"Part of our intention was always - in an almost performative sense - to raise questions as of why we make art and what the socio-political significance and potential of artistic practice is. The counter/cartographies project was a way for us to start asking some of those questions and to initiate a dialogue about different modes of artistic practice and their relation to the dominant order of liberal-capitalism. However, the counter/cartographies initiative, although essentially of a collaborative nature, was still structured as a project with very fixed boundaries and intents. We feel that, to a large extent, this is counter-productive and on this basis we would like to open it up to develop into more of a living structure, a self-organized mode of dialogue and collective learning, a form of experimentation with different modes of artistic action and intervention beyond the fixed boundaries of a given project. We want C.CRED to be this living breathing expanded thing that does not operate through projects and ideas with beginnings and ends, but as a collectivity, a micro-network, a micro-community, a form of critical dialogue involving various modes of practice, a form of workshop, or a form of collaboration initiating and developing various forms of intervention. The notion of counter/cartography we developed over the last 2-3 years - counter/cartography as a mass of information, as a set of alliances and dialogues with other groups and collectives working politically, as a resource for research and a tool for practice - only partly encapsulates what this practice implies, therefore - without abandoning the actual concerns of the counter/cartography project - we do abandon the project as such, along with the very notion of the project with its implicit teleology, and the paradigm that defines artistic and aesthetic practice as project based. Although the notion of the project helped us expand and move away from a form and mode of practice based solely on the artistic object (in any of its forms, but most predominantly in the form of the commodity), it does not allow us to expand further than the institutional, academic mode of practice it implies and insinuates. The very notions of the project outcome and documentation (which, in some ways, work only as ways to redefine the notion of the artistic object as a form of commodity) are, we feel, strategically redundant and open to institutional capture by the liberal-capitalist machinery. We therefore seek to abandon the very mode of artistic practice that is based on project orientation or any other imitation of institutional forms of practice, academic or otherwise.

In its place, we propose the critical appropriation of an anti-parliamentary political paradigm for understanding praxis as organized around a collective structure - open to dialogue, discussion, alliance, experiments and developments of forms of collaboration and modes of intervention - and active subcells - actualizing some of these modes and forms of intervention and action. This is not intended as a pun, a joke, or in any sense an uncritical affirmation of paramilitary rhetoric. Much rather, to us, it constitutes a shift in the paradigm according to which we think artistic and aesthetic practice. Using certain structures (and modes of destructuring) originating in anti-parliamentary political practice can potentially, we feel, generate productive mutations both of our practice and understanding of the wider field of rupture and production we call aesthetics and its position within the context of the contemporary socio-political order.

We want C.CRED to be a platform where people can meet - be it in the form of a flat, a bar, a walk, a dinner, a web-site, a reading group, a physical installation - where a micro-scene can emerge - sometimes semi-permanently, sometimes only for a day or a week - where dialogues can take place, where presentations and workshops can be arranged, where performances can be staged, where alliances can be drawn against the institutional and politically corrupt relational paradigm of liberal capitalism. We want it to be the breeding ground for experiments, for the development of various forms of intervention; for an experimentation and generation of new - different - forms of political subjectivity and modes of political action, against liberal-capitalism, against social-democracy, against institutionalized relations and modes of sociality. We do not want it to become a project - or the project - that too easily fits into the framework of a dominant, institutionalized culture. We do not want it to become an object - even in the sense of a form of documentation of past events - that would validate the project institutionally as a form of art. We do not want validation, but collective experimentation.

On a more practical note, our response to the events and discussions in Amsterdam, and to some extent in Rotterdam - to the issues that came up in dialogue with other participants, groups, collectives and individuals, the questions and criticisms of our project, the alliances we made, the interest we encountered, the suggestions that were made, and also the disagreements - is threefold. We would like to make the following suggestions:

1. C.CRED will try to end the incessant documentation of the events and happenings that is arranged as part of the collective structure. We feel this fetishization of documentation often points towards the regression of expanded practices back towards the objectification and the potential commodification of art. Instead, we propose to work through notions of the remix, free improvisation, live-events, etc. This does not mean that there can be no mediation or any sense of material production. We still have our archives and memories; texts, notes, graphics, videos, projections, photos, etc. It does, however, imply two concrete strategies: on the one hand, it means that any documentation is part of the actual work of the collective structure, not an addition or recording of actual events; on the other hand, it means that any use of archival material, will have to be on the basis of a remix or an improvisation taking place in the context of actual live events; that is, these materials should not be turned into documentation, into a video, or worse, the video, they should not be turned into books, editions, CDs, DVDs, etc. supposedly coherently documenting a coherent project; they should only be used as a continuous form of production, organization and remix; they only exist insofar as they are used in and as a real time practice. There is, we feel, a huge distinction - although for us it remains largely unexplored - between the archive as a form of documentation and the archive as a basis for remix and free improvisation. The texts, videos and photographs available on this website are part of our archives. We invite people to add to these textual/visual narratives and help help us set this up as a collective, expanding literature that no longer functions as a form of documentation, but as an on-going process of reworking and remixing material. You can add stuff to the site by visiting the forum/participation link and upload any material you wish to publish or you could download and edit/remix existing material. The forum/participation site is also intended to be a place where we can exchange information and material and debate and discuss the various practices, texts, events, interventions, happenings, etc. we take part in.

2. C.CRED will try to move away from hierarchical structures (for instance, conference style discussions, etc.) often modeled on politically corrupt and redundant academic institutions and instead work with situations that free up impromptu forms of dialogue and that operate on more than one level (conceptually, but also affectively). Part of this strategy involves the actual physical structures we work with; part of it involves the discussion and how it is organized, steered up and how it relates to practical concerns; and part of it involves how the events are performed and how discussions and dialogues are initiated. In place of the event we propose to set up structures that work on a less formulaic and rigid basis; an on-going dialogue in a bar, for instance, is often more productive than a form of dialogue that simply mimics the hierarchical and often alienating structures of institutional academia.

3. C.CRED will attempt to move away from the institutional-commercial paradigm that defines artistic work as an enterprise, or a project, in favour of a model that understands it as a form of aesthetic experimentation that is inexorably linked to ethico-political practice (that is, to life styles, modes of learning, the production of subjectivity, also as a collective category, etc.). We thus seek a shift away from an institutional paradigm to a micro-political, even paramilitary one that will allow us to think and practice art - and aesthetics - in a much wider, and much expanded, sense, not only across an existing socio-political realm, but also, and furthermore, as the generation or production of future forms of politics, resistance and dissention from that realm.

On this basis, C.CRED, as a project based art collective, is disbanding in favour of an open, collective platform (C.CRED) and interventionist subcells (isc.CRED)."



contact: ostahl@ccred.org
web: www.ccred.org