Walked an hour to IVAM, couldn’t enjoy the show as too distracted with self-doubt and tired brain. Luckily Nestor found me bumbling around in a dark exhibit and walked me to El Punt (The Point), a volunteer-run archive of anarchist publications and ephemera since 1990 from Valencia and beyond. The collection – in its current home since 2016 – holds books, zines and other printed matter in box files labelled in categories such as “Anti-militarist”, “Animal Justice”, “Permaculture”, “Eco-Feminism”, “Occupy Valencia”, “Alternative Economics”. Carles joins us and we spend a few hours lifting down boxes, sifting through documents, pulling out pieces to show each other: noisy xerox on degrading newsprint, staplebound pamphlets printed in copyshops, laminated business cards, wonky A5 flyers, official letters, newspaper cutouts, an advert for an eco-village in Barcelona, and a plethora of anomalous DIY protest material.
I tried to find media about crossovers in food sovereignty and anarchist organising, also in gentrification resistance and supermarket boycott. The judgemental part of my brain was characteristically pushing for extremes: expecting either nothing to turn up, or a document perfectly marrying the two. The higher consciousness realised that all the signifiers I needed were there already: in handwriting on folders, rips and tears, scrawled drawings and pixellated clip-art, (non)choice of paper. The glaring subtext is of the ethics and moral baseline from which the texts were written, gathered and organised. Stylistic similarity is possible to find, however it does not match the unerring consistency of spirit: the inextricable intersectionality of all justice movements.
Rejecting the entrepreneurial logic of merging, growing, institutionalising, groups stay separate (in their varying sizes and strengths) and collaborate or share resources to maintain strength in the undergrowth alliance.
If the organisations are trees, shrubs, saplings, crawlers, leaf mould, volunteer plants and soil creating the environment, then members are microbes, bacteria, yeasts, insects, molluscs, birds and critters populating the ground -------- so the struggle is the mycelial mat ---------- holding roots tight in the ground, omniscient in, shifting resources to areas that lack
We sunk a few of their cold, house beers at 2e a pop, whilst gratefully receiving a more in-depth explanation of the project by one of the librarians. Carles comments this may be the most important ethnographic resource in the city.