CNCRT

A life question: our productive process
4. Struggle for pleasure

For the book of , together with many other contemporary collectives, we were called to produce 5 images with text on the way we live, work and practice architecture.

A short extract from our contribution for the book Collective Processes. Counterpractices in European Architecture, Basel: Birkhäuser, 2021.

If work absorbs pure life and vice versa, when will we have to enjoy some moments of pleasure and otium? When will we finally have to do nothing? Once upon a time, bars, restaurants, cinemas, piazzas, terraces were meant for fun, for pleasure and smileys, today they advertise multitasking and long-stay working. This tautology becomes so banal and horribly cannibal as we think to the shame of an unemployed boy, girl or the discomfort of some young lovers having a drink in a bar full of laptop users. For those of us still emerged in academic life in bars you find crowds of students, freelancers, and new potential collectives. For many of us office workers, after working hours otium is still possible (some call it happy hour); others take public transport and go straight home. Struggling for pleasure means transforming work and the productive process from mere task-obligation to a higher level, closer to art and joyful as creative poetry.

CNCRT .aletta .is.a.woman .melchiorre Antonio Paolillo and Giovanna Pittalis



A life question: our productive process
3. Cooperation is …

For the book of , together with many other contemporary collectives, we were called to produce 5 images with text on the way we live, work and practice architecture.

A short extract from our contribution for the book Collective Processes. Counterpractices in European Architecture, Basel: Birkhäuser, 2021.

Cooperation is what structures our productive process. Cooperation is all of us working together, sometimes mixing-up, sometimes just 3, sometimes 2, sometimes 1 that wishes 10 or 100.000. (Some of us have never met, while others can always still join, externals, collectives, friends.) Cooperation is also what Capital needs to reproduce itself. Cooperation is the employer orchestrating a team of auto-CADists in his Trump-like office. Everything but an orchestra. Cooperation is Competition. Cooperation starts in the Office. Cooperation is a huge generic room of depressed and anxious precarious people, sometimes in silence, sometimes laughing, sometimes dining together, still for the necessity of the office. Outside the office, Cooperation is all of us wanting to give a name to what we want to do but still contradict each other. Contradiction is Cooperation. Sometimes Cooperation confuses with Union, but Union is not office-Cooperation A new form of Cooperation is what we experiment with. An alternative to the office-Cooperation-labor, no Bosses. Our Cooperation is still invisible. Cooperation is what makes this possible.

CNCRT .aletta .is.a.woman .melchiorre Antonio Paolillo and Giovanna Pittalis