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Frontida
Towards a radical imagination of care
'A decade after the international financial crash, crisis has become a pervading condition across the world and thus the new “global reality”. Dispossession, exclusion, suppression, loss and/or precariousness are today established normalities for the majority of the world population. Seeing our contemporary context from the lens of social reproduction enables a holistic understanding of this worldwide critical situation, for the multiple crises we face constitute different manifestations of a socioeconomic system that finds it increasingly difficult to sustain itself simply because it is doing away with the ways of sustaining life on our planet. Today, the crisis of social reproduction has acquired a global scale expanding across all capitalist societies and enhancing those forms of organising our material and social sustenance that is grounded in long-established social inequalities. However, the current multi-faceted crisis has also become a “truth regime” through which the dominant powers have installed a perennial state of exception. The regime of chronic-crisis is sustained on “TINA discourses”, which are deployed to make us believe that “there-is-no-alternative” so they can continue governing us according to their extractivist interests.
We propose to fight this regime of chronic crisis by feeding an emancipatory social imagination of care that allows us to collectively envision alternative forms of organising the sustenance of our own selves, our societies and our planet. In other words, to imagine new ways of how care and reproductive needs can be provided, by whom, in which conditions and in which spaces. We invite contributors to create “Frontida: Towards a radical imagination of care”, a manifesto in the form of a (trans)urban utopia.'
Frontida: Towards a radical imagination of care is an ongoing collaborative project that seeks to prompt discussion about the pressing need for a new social imagination of social reproduction – its organising, structures and spaces – given our contemporary times of widespread and multi-faceted crisis. It is argued that a new radical imagination of this realm, which as it stands plays a fundamental role in the continuation of capitalist exploitation, holds the potentiality of eventually overturning capitalism itself. The project takes the form of an urban utopia, which develops progressively through a series of workshops that aim to promote collective encounters, participation and collaboration.
“Φροντίδα” is the Greek word for “care”, and as such has been chosen to be representative of the suggested utopia.
The project draws inspiration from three utopian texts, namely Utopia by More (2009 [1516]), Edilia, created by Harvey (2000) in Spaces of Hope, and What would a non-sexist city be like? Speculations on housing by Hayden (1980), as well as from the idea of “real utopias” coined by Olin Wright (2010) for The Real Utopias Project, which consisted of a series of workshop conferences that were held from 1991 to 2009 and whose outcomes were published in a number of books including Envisioning Real Utopias. As explained by Olin Wright (2010), the project sought to prompt committed discussions about ‘radical alternatives to existing institutions’. Frontida follows this same spirit. More than a destination, Frontida proposes to imagine a process or a series of processes towards a society grounded in and organised around life-sustenance. This website gathers the ideas and thoughts generated through the workshops.
>> More at Frontida website
Antiuniversity Now 2019
London
2019 - ongoing
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Wposter B
Wposter A
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