Conviviality

by COMUNAL

“The convivial relationship […] is the action of people who participate in the creation of social life. Moving from productivity to conviviality is replacing a technical value with an ethical value, a material value with a realized value”.
Ivan Illich, 1978.

The Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich defines the convivial society as one where people – integrated into community life – can socially produce ways of being based on autonomy, relational freedom and joy as creative powers. It is also a social structure where plurality and balance of life are at the center of realizable utopias, enabling us to practice interdimensional justice, power distribution and recognize our ability to learn from everyday life.

Illich’s thoughts moved us to ask ourselves: what have we learned from coexistence in the social production and management of the habitat? How do we experience conviviality in the pluriverses that we collaborate with? How do the groups we walk with attempt balance and care for life? How do we rehearse autonomy?

This exhibition is a critical, affective and intercultural reflection that is woven from different spaces-times, places where experiences with inhabitants, collectives and original nations have led us to learn other ways of being, existing and inhabiting the world; to create collaboratively ways of producing the habitat where care for life and common well-being are both the means and ends of our togetherness.

In each of these territories we have witnessed conviviality as a diversity of relational pedagogies that emerge from the interconnectivity of life, while resisting and cracking patriarchal, colonial, racist and capitalist ways to produce the habitat. To share these experiences we have organized the exhibition in four relational pedagogies: Cooperate and Share Life / Heal and Care for the Body-Spirit / Defend and Cultivate the Territory / Create and Name the World-Universe. We hope that this exhibition will help us to create another space-time of coexistence and new reflections to continue cultivating the joy of learning together.

COMUNAL
We are a working group made up of four colleagues from different geographies: Mexico City, Oaxaca, Chiapas, Quintana Roo and Venezuela. We are moved to collaborate in processes for the social production and management of the habitat with inhabitants, organized people and collectives from different territories. We seek to contribute to the construction of other possible worlds based on mutual support, the exercise of autonomy and the search for interdimensional justice, using participatory design as a convivial tool that enables life care and freedom of inhabiting.

Curatorial Accompaniment: Marielsa Castro Vizcarra