15/05/2020
May, 2020
Insurgent workers’ minds and bodies turned up on dance-floors long ago, anticipating their liberation from the factory’s mechanistic discipline. Clubs were sites that integrated political education and entertainment; social recovery and antagonistic social articulation. Then arrived the weekend, ripe with evening temptations, as both a working class victory and a bargain with capital for an ever more dutiful submission to the pains of the working week. Whether mere toxic retreats into a world of purchased pleasures serviced by instrumentalized hospitality workers; or as maddening aspirations toward collective self-abolition in the crushing beat of capitalist ruins, spaces of nightly leisure are energized by a social desire for what Kristin Ross calls ‘communal luxury,’ a communistic drive for collective prosperity that capitalism recuperates and exploits.
The Ultimate Leisure Workers’ Club hopes to draw from these political potentials and link up with groups and individuals involved in the struggle to open new terrains for social liberation and communal joy in the night. The overall constellation of interests is in the process of forming, but is generally shaped by the vision of realizing a kind of leisure communism. The issues we’d like to navigate range from: emancipatory as well as toxic traits of spaces of escape; the class and gender politics of clubs; the political-economy of pleasure and the subversion of it; technological utopias of full leisure society and dystopias of machinic hyper-exploitation; social narratives about productive and nonproductive bodies.
The club is initiated by the nomadic project space Kabinetas and the political hub Luna6 based in the Naujininkai district of Vilnius, Lithuania. Through the majority of the year 2020, the club is planned to operate online, and in physical proximity to Luna6.
Contacts: ulwclub@gmail.com
http://luna6.lt/ultimate-leisure-workers-club.html
Club’s activities are curated by Noah Brehmer (Luna6) and Vaida Stepanovaite (Kabinetas).
Noah Brehmer is a political theorist and cultural organizer based in Vilnius. Co-founder of the Lithuanian critical media platform Life is Too Expensive (Gyvenimas Per Brangus), currently organizing with the new cultural/political space Luna6 in Vilnius. Luna6 strives to build an infrastructure for radical optimism: supporting a network of initiatives, which range from an independent labor union, public lecture series, reading group, queer affinity circle, radical zine archive, distro and library. Current research interests concern the capacity/failures of sonic environments to radically anticipate and envision the future. Recent output includes the essay RAVE-ACCELERATE-DIE and the presentation Senseless Pulsions: Queer Desire in the Techno Communist Horizon.
Vaida Stepanovaite is an independent curator based in Europe, currently pursuing MRes in Curatorial/Knowledge at Goldsmiths in London. Curator of Kabinetas, a nomadic project space that concerns itself with methods of collaboration and performative curatorial strategies, elaborated through long-term research projects and events usually staged in between the frameworks of contemporary art. In 2018, among other projects, Kabinetas initiated an ongoing collaborative research project Ultimate Leisure, under which a day-time rave Tarka in Vilnius was curated in collaboration with community radio Palanga Street Radio, and the first Ultimate Leisure Workers’ Club staged in Beijing with Xiaoyao Xu. Recent projects also include project Ghost Islands at I: project space in Beijing, and textual contribution to Wounds heal faster in a metallic mouth on O Fluxo.