ART CITY [first residency]

ANARKOARTLAB AND ART CITY: From Brooklyn to Liberty
Notes from a residency in New York
September 24, 2026 to October 20, 2026

By Tasha Mrzljak, curator and art critic,

in conversation with Adrians Black, multimedia
artist and founding member of AnarkoArtLab, the Anarchist BookFair NYC, and Art City

.
I arrived in New York on September 24, bringing with me a working relationship in which
artistic production and critical writing continually intersect.

Over the years, Adrians Black and I have developed a process of reciprocal feedback: Adrians’s work produces questions that enter my writing, while my writing returns to the work as another layer of pressure, articulation, and possibility. This is Anarkoartlab. Adrians constantly produces images, performances, propositions, architectures, situations, texts, diagrams, and social experiments, and I write within this movement, preserving the singularities of our positions. We are a collective made up of unique ones: two autonomous positions that meet, traverse one another, and transform while remaining distinct. This, too, is Anarkoartlab.

This conception of the collective, Bakunin in dialogue with Stirner and with the association of singularities that preserve themselves in the constitution of the common, is important both for understanding our working relationship and for thinking through some of the questions beginning to take shape in Art City. Within this process, criticism accompanies a practice as it unfolds and also accepts being changed by it. Our book on the AnarkoArtLab collective emerged from this process of creation and experimentation. Adrians constructed the visual field through photographs, poetry, images, and documentation of artistic actions, while I developed the theoretical and critical writing in continuous dialogue with the works and with our conversations.

Conversations with Adrians were a fundamental part of the development of the critical thinking, as were the interviews we conducted with members of the collective, incorporating into the publication the voices and experiences of those who had been part of its trajectory. The book took shape through these relationships, through the coexistence of image, thought, conversation, memory, testimony, and collective experience. Its construction thus extends the movement of AnarkoArtLab itself, in which creation emerges from encounters between different singularities without its developments being entirely defined in advance. This experience matters to what is happening now because Art City extends some of AnarkoArtLab’s questions and, at the same time, profoundly changes their conditions. The temporality of a performance, a public intervention, or a temporary collective situation differs from that required by a territory where people may come to live, plant, write, make poetry, make art, make music, build, care, produce food, enter into conflict, grow old, cook collectively, observe wild animals, feel the metamorphosis of nature, and remain.

The first days of this residency coincided with the Anarchist Book Fair, of which Adrians Black is one of the founders. Throughout the fair, we sold and signed our books at different moments, speaking with readers, artists, publishers, and activists involved in distinct political practices. Our book on AnarkoArtLab circulated among other publications, experiences, and genealogies. As we signed copies, the book functioned simultaneously as an archive and as a present situation: people asked questions, told stories, recognized similar questions in other experiences, and put a trajectory spanning two decades back into circulation. The Book Fair made visible a field far broader and more complex than any single definition of anarchism could contain. Anarcha-feminism, ecology, critiques of capitalism, libertarian education, gender and sexuality, antiracist and anticolonial struggles, community organizing, mutual aid, autonomous production, and independent publishing ran through the stands and conversations. The questions posed to anarchism today exceed a generic opposition between the individual and the state or an abstract critique of authority. The state, property, capitalism, money, and hierarchy remain fundamental problems, linked to the climate emergency, the destruction of ecosystems, relations of death between humans and other species, femicides, coloniality, technologies of control, the enslavement of labor, industrial food production, borders and migrations, and the ways in which relations of power continue to be reproduced within everyday life and the most intimate relationships. It was within this multiplicity that the still incipient alternative community of Art City began to acquire another depth. Some questions that circulated in Brooklyn among books, conversations, publications, and political experiences begin, in Liberty, to encounter art, land, water, food, architecture, climate, and duration.

Brooklyn confronts me with density, circulation, noise, encounters, and political histories; Liberty introduces
distance, maintenance, cultivation, shelter, forest, seasons, and the material persistence of decisions. Art City, based on the triad Art + Healing + Veganism, begins from the
relationship between territory and subjectivity: from the way a territory participates in the formation of a subject and how subjects, in turn, transform the conditions of
the place they inhabit. Territory, here, means something more complex than an expanse of land on which certain bodies settle. The distance between two buildings
changes the way people meet; autumn alters the rhythms of work and radically transforms the colors of the forest; woodland produces paths, zones of silence, limits,
risks, and temporalities; a spring changes the relationship with water; a collective kitchen will produce specific forms of living together. At the same time, the bodies that arrive, at this moment mainly mine and Adrians’s, open trails, carry objects, build, plant, name, think, write, paint, care, use, and modify what they find. Inhabiting becomes a relationship of reciprocal affect.

Spinoza offers a first point of entry for my thinking. A body exists through the encounters it establishes: it affects other bodies and is continually affected by them. These encounters can increase or diminish its power to act. Subjectivity, from this perspective, is
constituted through the relations a body establishes, sustains, transforms, and with which it is able to compose. The question about Art City can then shift. Beyond asking only who the subjects capable of inhabiting this territory are, it becomes possible to ask what these subjects become capable of doing when they enter into certain relationships with one another, with the forest, with animals, with water, with food, with work, and with what still
needs to be invented. Because this is part of my own formation as a writer, I also think through Deleuze and Guattari. Subjectivity can be understood through assemblages involving bodies, spaces, practices, signs, objects, machines, forms of language, social relations, and territories. A subject occupies a place and is also produced by the relationships that place makes possible.

Contemporary capitalism runs through our bodies and desires. Machines,
communication systems, algorithms, industrially produced wants, and incessant forms of consumption participate in what we want and believe we need. They produce
connections and possibilities while intensifying isolation, anxiety, and an existential emptiness increasingly constitutive of contemporary experience. As we arrive in the
forest, we bring other forms of subjectivation with us. The passage from one territory to another opens up the possibility of perceiving them, displacing them, and producing
other compositions. In Guattari, this problem acquires a specifically ecological dimension through ecosophy. Environmental ecology, social ecology, and mental ecology form
interdependent fields. A society can preserve certain trees and continue producing subjectivities founded on competition, exploitation, hyperconsumption, and
individualism; it can speak of sustainability while keeping intact the social structures that produce devastation. Ecological transformation implies the transformation of relationships and modes of existence. I perceive in Art City this desire to bring these dimensions into relation. The forest participates in the political experience as much as the assembly. Water matters as much as the New Social Code envisioned by Adrians. The way cultivation will take place will be linked to the way work is done and how roles are distributed among bodies, including the desire to abolish divisions of labor founded on sex classes. Architecture participates in the possibilities of encounter, intimacy, isolation, and collective life. It is at this point that Indigenous and decolonial thought can produce a more radical displacement. They enter into friction with a genealogy of thought passing through Spinoza, Deleuze, and Guattari and unsettle any linear sequence once again organized by European philosophy. These traditions have been produced within distinct historical, political, and cosmological experiences, and it is precisely this difference that allows them
to put pressure on the categories through which Western modernity organized nature, humanity, civilization, development, property, and territory.

I am Brazilian, my theoretical formation passed extensively through European traditions, and Adrians also works across multiple repertoires. I want to acknowledge this formation and place it in dialogue with other fields without pretending equivalences. As a writer and art critic, I also think from the need to critically work through the coloniality that organized the very criteria by which certain forms of knowledge were universalized and others transformed into belief,
folklore, superstition, or anthropological objects. In different Amerindian cosmologies, the division between a humanity endowed with
subjectivity and a nature external to it and available for appropriation becomes insufficient. Rivers, animals, plants, forests, ancestors, and humans participate in networks
of relations in which agency and perspective belong to a field broader than the exclusively human. Amerindian perspectivism, developed by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro
from Amazonian ethnographies, is one possible point of entry into this discussion. Davi Kopenawa offers another, speaking from a Yanomami experience in which the forest
possesses its own life, relationships, and intelligence; Krenak, through other paths, insists on the continuity between humanity, rivers, mountains, and the Earth. Art City is an
experimental artistic community situated in Liberty. Its dialogue with Indigenous thought requires care precisely because Indigenous cosmologies belong to specific peoples,
histories, and territories. A productive encounter happens when these ways of thinking unsettle our questions instead of functioning as a spiritual repertoire extracted from their contexts. If a forest is understood only as property, resource, or landscape, certain relationships seem self-evident. When this understanding shifts, other questions appear. What does it mean to build while recognizing that the land has its own rhythms and limits? What does it mean to cultivate in response to the conditions of a place? What changes when water comes to be understood as a vital relationship? How can the presence of other species be recognized beyond their usefulness to humans? How far can a community transform a territory while building ways of listening to it? The idea of florestania offers a powerful point of entry into this question. The term
emerged in the context of struggles that brought together rubber tappers, Indigenous peoples, and other forest populations, historically linked through the Alliance of Forest
Peoples. Krenak locates this formulation in the movement built with Chico Mendes and others who defended the possibility of a life of citizenship within and through the forest. Krenak returns to this field to think about forms of belonging that begin from places other than the polis and also develops, in Ancestral Future, the idea of affective alliances, encounters capable of bringing different worlds into relation while preserving their differences. Through another route, this formulation approaches a question running through Art City: building the common while preserving the singular. An alliance can exist between differences that remain differences. In this sense, the very notion of identity deserves to be questioned. Identity, when transformed into a stable and definitive essence, can imprison subjects within categories intended to make them visible. At the same time, there are concrete political situations in which identities need to be affirmed
because it is through them that historically violated groups can name their own oppression, produce solidarity, and fight for rights. It is possible to claim a position
politically while also preserving what exceeds that position. Art City wants to exceed preestablished identities while continuing to struggle.
The very name Art City acquires tension when considered through florestania. We are speaking of a “city” whose territory is traversed by forest, water, animals, and seasonal
rhythms. This tension produces thought. What does it mean to call a place a city when its common life takes into account relations between human beings, the continuity of the forest, water quality, the movement of other species, cycles of cultivation, and physical limits imposed by the territory? Sônia Guajajara formulates an image that expands this discussion: reforesting minds. Reforestation comes to designate the transformation of political consciousness, affects, and ways of relating as well. Preserving trees while leaving intact the forms of thought that turn land, animals, rivers, and people into resources maintains the logic that produces devastation. The environmental crisis is also part of a crisis in forms of subjectivation. Reforesting minds therefore involves changing what a society desires, values, consumes, and imagines. Territorial transformation and subjective transformation begin to operate together. It is on this ground that Art City’s animism becomes central. Near the entrance there is a
small altar where Saint George, Yemanjá, and Preto Velho coexist beneath the inscription Art City Animism. The word appears literally on a threshold: between the road and the territory, between the entrance and what is intended to be built within. Animism runs through the way Adrians formulates Art City’s fundamental structures, particularly the
conception of healing, and through its three pillars as a spiritual and invisible dimension connecting different planes of experience. This involves recognizing a dimension of
existence that exceeds the measurable, the utilitarian, and what is defined by a linear temporality, and that intervenes in the relationship with the territory and with other
beings. This spiritual dimension has practical consequences. The invisible runs through the philosophical and theoretical dimensions and translates into movement, choice, and action. Body, territory, food, relationship, spirituality, creation, and politics enter the same experimental field. In this sense, Art City takes on something close to a mission, with mission understood as a shared task: experimenting with forms of life that call into question separations that seem natural because they have been historically produced.
Art is fundamental to Art City. It contains and runs through the other two pillars because it is through creation that Art City intends to experiment with new forms of healing, food, coexistence, production, and social organization. Art means working with what has yet to find form, building relationships that do not yet exist, and making common life itself a field of experimentation. Experimentation also displaces the rigid opposition between error and success. What we call an error can produce an unforeseen direction; what seemed a success can reveal its limits when other people enter the experience. The rigid opposition between right and wrong belongs to the same kind of binary thinking that Art City seeks to call into question. Responsibility, consequences, and violence continue to require ethical consideration; at the same time, the creative process can accommodate what escapes a teleological progression toward a final solution. The art laboratory, the music laboratory, the library, performance spaces, writing, architecture, the kitchen, the greenhouse, the free school, and the future science laboratory participate in this
expanded understanding of artistic practice. Art City is also an artistic proposition because it makes a field of experimentation out of what is generally treated as external to
art: property, food, sexuality, health, education, language, relations between species, the division of labor, spirituality, and ways of making decisions.
The second axis is healing, grounded in animism. Healing means caring for oneself, for others, for nature, and for animals. If existence is understood as a network of relations, health comes to be thought of within the quality of those relations. The health of a body involves the water it drinks, the food that sustains it, the air, the possibility of rest, the relationships it establishes, its working conditions, and the territory in which it lives. A collective that continually destroys the power of its members compromises its own possibility of existing; a conception of individual freedom that ignores the effects of each action on others also destroys the conditions of common life. Healing requires constant attention to the circulation between these scales. It is in this dimension that Spinoza returns to the thinking about Art City. If some encounters increase the power to act while others diminish it, healing can be understood as attention to what encounters produce. Conflict, sadness, and disagreement belong to collective life. A community capable of bearing them is better able to distinguish productive conflicts from relationships that systematically produce domination, exhaustion, competition, manipulation, or
destruction. The third axis is organic veganism, accompanied by the idea of animal liberation. It goes beyond an isolated dietary choice and participates in the relationship with other species, food production, the territory, and the critique of industrial forms of animal exploitation. Veganism takes a position on the transformation of animals into units of production and on the structures that make confinement, forced reproduction, slaughter, and industrial exploitation possible. Animal liberation adds an explicitly political dimension to veganism: other species enter a discussion about freedom, domination, and violence. At the same time, Art City’s organic veganism questions the industrial model of vegan consumption itself. Replacing meat with an ultraprocessed vegan product, produced by large industrial chains and wrapped in several layers of plastic, transforms an important dimension of the relationship with animals, but can preserve relations of dependence,
consumption, waste, and large-scale production. For this reason, the greenhouse, collective kitchen, and science laboratory begin to form a continuity. The greenhouse could produce part of the food. The laboratory will allow us to experiment with fermentation, develop vegan milks, cheeses, and other foods,
understand microbiological processes, test methods of preservation, and acquire knowledge that usually remains hidden in a ready-made product. The kitchen transforms
this knowledge and this production into shared life. Since my arrival in the United States, Adrians and I have been talking about the quantity of excessively processed and
packaged products found in supermarkets: our plastic-wrapped and poisoned garbage. The expression comes from a very concrete experience: entire aisles of packaging,
ultraprocessed foods, and products whose relationship to their material origin, to the territory, and to the processes that produced them becomes almost invisible. The
question becomes: what science, produced by whom, in the service of which forms of life? Making a vegan cheese, learning a fermentation process, or investigating how to
preserve a particular food are practices in which an idea encounters the concrete resistance of matter. The critique of the food industry changes in nature when one actually
has to produce what one intends to eat. Animism also runs through this axis. Animism and veganism constitute distinct fields.
There are animist societies that hunt, fish, and establish complex relationships of reciprocity and predation with animals. Art City builds its own articulation, bringing a
nonanthropocentric understanding of life into relation with a position explicitly linked to animal liberation. This distinction keeps animism as a field under construction within the experience itself. The question remains: what animism is being built here? It appears in healing, by relating human health to the health of relationships and of the territory. It appears in veganism and in the political recognition of other species. It appears in art, by admitting sensory, spiritual, and invisible dimensions as participants in creation. It appears in the relationship with the forest, with water, with the body, and with what escapes utilitarian logic. This invisible world runs through the practical world. Theory and practice find movement.n New York the individual, from the community; the mind, from the body; work, from its effects; food,
from the territory or the animal that produced it; consumption, from the material conditions of production; the owner, from the consequences of exercising ownership.
Individualism radicalizes this operation by producing the fantasy of a subject who is autonomous because isolated. Art City wants to experiment with another hypothesis:
autonomy through relationship. This formulation also transforms the idea of freedom. Freedom comes to involve the
capacity to build relationships in which singularities can exist, produce difference, and preserve the conditions of existence of others. The question takes concrete form in
relations between people, between people and animals, and between all these bodies and what we call nature. Coloniality organized territories, economies, and institutions and also produced ways of perceiving the other, establishing hierarchies, forming families, distributing care, organizing sexuality, racializing bodies, deﬁning normality, and
understanding relationships through possession, authority, and subordination. In this sense, decolonizing a community also implies decolonizing relationships between
people. This question appeared in this year’s Anarchist Book Fair program through the Decolonizing Love project, which brought relationship anarchy into a broader discussion about the political transformation of relationships. The question goes beyond the choice between monogamy and nonmonogamy: how do property, hierarchy, coloniality, patriarchy, and capitalism continue to organize our relationships even when we intellectually declare ourselves antiauthoritarian? Art City encounters this problem
directly. An anarchist community can reproduce authoritarian relations. A collective kitchen can reproduce the patriarchal division of labor. A libertarian vocabulary can
coexist with forms of subjectivation produced by the society we come from. Art City’s libertarian political work begins precisely when these forms become visible.
Healing thus acquires a political dimension. Caring for one another requires recognizing relational forms that reproduce domination, manipulation, destructive dependence, or
exhaustion. At the same time, care needs to preserve difference and the possibility of conﬂict. A healthy community moves through sadness, tension, disagreement, and what we provisionally call error without transforming them into permanent structures of destruction. It was in this context that Harut, Adrians’s friend in Armenia, suggested that, before inviting people to live permanently in Art City, gatherings lasting a few days should be organized. People would arrive, remain for a deﬁned period, share in the life of the territory, and then leave. Other subjects would follow. There would be circulation
before permanence.The proposal changes the way the formation of the community is conceived. Instead of deciding in advance who belongs through proﬁles, political identities, or declared afﬁnities, Art City could produce encounters and observe what they produce. For a few days, different people would share food, work, readings, art, assemblies, forest, silence, tasks, moments of retreat, and conﬂicts. The symposiums, residencies, assemblies
themselves become a social laboratory. A person can arrive without mastering the project’s entire vocabulary and produce relationships capable of increasing collective
power. The question of belonging changes. Instead of only asking who can live in Art City?, it becomes possible to ask: what happens when certain bodies, histories, and
modes of existence enter into relation in this territory? Circulation also creates a margin of safety, safe, because it allows relationships to show what they produce before acquiring the rigidity of permanence. Disagreement is productive. The issue lies in the capacity to compose, modify, listen, and recognize the effects one presence produces on others. It is fundamental to understand that the community itself, as it takes shape, seeks to create the
material conditions for other ways of perceiving, thinking, and inhabiting the world to ﬂourish, freeing the imagination from the structures of power that have historically
conditioned our experiences. This transformation begins in the most concrete practices of everyday life. In the science laboratory, experimentation with vegan cheeses, milks, meat, and beers opens possibilities for reinventing our relationship with food, with other living beings, and with processes of production. In the Free School, children will be able to cultivate curiosity, exercise autonomy, think for themselves, and develop the capacity to question what was previously presented to them as natural, necessary, or inevitable. It is a matter of making existence itself a ﬁeld of experimentation, where learning, creating, eating, and living together participate in the same movement of emancipation and freedom.
This conception meets our way of thinking about the collective through Stirner: unique ones entering into association while preserving their singularities. The New Social Code
needs to work within this tension between singularity and the common. It is in this context that the proposal for decision-making by consensus enters. For Adrians, when nine
people agree and one presents a different position, this difference requires elaboration. Why does this person disagree? What does this difference reveal? Is there another
solution? What part of the problem does the rest of the group still need to perceive or perceive? The singularity of the person who disagrees is incorporated by the collective
and becomes political information. Consensus carries its own risks: it can consume an enormous amount of time, and it needs to remain subject to criticism and
experimentation. While reading Bakunin, my attention was caught by the idea of revolutionary propaganda
as the need to circulate autonomous experiences and modes of life outside totalitarianlogic. I asked Adrians about a contemporary equivalent of the revolutionary newspaper
for Art City. The answer quickly expanded: fanzine, blog, podcast, video, documentation of assemblies, texts produced from the discussions. The assembly can become
simultaneously a space for decision-making and an editorial device. A conversation generates a record. The record circulates. Other people respond. The responses return to
the project. This circulation afﬁrms a connected autonomy. There is also the desire to tell people who share many of these concerns that there is a safe place where they can arrive,
rest, remain for a while, experiment, and share. Art City can seek greater material autonomy and remain intensely connected to other people, communities, artists,
movements, and territories. Resting is important because New York is the head and the stomach of the beast. Rest is a basic action for escaping the slavery of work, beginning to think and act autonomously. This is a prototype for the construction of a parallel world far from the totalitarian structure that mortally wounds our subjectivity, our territory, and our
life in common. The social code needs to be enacted by the body. A declaration against the sexual
division of labor needs to reach the dishes, the wood, the stone, the kitchen, cleaning, and care. During our conversations, the hypothesis emerged that each inhabitant might
devote approximately three hours a day to work necessary for the collective, keeping the rest of the time available for their individual practice. Cooking, cleaning, tending the ﬁre, working in the greenhouse, producing food in the laboratory, renovating the music space,
organizing the library, building and maintaining infrastructure all participate in this common ﬁeld. Artistic and intellectual work also contribute, and the very deﬁnition of
contribution needs to remain under discussion. How can age, disability, physical strength, health, skill, knowledge, desire, and preference be taken into account? How can the
invisible work that sustains the conditions for everyone’s artistic production be distributed? The rotation of roles appears as one possibility. Those who cook can
participate in construction; those who work in the library can tend the greenhouse; those who produce art also wash the dishes. The critique of the sexual division of labor ﬁnds its living test in everyday life. Sexual freedom constitutes another dimension of the New Social Code. Adrians imagines a Free Love Room, dedicated to different forms of consensual sexuality between adults. The most relevant question lies in thinking about freedom, consent, responsibility,
and possession, but also in interrogating the historical structures through which we learn to desire, love, and establish relationships. Monogamy and heterosexuality were
historically institutionalized as normative models for organizing affective, sexual, and family life, linked to property, marriage, reproduction, and the distribution of social roles
between men and women. I am thinking here of Adrienne Rich and her formulation of
compulsory heterosexuality, which allows us to understand how certain forms of desireand relationship are naturalized through institutions, social expectations, and relations of power. I also return to Monique Wittig, for whom heterosexuality constitutes a political regime that organizes sexual categories and material relations of domination. These
formulations allow the discussion to shift from sexuality as a strictly individual choice to the social conditions in which our desires, affects, and bonds are produced. Sexual
exclusivity, jealousy, ﬁdelity, the nuclear family, and the association between love and possession become questions that can be interrogated. To what extent does what we
recognize as love carry historically constructed forms of ownership, control, and dependence? How can the desire to share a life with someone be distinguished from the
claim to exercise authority over their body, their affects, and their choices? Relational anarchy, or relationship anarchy, offers another entry into this problem by questioning
preestablished hierarchies between romantic, sexual, affective, and friendship relationships, proposing that bonds can be built from the singularities, desires, and
agreements of the people involved. Breaking with imposed monogamy does not mean turning nonmonogamy into a new mandatory model. A monogamous relationship can
also result from an autonomous choice, just as nonmonogamous relationships can reproduce jealousy, competition, inequality, manipulation, and gender hierarchies. The
problem lies in the structures of power that run through these relationships and in the concrete conditions in which consent and freedom can exist. The more
possibilities open up, the more complex the practices of communication, negotiation of boundaries, care, and affective responsibility become. Consent needs
to remain free, informed, speciﬁc, and able to be withdrawn, including when prior bonds or shared expectations exist. I think the Free Love Room introduces a particularly
interesting question for Art City: what happens when sexual freedom ceases to be only a theoretical formulation and encounters bodies traversed by histories, desires, insecurities, experiences of violence, expectations, and different ways of understanding intimacy?
How can conditions be built for experimenting with other forms of sexuality without reproducing collective pressures, asymmetries of power, or expectations of sexual
availability? Freedom also includes the possibility of refusing, choosing exclusivity, remaining alone, and preserving one’s own intimacy. If the New Social Code intends to
call into question the binary and proprietary structures that organize social life, affective and sexual relationships constitute a fundamental ﬁeld of this
experimentation, precisely because it is within them that many forms of authority, possession, and subjectivation continue to operate profoundly and, frequently,
barely perceptibly. Architecture participates in this code. Adrians showed me an old china cabinet that once held decorative plates and now houses books. The gesture reorganizes what the house places in a position of care. The
library, the collective reading room, a small table intended for writers and poets, themusic laboratory, the collective kitchen, the future art laboratory, the greenhouse, the
science laboratory, assembly spaces, and retreat areas begin to constitute devices for different forms of relationship. On the terrace, a circular table organizes conversation; a central ﬁre brings bodies together in another way. These spaces create speciﬁc material
conditions in which other relationships can be experimented with. On October 8, Adrians took me to the area intended for future dwellings. After leaving
the main house, we walked through the forest, at times crossing denser woodland, passed a long, narrow, shallow watercourse, and crossed a small wooden bridge.
Surrounded by woodland is the area where future residents will be able to build their own houses or use prefabricated structures, also being considered for their relatively
affordable cost. There is an elevated wooden structure there that the former owner used for hunting. How horrifying. This small material trace of another relationship with the
forest and with animals remains in the territory at the very moment when Art City is trying to formulate animal liberation and another form of coexistence between
species. What I found there was a spatial hypothesis. Autonomy immediately left the abstract ﬁeld and encountered the circumstances of its existence. How will the materials
arrive? Where will the water come from? Where will waste and sewage go? Who will maintain the path and the bridge? How will energy get there? What will be individual and
what will be common? Also bring in the MST and its forms of life in common and the countryside. Coming to the countryside is a revolutionary action. Who will stay through
the winter? How will someone who still works in the city live there? And what about children who need to attend school? There is an intention to create an Art School or a
Free School, two proposals that deserve to be distinguished. An Art School could constitute a space for artistic education and experimentation, open to creation,
imagination, and the investigation of different languages, while a Free School would question the very organization of education, its hierarchies, its methods, and the relations
of authority between children and adults. I think here of Paulo Freire and his critique of banking education, in which knowledge is deposited into students, in opposition to an
education built through dialogue, experience, and active participation in the production of knowledge. I also think of the historical experiences of free schools, which sought to
expand children’s autonomy and recognize their interests, rhythms, and capacities for decision-making. The traditional school, frequently organized through the standardization of content, the fragmentation of knowledge, the disciplining of bodies, and the valorization of preestablished answers, can restrict curiosity and creativity, subordinating different ways of learning to a relatively homogeneous model of development. In Art City, an Art School could explore the relationships between artistic creation, forest, music, architecture, food, science, and collective life, while a Free School would require a
broader reﬂection on freedom, knowledge, responsibility, and human formation. The twopossibilities could coexist and intersect, preserving their speciﬁcities. However, a free
school also needs to respond to children’s concrete needs, including literacy, scientiﬁc knowledge, intellectual development, social relationships, pedagogical support, and
conditions of care, as well as legal schooling requirements. How can these conditions be ensured without reproducing the structures of control and standardization that are being questioned? How can an education be built that recognizes children’s singularities, including their different ways of learning, and sustains their autonomy without transferring to them responsibilities that belong to adults and to the community? The possibility of a Free School thus introduces a fundamental question for the New Social Code: how can libertarian forms of education be experimented with in which freedom, collective responsibility, and access to knowledge can constitute a concrete experience of life? I return here to the walk of approximately ﬁfteen minutes through the forest between the main house and the area of the future dwellings, a seemingly short distance, but one that already amounts to quite a trek, depending on the circumstances in which it is crossed.
On dry, clear days, the walk can be pleasurable; in winter, in snow, in darkness, or while carrying groceries, tools, or a child, it produces another experience. For someone with reduced mobility, ﬁfteen minutes in dense woodland can constitute a barrier. For someone who needs to leave every day to work, the route affects their routine. For
children, older people, or someone who is ill, it produces other needs for care and transportation. Houses sufﬁciently far apart can preserve intimacy, silence, and autonomy;
a greater distance can fragment the common experience or create dependence on infrastructure that does not yet exist. Proximity becomes a political, spatial, and affective
decision. The territory thinks alongside the project because it imposes rhythms and limits that an architectural plan drawn on a table can ignore.
Food participates directly in this relationship. One of the fundamental pieces of infrastructure will be the greenhouse, intended to progressively increase food autonomy
according to Liberty’s speciﬁc conditions. There are apple trees and pears. The forest offers possibilities for mushrooms. Other plants will need a greenhouse during cold
periods. Food autonomy requires situated knowledge. It is necessary to discover what grows there, when it grows, how much work it requires, and which technologies can work with that territory’s own conditions. During our conversations, we recalled experiences of the MST and a visit I made to the Marielle Vive settlement in Valinhos, where certain forms of cultivation were being rethought from the concrete experience of working in that territory and from the critique of the monoculture model. The principle that can remain is that production and territory need to respond to one another. The economic question appears in a similar way. One of Art City’s aspirations is to
progressively diminish the centrality of money in the community’s internal life. However,taxes, energy, internet, and tools continue to bind the territory to the external monetary economy. Adrians imagines different forms of production capable of covering external expenses: jams, apple juice, mushrooms, and other products can participate in this economy. What is initially conceived as food autonomy can also participate in forms of economic support for the project itself.
Here my readings of Bakunin return. Statism and Anarchy, written in 1873, is one of his last major political formulations. A passage about the collective cultivation of the land and the distribution of its products according to needs stayed with me. In Liberty, this formulation encounters a deed, taxes, maintenance, physical work, legal boundaries, and speciﬁc responsibilities. Art City exists on land acquired by Adrians Black, Vilma, and Joe Duplantier. Ownership precedes the collective project and creates a concrete asymmetry. An experience guided by horizontality begins within a legal structure that recognizes speciﬁc owners. This tension needs to remain visible, at least here in my diary. Where does the common end and property begin? Where does the collective space end and the owners’ house begin? We are, after all, at their place. The critical interest lies in following what happens when a project that intends to experiment with other relationships to property and collectivity operates within a legal regime organized by private property. If Art City wishes to write a new code, property is one of the ﬁrst realities that this code will have to confront materially.
The true object of Art City is the New Social Code. The city is the space-action in which this code encounters body, matter, conﬂict, and duration. A proposition about gender
encounters the division of labor. A proposition about veganism encounters the kitchen. Animal liberation encounters food. Animism encounters the forest, water, and the
invisible dimension of experience. Healing encounters health, care, and conﬂict. A proposition about property encounters the deed. A critique of money encounters taxes. A
proposal for consensus encounters someone who disagrees. The attempt to abolish binary language encounters bodies and habits formed within it over decades. Art City’s
laboratories, artistic, musical, scientiﬁc, pedagogical, and social, exist within this friction. The code transforms in the here and now. A code oriented only toward an ideal future
would turn the present into mere preparation for the completed community, the completed city, or the ﬁnally transformed society. The laboratory operates in the present
because it is there that relationships can be experimented with, contested, andreformulated. My position as a critic transforms within this experience because I accompany Art City before much of it exists. I walk through spaces before they become architecture, participate in actions that may later become part of the project’s history, ask questions,
disagree, introduce references, write, and return the text to the conversation. One of theﬁrst actions I participated in condenses this relationship. Adrians took an old sign and
wrote ART CITY on it with black spray paint. The letters came out irregular, deformed, traversed by the gesture. We carried that heavy sign through the grass and vegetation,
and I had the honor of hanging it on the main gate. We ﬁnished happy. The gesture remained because a sign names and a gate establishes a threshold. By putting up that
inscription, we were naming something that was still in the process of coming into existence. The name preceded the houses, the residents, the assemblies, and much of the
infrastructure. Art City stands between the name and what that name may yet come to designate. It already exists as territory, desire, archive, political hypothesis, partial architecture, laboratory, code in formulation, and network of relationships, but remains sufﬁciently open for situations still unknown to intervene in its construction. Our own working relationship helps us understand this openness. Adrians and I are able to produce continuity between two singularities. An idea passes from one position to the other, encounters resistance, changes shape, and returns different. The collective happens in this circulation. Art City can experiment with something similar on another plane: forms of the common in which singularity participates in collective power and the collective expands the possibilities of the singularities that constitute it.
The Art City community begins to take shape through different possibilities of participation and belonging. We imagine founding members, ﬂoating members who
move through the territory without necessarily establishing permanent residence, members who contribute ﬁnancially, others who participate in everyday work, artists in
residence, scientists, writers, vegans, healers, and permanent inhabitants. These forms of participation may intersect, change, and acquire other meanings as the community
develops. How can such distinct contributions be recognized without establishing new hierarchies between those who have ﬁnancial resources, those who work, those who
create, and those who inhabit the territory? How can a community be built in which different degrees of presence and commitment can coexist? For now, these possibilities
make up our current constellation of desires, still open to the encounters and singularities that may transform it.
I arrived in Liberty thinking about how to enter the territory through writing. To write the territory, I need to allow the territory to disorganize the categories through which I
learned to read it. This requires a process of decolonizing thought itself. Decolonizing my thinking means interrogating the hierarchies that organize what I recognize as
knowledge, subject, nature, body, rationality, property, time, and language, and perceiving how much these categories carry the history of the colonial modernity I intend
to criticize. My thinking was also constituted by European traditions. Decolonizing itmeans putting this repertoire at risk in the encounter with other thoughts, other
experiences, and, above all, with what the territory itself makes it impossible to continue thinking in the same way. Writing then ceases to occupy a position external to experience. It, too, is affected. I arrived trying to understand Art City through concepts I already possessed. The territory begins to return resistance to these concepts. The forest, distances, water, animals, property, food, relationships, and the project’s contradictions intervene in the way I think. My writing returns to the conversations with Adrians; the conversations change what I observe; what happens in the territory returns once again to the text. The dialogue that already existed between my critical work and Adrians’s practice comes to include another agent: the territory itself, which begins to participate in the conditions in which writing becomes possible.
For this reason, thought needs to be deterritorialized before it can write about territory. Deterritorialization here means losing the security of conceptual positions that seemed
stable and allowing the encounter to reorganize their coordinates. Objectivity understood as a protected distance can no longer adequately respond to what is happening here, because I am implicated in the situation I am trying to think through. My thinking then encounters an encruzilhada. The encruzilhada is the place where distinct paths meet while preserving their differences: European thought and decolonial thought; criticism and participation; writing and territory; visible and invisible; individual and collective; theory and movement; what I bring with me and what the encounter forces me to reconsider. Sustaining this tension may allow another form of thought to appear. Writing from this encruzilhada requires accepting that criticism, too, is transformed by the object it accompanies. Reciprocal feedback happens in all these directions. It is within it that the text can cease to speak only about Art City and begin to be produced with what happens here. The territory, too, has begun to write.
It has been raining and windy since early morning. This wind and this rain give rhythm to the falling leaves as they accompany departure and return.

From where everything for everyone can be a reality.

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