Potpuri

LIRI, PAVARËSI, POTPURI* (FREEDOM, INDEPENDENCE, POTPURI)

*is a twist on the famous slogan “Liri, Pavarësi, Demokraci” used by Kosovo politicians, proponents of seceding and establishing a democratic republic during the 90s when Kosovo was facing various repressions under Yugoslavia.

Potpuri is simultaneously the title of a newspaper and the collective which produces it, broadly speaking it’s a platform focused on experimental methodologies of research and production. Potpuri is based in Switzerland and Kosovo. Its main success was the publication of the first independent self-organized newspaper print edition in Kosovo in 2022, shortly thereafter followed with an organic development of collective principles and practices aimed at ensuring the continuation and sustainability of the platform and newspaper. 

Potpuri joined the School of Commons 2023 cohort with the aim to determine and outline conditions of precarity in the context of (a) collective work and (b) socio-economic and political situatedness. It was a common urgency for the people behind it to address the overarching question of “How to (not) live precariously as a collective learner?”

The main goals of the process were: (1) setting up precautionary measures and establishing systems of care in the face of precarity of financial, temporal, human or technical resources, and (2) supporting the discussions for the exploration of our own core practices and principles. The methodology for this research process was quite open, allowing space for personal and collective reflections to be given centerpiece and organically emerging practices to be noted.

The main questions of our research process were:

How can the learner and practitioner survive in precarity?

How can you forge support when peripheral ways of seeing and being are overshadowed by the consent manufactured through media and big companies?

How can a collective thrive without answering to the intersectional issues an individual faces when striving to make a living?

How can interest and desire to work in the collective continue and renew without individual consideration, care and trauma-informed communities? What alternatives can we imagine?

These questions were written down as the guiding points for our process during SoC because they were the underlying, unresolvable matters that permeated our own discussions and our ability to organize ourselves within the collective as Potpuri.

Since the beginning of the process and throughout the year we continued to be faced with precarity and stagnation with regards to: point 2 because we are operating in a new digital imperative and media environment which demands a consistent and attractive online presence in order to drive interest around your project - something we couldn’t quite muster up the forces to work on. Point 3 because it became clear to us that we are operating in financial precarity as a group and as individuals, which in turn would always make volatile one’s desire to continue contributing without knowing when and if the results are gonna be successful. This, in turn, would impact one’s ability to show up consistently since other paid duties would be a priority, especially because one had to find and get involved in other projects which would ensure income. On top of this is the awareness of the fact that we’ve almost become conditioned to believing that volunteering is a noble task, even when you’re left to prove your worth in the rat race and struggle to make little money. Point 4 because we realized that when the funding for the project ended we were still there because we had a common purpose and cared for one another, hence, we continued working on joint principles and ways of working. However in this same process we would find that individual traumatic experiences and responses as well as resentment, unaddressed conflict, inequality and bias from previous processes of working collectively would constantly appear in our discussions, despite perhaps not having the language to name it, or obtaining care practices to work through it. 

As part of the SoC process we formulated these questions to help guide the discussions and find the stressors in collective processes. More so than data collection, these questions came out of our own urgencies, and are meant for collective reflections and mapping out possible imbalances and needs of the collective process.

Do you have a stable monthly income? Does your collective have a monthly financial income to manage base activities? If not, how does it affect your activities’ success and the ability to achieve your goals?

What is the ratio for time spent between acquiring funds & applying for funding and for time spent in the organization & management of funds and activities?

Are you subject to conditions of financial precarity as an individual? How does that impact your ability to continue working effectively in the collective?

What care practices and check-in exercises do you utilize within your group?

What do you place first within your collective: your ability to maintain friendships, take care of one another and good relations or your ability to achieve results and goals?

Besides financial, what type of resources are integral to your work? Do you face precarity with regards to those resources as well? What other resources are in abundance when financial resources are not, within your collective?

What sociopolitical issues affect your ability to work effectively and achieve your goals?

How sustainable would you say the collective you are fostering has been so far? What factors and practices have enabled or disabled you to ensure continuation?

Do you think past traumatic experiences and access to psychological help and resources affects a person’s ability to work within a collective? If so, how?

So far, what would you say is the greatest factor to have played a role in your ability to continue working collectively no matter conditions of precarity?

So far, what would say have been the most useful practices within the collective to ensure the persons involved continue to be engaged and committed to the work?

The following text is written in three voices, members of Potpuri Diona, Adelina and Njomza discuss findings, lessons and thoughts of the process from their own POV.

Diona

Since there’s no way to get out of precarity of any kind, considering that life itself is precarious and uncertain, the only thing that can ensure some sort of self-renewal is continuous reflection and open dialogue as well as regularly auditing collective processes. I believe the following topics of concern are quite strongly related to our initiative’s particular conditions and the zesty case of starting and maintaining a collective in a country with not much language around collective, horizontal processes and foundation for experimental creative work. Here’s what I’ve learned and am taking with onwards:

Rule out fancy topics

Any normative and affirmative language or proposals may confuse and obscure a collective process. Ahead of speaking about big concepts and ideas, ask yourselves and one another whether you share the same idea or understanding of principles and ideas you already allocate to your collective processes or products/results. Beware of the fact that anytime you speak of something outside of your reach or understanding you bring yourself outside of your body and the experiences, memories, feelings that are most innate and true to you. Beware of how communicating as such in a group may affect the group’s wellbeing.

Get back to the basics

Be aware at all times that there are individuals in a collective process, each with their own visions, dreams, ideas, perceptions, ever-changing emotional and energetic states. Try observing a snail for 15-minutes at a time the next time you encounter one. Notice how long it takes for the snail to trust you enough to come back out of their shell. Treat people the same way, give them enough time to express, heal and grow, understanding how delicate they are and how much compassion they need. On the other hand, as an individual in a collective process do your best to be honest and self-evaluate where you’re at in life, how much you can handle and express that truthfully in a group.

Check-in regularly

Often we regurgitate the zeitgeist of our time - that we must achieve results and fast. Why is there this unconscious drive to treat people and processes with such constraints? Take some time to reflect on what makes you feel constrictive as an individual in a collective, name these things honestly and without shame. The next time you bring them up in a collective setting, speak of these things not as if you’re seeking to have them validated or put up for discussion but assert them and ask how you can work with your body and not against it. Never fail to recognize that just having a check-in with the group regularly may play a role in creating space for people to just begin expressing and feel heard.

Develop within/as a response to your local context - Make your inner work public

Within our team several processes and discussions took place which were not strictly based on the work we put out together but more so on debating joint principles, assessing our abilities honestly, listening to one another, reflecting on traumatic remnants of past collective experiences. Since none of these processes were documented, does that mean the process never really happened? Since this type of emotional and interpersonal labor is so essential but unrecognized and unpaid, how can we recognize the importance of this and create spaces and conditions for this to happen? Work on making the internal work seen, known and supported. If and when individual and collective healing does not allow for a product/result to take place, make the inner work the product/result.

Create a language of your own

“He who knows how to do nothing with his whole body & soul, will have everything done for him”. Reflect on how you can reach a state of flow within your team, a position of effortless creation where everyone can provide as much as they can and be valued for their unique gifts and skills which compliments others’. Be brutally honest with one another - this is how you grow. Do as much as you can, softly nudging people into the direction they are curious to explore and supporting them to grow.

Non-judgement. Radical self-compassion (vis-a-vis Community)

Deploy a mindset of non-judgement towards every member of the team. Individually, practice radical self-compassion for wherever you are in your journey. At the beginning of this process I experienced a lot of rigidity and resistance and was very impulsive with the team members. Later on I was asking myself: “How can I be free from feeling resentment and abandonment in the collective?”. I realized I was resentful because I was taking on tasks I couldn’t handle and expecting things from others that I needn’t expect. My abandonment issues were not just projected in the collective work but they were precisely the reason why I preferred to work collectively - because I believe working on a shared mission gives an individual purpose and allows you to grow while feeling held, but for that one must always choose to trust in others and have blind faith in the process.

Understand how trauma leaks onto everything

There’s a hidden labor and hidden cost to collective processes: unearthing unconscious hurts and healing in togetherness. For our work to be strongly rooted and self-sustaining it almost feels like there is a shared feeling in the group that we will show up for one another and do as much as we can to heal and grow, even though this was never the initial or intended purpose. This can be an unexpected and secondary matter that shows up in collective processes. To keep it going, you will have to do the hard work no matter what cultural conditioning says, you must address the question: “How to contextualize this digging into the past as it shows up in the emotions and experiences of the present?”

There is no language around intergenerational trauma in Kosovo

It is my belief that we came to face the matters and situations we would face because of the cultural and physical situatedness of our project, namely the fact that recent & intergenerational trauma permeates every aspect of the social, economic and political in the country of Kosovo but no one has the language or capability to speak about it. It is my belief that when you grow up feeling small, unless you do a lot of inner work, it will be very difficult to advocate for yourself and improve your status, and it will be complete bullshit to advocate for others. While on a mission to self-manage a publishing platform for those who cannot find a footing in academia, media or through mainstream channels, we stumbled upon the task of holding and taking care of one another - of naming the unnameable, making visible the unseen, validating ourselves.

Adelina

Notes from a discussion on precarity with Njomza, Diona, Roni and Fabian: (24th September 2023)

• Precarity of collectiveness
• Precarity within collectives
• We put this research because we had these questions in Potpuri and they were important to us
• So now we are putting this in a collectiveness and asking questions on precarity within collectives
• This is an unsure context which asks for creating a feeling of collective identity but while still always keeping individual identity
• Survival strategy of performing in this identity as an artist? It is also transcending in this school of commons
• Precarity of collectiveness - people miss feeling of belonging to a community and cannot admit that, so that’s precarity And you are protected by being precarious Being in precarity because you cannot belong to a community
• Precarity of collective - being precarious because you are in this precarity
• Social capital would mean you belong to a group just because you profit Precarity of collectiveness also asks for giving something
• Collectiveness cannot happen if there is no revolt against yourself
• Hierarchies give us the space to go revolt against somebody else

I left this conversation feeling mind blown about our discussion as if I had found all the answers to the topic of precarity, largely thanks to the weed that intensified this mentioned feeling. Looking back, these notes open up further questions on the topic of precarity of or within collectiveness. But a win is a win, so I will gladly take on that aha-feeling that i got out of it.

The next day I found myself back to the intensive weekend of School of Commons that happened that weekend and back to juggling a job I was doing at that time and also studying. During those days approximately 8-10 times I was going back and forth on quitting either the job or the intensive weekend, as I had my fair share of socializing, planning and hustling but decided against it with a good lump of tiredness on my soul. In hindsight I cherish the moments where it felt like we were sharing the burden of living as precarious learners on different levels even if it meant I was doing said precarious work in the moment. Maybe putting myself in this juxtaposition with precarity made it more malleable to change it into moments of solidarity and acceptance of it just being shit.

SURVIVAL STRATEGIES FOR PRECARITY

• Don’t try to take in everything with the same capacity
• Sleep
• Once in a while shout into the void
• Sometimes a positive outlook on everything doesn’t help but suck your soul, dare to name precarious situations that just suck ass
• Blame the highly capitalist state of existing and system
• Heal your inner child
• Talk madly, talk softly, talk about it
• Steal
• Connect
• Unlearn

Njomza

So what about FREEDOM, INDEPENDENCE, POTPURI?

In a collective as POTPURI formed of individuals within two radically different contexts (Kosovo and Switzerland) we manage to have common visions. Isn’t that just nice. At least it feels nice. Joining a collective means opening yourself to not having a position, meaning opening yourself in finding and forming a position. How much of that (non) status is allowed for us in our everyday life? I mean within the capitalist everyday. I could say either zero or if some, you're the lucky ones. In a capitalist society where meritocracy is the backbone of defining individual status, it means that we enter spaces and places based on an obtained formation of the individual self. You’re formed, trained, educated and mannered for the position which you claim to have, be that a job or personal relationship (contract). So you work to maintain that picture of the formation of self that you once told when entering that space or place. All that in order to run out of precarity. Then you get experience and you want to be ‘promoted’, to get higher in the ladder. And so, again, you climb the ladder of hierarchy as means of growth, translated into your salary or good CV. Justified with meritocracy, a concept invented by the privileged, to further gate exactly that privilege. So again, how do we keep ourselves open to not having a position, how do you keep yourself out of precarity in capitalist systems? Keeping ourselves open or not having a position could also be interpreted as having no values or adapting so much on others’ values that you’re like those neo-liberal spineless humans, as we say in Kosovo, that you have not been taught any personal borders but that you can adapt so much that you are barely visible but damn annoying with an energy one can’t just ignore because it sucks so much space that it suffocates. Anyhow, maybe this was too much of a generalization. But what I mean with opening yourself to not having a position is not not having borders nor needs nor visions, what i mean with being open to not having a position is it means your focus is in unlearning, relearning and forming anew your taught values within a group of people that you have no idea about. Opening the fact that you just are a prejudgmental being and don’t really know how that collective or group of people tests your taught values, either chosen by you or implemented in you. If this is the approach to follow within a collective, through not having a position, through being open or creating an opinion with and through the collective, how does such a collective of individuals get out of precarity, because such work is barely paid? Or, is it ultimately not possible to work healthily within a collective inside capitalist societies? Because by default a so-called collective must fight against capitalist mindsets. Because being a collective means you’re dedicated to care, and how much of care is allowed for us to be given and where is care numerated into our ‘salaries’?

The answer is neither yes nor no. The answer is in-between. If we speak of getting out of financial precarity, we speak of capital, we speak of obtaining capital in order to survive. Because obtaining or owning is not only capitalist, it means that you own certain goods which allows you to behave freely. And if you own those goods, the real question is how you distribute them, how are you placing them into a social system of (non) materialistic exchange, be that money or be anything that holds value. For our collective within Potpuri, that capital is not only material, it is emotional, social, intellectual. Then the question becomes slightly more complicated. Because our material and financial capital is almost non-existent, like most of the collectives today, I mean those honest collectives not those pseudo called collectives.

What I mean with the answer is in-between is that out of precarity, whether material precarity or mental precarity, a collective must be aware that it owns certain capital and it should question how it distributes such capital, and how does that capital meet the individual needs of its members. If our capital is emotional strength, how is our collective making an individual feel? If our capital is social, how are we producing and applying those social values, or, firstly, which are those values? Or if our capital is intellectual, how are our collective practices supporting the intellectual growth or process of each of our members? 

In a hyper individual society, the material precarity of collectives has put a weight on other values, be that emotional, social or intellectual, because the absence of financial or material capital is existential and the absence of that produces exploitive collectives. Through romanticizing the emotional, social and intellectual growth in a collective you seek to cover what your material prosperity within the capitalist system can’t cover. A collective must recognise that it holds a bigger role and more power in the way we build our social systems, and if a collective keeps the individual open at all times to unlearn, relearn and form anew, at least it should provide a space of safety where that individual knows what are those ‘capital’ values the collective can obtain and what are those that would be precarious. Because above all precarity is not material only, precarity is also a mindset.

So if Kosovo’s aim for centuries has been ‘Freedom, Independence and Democracy’, I can freely say, Kosovo today has not reached freedom, nor independence, nor democracy. Admittedly it has reached freedom from its oppressor, but Kosovo today is fully dependent on its international allies for its freedom of movement, and fully dependent on the imperialist concept of democracy. Kosovo today is neither transparent to its citizens nor to itself. Thus maybe to all of us, members of our collective, in Kosovo and in Switzerland, our slogan could be ‘FREEDOM, INTER-DEPENDENCY, POTPURI’, because without the recognition of that inter-dependency, neither freedom nor Potpuri would prevail.