#whenigrewup

When I Grew Up (my own private ZAD by the sea)

an archipelago imagined for isthisit? a map designed by Ugo-Lou Chmod

Louise Ashcroft Iyas D-Toth Corentin Darré Adem Elahel Lisa Fetva fleuryfontaine Hanne Lippard Erin Mitchell Jonathan Monaghan Sara Sadik Claire Serres

Leaving the land, the Westphalian state governmentality, or even your parent’s home isn’t something doable from scratch. When I Grew Up is a meditation on this process of leaving as a technological practice.

When I Grew Up could be once the story of a teenage person who’s cutting the cord with their parent’s, and a drama on Silicon Valley euphorists who hope to build cities in the sea. It tells about exit dreams like those of existing as yourself. It’s a composite narration about self-definition as separation.

When I Grew Up is an artificial narrative archipelago on self-definition as a technical and multi-agential process. Using seasteading as a metaphor, it shows fantasy and technology as means to bring about the community: how, like seasteading does, we construct ourselves as individuals or communities out from existing materials.

When I Grew Up is a project on sovereignty, mediation and inner life. Intersecting self-construction and secession, it’s a reflexion on identity as made through consecutive inclusions and exclusions. Drawing on Levinas’s idea that the Other stays naked unless we dress it with anything else that its otherness, WIGU wants to initiate a collective work on ethical secession. How to exit without creating bare life?

From the Pussycat Dolls, to Gus Van Sant, When I Grew Up is a project on creation as “patchwork” and emergence, on self and community as technological devices for bringing forth, and on relationality as the stream that leads poiesis. It’s a collective work aiming at a more inclusive practice of leaving. More Zone à Défendre than Seasteading Institute, it’s an exercise on inclusive leaving, on quitting-with more than leaving-behind.

When I Grew Up wants to perform a community that includes an ecology of people, institutions, objects, landscapes and any non-totalities, softening the relations between human and non-human, but also highlighting human choices as continuing an already ongoing movement.

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