OPERATION 0

We wanted to start by sharing some of our starting points and how we came together to think that damage and queering damage could be generative starting points for a conversation with some of the collective activties at Hangar. Jara, Laura and Helen (We =) were gathered at the Ageing Companions workshop, at Constant, discussing what it might mean to rot together or to riot together. How we might engage with the processes of damage and being damaged that we were experiencing, witnessing, feeling out, touching on in our practices but also how we might be in conversations with others who were dealing with damage, injury, repair, restoration, composting, speculating, in ways that could hold the damage rather than try to smooth it out, remedy it, hide it, in process of collective reparation.

Last summer there was a powerful leap towards the potential of turning damage analysis into a queer methodology.

But first perhaps it's fair to explain ourselves what we find urgent in those elements, so:

- Damage - We would like to widen the notion of damage and identify its conditions and surrounding through examples, practices things we come into contact with, and by damage we mean things like: pain, suffering, injury, uselessness, unrevoerability, unreparability, homophobia, racism, ageism, ableims, specism, classism, exclusions, inclusions, // No tienen por qué ser daños experimentados personalmente: pueden ser daños observados, o daños colectivos. Puede ser daño corporal, daño comunitario, daño medioambiental, daño personal, daño histórico, daño público, daño ficticio, daño cultural, daño de archivo, daño estructural, daño naturalizado, daño informático, daño urbano, daño trangeneracional, daño geopolítico... etc.Also we are interestedin how to make practuces that damage .. such as damaging institutions, damaging power structures, damaging fossil fuel economies. --- basically we might have to fuck some shitup.. on the way to repair. but that even with damage sometimes fucking shit up can seem difficult..

- Queering [we tell our aneqdote of last time we were in hangar] - what does it mean? non-identitary, non-essentialist, non-fixed lives // trans*feminist approach: interesctional, not-only-human, antinormative, affirmative...

(partial) Reparation - We want to propose perhaps that we can have some partial hopes to repair some damages but not others, or to live with damage in ways that give comfort and care The semiotic-material lives to which damage happens are complex entanglements. Reparation is not taken here as a developmentalist move nor a progressist tecnique to keep complexity up and healthy and sharpened no matterhow, but as as basic gesture of trying to organize a togetherness that counts.

Queering Methodologies -- Methodologies: Focus on how we generate data, knowledge, stories, as part of feminist research practices.. Although we are aware that we are a diverse group in which each person's practice might evoke different definitions of method.In other words, how can we, as Octavia Butler might say, uphold a politics of queer survival?

Analytics (discovery, interpretation, and communication of meaningful patterns in data) : post-positive move. A shared word, but many ways to approach that. If you search for analytics online you come across thousands of corporate companies who offer analytical services, services that draw conclusions through running algorithms over data sets, and we feel it is urgent to reclaim analytics in non profit experiments and in processes that might give space to other ways of understanding data, art practice, movement, bodies, thinking with other species, or different types of computation. We can reclaim analytics as the practice of cutting complexity together apart. To take on the both the injuries caused by analytics and how they are instrumentalised to provide (situated, temporary) truths about lives living the possible ways of living and also to take on how we might invent/generate/build on an analytics for trans-femisnit work that stays with damage... //