grundeinkommen!
Today, another SOHO highlight!
Beatrix Zobl, my indefatigable curator-collaborator helped me make the acquaintance of Margit Appel, an activist for what they call Grundeinkommen, or a basic income. And today Margit and a crew from the self-organized, grassroots group with which she works, Runder Tisch Grundeinkommen (the Round Table for Basic Income), came by for nearly a full day of collaborative text-writing, prop material production, public dissemination, and then an evening review/evaluation/discussion session. The whole thing was an experiment, none of the activists being art identified or trained. But open-minded, willing to try something new, and even a bit anxious for a fresh group and public exercise. They have spent most of their time and energies 'til now focused on conferences, panel discussions, studying policy, and the like. No creative public action.
So we got together and riffed on the various rationales for a basic income.
We talked, and wrote, together:
Then we put the text into visual form, via lo-tech methods and by hand. In other words, we had a little drawing party, with photocopying, folding, and tearing, too.
The natural next step: dissemination, on the streets.
And after that, a little break for food and rest, and then regrouping for review, evaluation, debriefing. All in all, a very useful exercise for all. For the Runder Tisch Grundeinkommen, a lesson in fast, cheap, practical group creativity, and perhaps more to the point, experimenting with a new way to relate to each other, a different way to collaborate. (Up 'til this event, the group's activities have mostly been about conferences and policy.) This, I told them, is one simple way the group can cultivate itself as a culture.
