By Toni Serra-Abu Ali (OVNI)
Something very important is seeing the sensation that a community is being formed, it was as if a group of people, instead of existing in a spatial sense existed in a temporal one, and when we’d meet for the gatherings you would start seeing people that you’d never see again, where there was an affinity, sometimes a deep concern, sometimes pain, sometimes happiness, and it was for a few days. And this community was there already and suddenly somebody would come up to you and say “thank you because I thought this is the way things are and now they are really big”. So this community building, of a village in time, was very nice. With regard to everything else, more than a response to a plan or project, OVNI was a response to a life experience. Each year, all the time, things happen to all of us, they happen to us in smaller communities, as a collective and on the personal level, on the outside and inside and then all of this is reflected. And even the periods of closeness or of distance between us, doubts, tensions, all of this, during the moments when we aren’t doing well, it’s no big deal, and when we are good, we understand that this is what makes it wonderful. So these doubts, these dizzy spells, these moments of not knowing, not understanding, all of this makes up part of the rich experience of OVNI. Normally this is the part of all the projects that is castrated, it’s cut, it’s not productive, it doesn’t turn out well, doesn’t produce anything, it’s not clean or polished. So leaving it there even if you don’t want to, like the essence of life, are friendships that have lasted for a long time, and it is almost like becoming brothers and sisters, it’s wonderful.
By Ricardo Antón (ColaBoraBora)
A community of practice is to say “this is what we think would be interesting to do, let’s get together to see if we are capable of doing it”. Of course, a community of practice has the problem that you don’t really know how to do what you’re doing, and sometimes it’s frustrating because it often doesn’t work and you need it to, and sometimes, for many reasons and because we are people, and people are fucking complicated animals, well, it’s complicated. But we find this idea of a community of practice very interesting, of coming together in a community, around a common interest and trying to go about practicing it in order to learn it…
Normally when we come together to collaborate we tell ourselves “we have to do this or we’re going to get together to do this” but you haven’t even thought about who you are or who the other person is. What interest does each person have in doing what they want to do? So, it’s important to first work on all of that stuff before you start doing what you wanted to do. So, it’s a question of dedicating a little time to getting to know each other, to know what each person’s abilities are, to know what their interests are, etc. Overall, we work on this, generating methodological frameworks and then we try to apply them to concrete realities…
We work a lot in this neighborhood and we try to work all the time from a perspective of proximity so that the network can really hold you, because if not, the holes in the network are very large and you fall through them. We think about how to build networks that are more intertwined. We work a lot with this idea of “the commons”, any community is a network. Then within the networks we try to think of distributed networks where there are no central nodes that accumulate power, the legitimacy or relationships that instrumentalize the network; we try to make it as distributed as possible and that is difficult because we are very used to very centralized or decentralized models, but not distributed ones. When the economist Elinor Ostrom formulated how a community works, she explained a kind of circle-triangle that we have always liked a lot and that had to do with the fact that there are relationships of trust, appreciation, and reciprocity.