TEXT FOR BEGINNING: 20 minutes! 
 
WELCOME, PLEASE SIT TOGETHER
- get a drink and join - grab a seat - stand when you need to
 
DOCUMENTATION INTRO 
- Welcome to this pile of people. 
- Something before we start - a lot of things will be said tonight and there's no official documentation going on. But there is this weird pile of clipboards here. If some notes get written on these, my plan is to photograph them and put them somewhere available to all of us, as a kind of collective memory. So please be welcome to write on these anytime. 
- Is there anyone that does actually enjoy synthesising and making notes as a way of listening? yes? would you be willing to be passed one of these now?
 
SPIN INTRO
- Welcome and thank you for gathering. We are all here at the invitation of SPIN, so for a while me & K/H will speak as SPIN hosts. 
- We want to try and be brief and concise and clear - so we can get onward to the interesting discussions.... so we are going to read from our notes.
- First up, a word aboutSPIN - and what it is, for those that are new to it. It's a small non-profit Brussels organisation. It is a support & research platform for artistic practice. It is run by artists and their collaborators. It has existed since 2011, and it currently has structural funding, mostly from the Flemish Government, and some other sources, for the next 3.5 years. 
- SPIN has several activities. One of these is the support of three artists practices - those artists are H, K & D. SPIN provides a skeleton of administrative and development support for their three separate practices. 
- Apart from that, SPIN has another activity, which is given about an equal budget to those first three tajectories. This other activity is committed to exchange and co-learning in the arts field at large. 
- In the past this activity was expressed through actions called SPINoffs. These SPINoffs experimented with many forms, though they were always about this co-learning & exchange, fertilisation, feeding. Some were classical seminar events, but many of them were much more strange, or dreamy or celebratory. Some lasted a few hours and others for many months. Including two living-room festivals, a camp-ground, a treaure-hunt, a political choir, a reading club, radio shows, many co-learning gatherings on the subjects of work, political art, and artistic practicees - anyway more than 20 initiatives happened, and they also involved institutions and public, and people working outside the arts - and some of you collaborated on them, and some of you heard about them now for the first time. That's all fine.
- The way those SPINoffs worked, was the three artists would get together, they would decide the content & shape of a SPINoff, and then they would invite a few collaborators to join and develop it together. 
- So that was SPINoff of the past - they stoppeda year and a half ago.
- But within SPIN the motivation and the space and the resource for this activity remains - and instead of continuing the dynamic where us three decided and initiated from within SPIN, we wanted to 
try a new open experiment together with other people- always with this ambition toward action that fertilises and feeds. 
- So we arrive to here tonight.....
 
WHAT IS THIS?
- This is an invitation to all of us from SPIN. 
- It is an experimental collective process.
- In this experiment there is acommon goal: which is to dream up and enact ideasthat develop, knit, fertilise, inspire, agitate or resist via the Brussels arts field.
- And this experiment has some initial parameters. 
- There was a group that tried to think up this invitation - and they tried to imagine minimum basic parameters, so that this group now can immediately become autonomous and decide for itself what and how things will happen. 
- There are five basic parameters: 
(1) a context- which is Brussels and it's arts field (a beautifully complex parameter). Why Brussels? Because we're here. Why the arts field? Because we as a group have a lot of agency and knowledge in that field. Which is not to say that we don't have agency and knowledge in other fields. So this arts field parameter is not meant as a restriction, but rather as a springboard....
(2) a time frame- this process is open for roughly a year until next summer
(3) a financial resourceof 10,000€ (which comes from SPIN's VG structural funding). This money is available as of today, and there is no obligation to spend it. Whatever is unspent next summer will merge back into SPIN's budget, and some other experiment will begin no doubt.
(4) it's a self-organised process
and (5) of course, a group of peoplewilling to enter an experimental collective process - this 'us', this 'we' that doesn't exist yet. 
 
WHY ME?
- You're here tonight because SPIN invited you - and wonderfully you (and I and everyone else) came. 
- You were invited because there was a smaller meeting in SPIN where people tried to imagine what thiscould look like as a starting point. They imagined 20 or 30 people might be an interesting number, not overwhelming but still largish. They thought you in particular might have the interest, or the skills, or the fire to enter a collective process. There was an effort to invite people who know each other and people that don't know each other yet. 
- And each of you was invited because someone in that smaller meeting felt personally interested to take care of hosting and connecting with you.
- Definitely you are invited as persons, and not as representatives of any organisation you maybe work for.
- In fact we are xx (number of people) tonight, this is how xx people feels. And there are four others who wanted to come but couldn't. 
- This here is a start point. It's only and already a start point. It's highly likely that some people will not choose to join this process. And maybe along the way you will decide to invite others to join. 
This is where this hosting idea gets really important. (and this is a personal viewpoint now): in the same way that each of you is personally invited and hosted by at least one of the smaller SPIN group, I think any person who joins from this point on, needs to be personally invited & hosted by somebody particular here, who is responsible for bringing that person in, making sure they have the information they need, integrating them so that everyone is well included with the same level of agency and information. (SPIN hat back on).>> this will be addressed later on, no? in part 6 (the anarchic process)
 
HOW'S THIS (PROCESS) GONNA HAPPEN?
- We said earlier that this group is invited to "become immediately autonomous".... which just means, that this is self-organised – you will organise it and perhaps, hopefully, an emergent ‘we’ will organise it.
- this first meeting is hosted by SPIN, as a start point, but after midnight tonight this process belongs to the group - and that group will be everyone who (after tonight) decides they want to engage. 
- within the group there are a few people who do work at SPIN - but as we said before, no-one in this meeting is representing an organisation. So after tonight me and the others will melt into this group with exactly the same responsibility and power over what happens as each of you. 
 
- We just spoke hosting and hospitality and that's already begun - tonight is already hosted by many people. By Anna & Christophe (and Dora) who's home we're in, and by Elli who designed the food & x, x who helped her cook it, and Laura who drove it over here, and by me and Hans who sent invitations. And tonight's gathering is also and already hosted by all of you.
- We will be hosting each other at every stage of this process as it develops. Maybe opening your home or your space for a gathering, or bringing food, or by mediating a discussion, or including those who haven’t spoken, or by offering your ideas or skills, and basically taking care of a collectivity. 
- I imagine that we could be hosts and guests to each other at the same time. Being responsible for and taken care of at the same time. There is a definition (by ____?) of the guest as a kind of monster, a monster who's invited into the host’s home and makes that home strange, or monstrous, by using it and just being in it in unfamiliar ways - and in the process also actually allows the host to become monstrous or unfamiliar to their own home, opening up for them new ways of to be there. So, I love us being monsters for each other. 
- And maybe it's not us that will be the monsters, maybe it will be the ideas that get discussed, or the actions that come out of it.... we'll see.
 
MAYBE....
- So we said: ourcommon goal here is to dream up and enact ideasto develop, knit, fertilise, inspire, agitate or resist in the Brussels arts field (or through it, or with it, or in some way connected to the Brussels arts field). 
- And we said: the goal is to do this through a group process. 
- So there were several small groups in SPIN who tried fantasising what might maybe happen... (instead of this sentence (i think we can let go of the idea of the smaller group in SPIN): And to help kickstart your imagination we'll briefly share some of our fantasies: 

• • - Maybe after tonight monsters will signal to each other that they want to engage with this process.
  • - Maybe there will be a summer of fermentation. Monsters lie on beaches thinking and imagining softly. Or they happen to meet on terraces and chat together about their ideas. Or maybe one of them will cook dinner and howl out to any monster available to join and talk. 
  • - Maybe some ideas will come very quickly and concretely. Maybe some won't even need any money to get going. Maybe parts of this processs will be very light and organic and flowing!
  • - Maybe there will be transparency and we'll findagood ways (or good-enough ways) to keep each other informed and included. Even over distance or non-presence!
  • - Maybe one monster invites and hosts a new monster in the mix.
  • - Maybe after a summer of fermentation, monsters find a way to crawl together again. Maybe someone proposes to host another big meeting to throw ideas on the table so they can be chewed and digested collectively. Maybe individuals propose these ideas, maybe small clusters of 3 or 4 people have developed an idea together.
  • - Monsters will propose ideas that they can actually enact themselves. (We'll come back to this later) 
  • - Maybe in late autumn sometime the big group finds itself able to decide on financially supporting an action. Or maybe several actions. 
  • - OR maybe there are too many ideas that need budget to happen. And maybe the group will decide how to decide. 
  • - OR maybe there will be an idea for action that monsters disagree about, maybe some find it unethical or not matching the shared goal. Maybe the monster group will be able to support a decision process for yes or no, or to modify the idea...
  • - Maybe by the end of the year decisions will have been taken and actions will be happening. 
  • - Maybe these actions are designed to radiate and communicate into Brussels communities.
  • - Maybe they take only a few hours to achieve. Maybe they spread over several months. Maybe they have a vision for years.
  • - Maybe they contribute small steps within bigger processes.
  • - Maybe next summer sometime, this whole group - monsters who engaged and those who didn't - will be hosted for another picnic to howl about what has happened...

 
Enough fantasy! let's move on
 
We wanted to propose now a round of greeting and response (??). Some people love structure in an exchange like tonight, others suffer with it. Regardless I hope you will accept this proposal......
 
Into the round of names / comments and questions - document! see if there are urgent questions that need to be answered by us tonight 




> meditating together
 What would you love to see happening locally, as an evolution / rupture / shared-resource / new-language / action / conspiracy / celebration / ∞... via (or beyond) the arts field ?

What can you imagine initiating yourself (with others or alone) as a celebration / resource / action / ∞ / collision / evolution / ... ?