WHAT YOU CAN DO TO CONTRIBUTE TO THE VARIOUS COMMUNITY-SUPPORTED ENDEAVORS OF HIC ROSA
Sponsor a GCAS-Jəhān Term 2022 | $16,500
Sponsor a GCAS-Jəhān Course | $5,000
Sponsor a Week of Study | $1,250
Sponsor a Weekend of Study | $500
Contribute any amount you can
to Jəhān, Jəhãnuma, Falsework/JəhānYoung People’s Aesthetic and Political Education Programme, Common Tern Works
Donate Labour or Accrue Work Credit
donate your skills, or accrue credit toward any enrollment or registration fees you might incur for yourself or for someone else, to help us with what we need to do as we build the organization further: such as legal advice, the board of directors, accounting, educational technology, design, social media, outreach, and teaching in/for various programmes.
Please spread the word, and introduce us to potential collaborators, partners, and allies!
Please write to build@hicrosa.org with any ideas.
All donations are tax-deductible in the US. Please contact us at contact@hicrosa.org
WHY THIS? WHY NOW?
This is an exciting time for Hic Rosa. After almost 7 years of building and affirming our commitments to study and practice, and to the entwining of art, education, culture, politics, and the humanities around subjects who might build a different world than one besieged by inequality and injustice — and, increasingly, a lack of connection across various boundaries that runs against the very human impulse to connect and make larger wholes — we have now entered a new phase. All of these years have been sustained by friendships and relationships, by trust and mutuality, by friends of friends, and friends of their friends, by all of us finding each other because we needed to!
This new phase sees the assembling and assertion of our own constructive and liberatory institutionalities that can provide a space for questions and connections otherwise not prioritised or made possible. At the beginning of 2021, we brought our enormous global pandemic writing project Falsework, Smalltalk into the world with over sixty contributors, and then embarked on building a cooperative of cultural workers from around the world — educators, artists, community organisers, social workers, and more — by the name of Common Tern. A cooperative production wing, joining small initiatives and collectives in various places, Common Tern Works was deemed a way to share knowledge and information, and enable working together to build a space outside the institutions from which we emerge, to support our work both inside and outside them.
One aspect of that coming together was delineating a need for an educational project that might be the place where academia, artworld, and activism might meet, not in a way where each is merely instrumental to the other, but where their foundational mutualities — literally, the common ground of their emergence and sustenance in our labours, bodies, aspirations, resistances — can be verified and built upon, perhaps in order to let our work matter in different ways rather than being given over, parted with, alienated from us.
This dream has already seen its earliest inkling of realisation in a partnership with the Global Centre for Advanced Studies in Dublin, in terms of Hic Rosa building a deterritorial and autonomous node, Jəhān, in order to produce a new form of institutionality out of our commitments, and to allow it to be truly accountable to the Global South as a particular relation to power, rather than an object of study alone. Seeking a space where all producers of knowledge and lifeworlds wherever they may be, assert their own claim on an institution that does not carry with it the spoken/unspoken imperatives to mimic that which we also resist. In other words, perhaps ambitiously, a space where the usual coping mechanism of desiring our own subjection in order to feel empowered — we know how that goes — can feel unnecessary, and new sprouts and muscles of thought and action can grow.
This project is a response to a need, and has been brought into the world for those who need it the most. The work is not salvationist or condescending; rather, it is faithful to the truth that those knowledges exist and indeed worlds that need to come into contact with each other that often never do, or do it under the auspices of institutions to whom most of the people we care about still feel hostage to.
This is the first institution of its kind, learning from the work of may friends, which is truly committed to an educational model that sees every participant as a knowledge maker, and each classroom as a space that incites and recites other worlds, in new ways, and new tones. Sustaining it will involve confronting head-on the inequities of the global educational system, upholding a spirit of cooperation and mutuality with all those who are engaged in the same project but in their own ways, and starting afresh gives us an excuse to be idealistic about who we want to be and whom we want to serve. Having brought only our immense labor and love, and the abundance of social relations committed to worldmaking, being just granted a 501(c)3 status in the US as a public charity in the arts, humanities, and culture, we feel we have a chance to inaugurate this new phase with the support of those who are able to support our labours, and let them mean something.
We need your support to sustain a grounded institution that is both global and immensely rooted in the time and space of the present wherever our participating faculty and students are. Please refer friends who have been looking for a place like ours, and donate whatever you can according to your capacity and inclination. Each contribution is meaningful, and will allow us to start on a footing that does not extract more from those who always give everything anyway, and doesn’t place the burden of supporting this institution on those who need it the most. It has become clear that our work resonates with so many people in parts of the world that allow us to dream of internationalisms beyond geopolitics, and to validate a global undercommons that sets its cooperative agenda, and establishes a sanctuary of knowledge producers that brings together need and ability in ways that do justice to our personal position and our historical geo-socio-economic locations.
Dignity and grace mean everything to us, making us rather unfit for the kinds of hustle that this work requires in these neoliberal times. So, please know this is very hard for us. We need any help we can get to get started in a way that is fair and portends good things for the future, and allows us to not turn away any teacher or student from the global south, supporting our fellow workers and students according to their need, ability, and availability as much as possible, without trying to reproduce whatever systems we have been wrought within but seek departure from. This effort seems all the more necessary for where we have already been, and what we have already seen and been part of.
We build alongside what exists, because we feel the worlds are big enough, because we know lives and labours are are attached to all those institutions and projects that stand on thin ice and keep coping with this precarity by insisting on returning to what was, and didn’t work that well. This makes this endeavour not merely snark or objection: it is fully one of healing and worldmaking, an excuse for thinking of a future when it feels least possible, a lifeline for all that we love, an invitation to all that is unrequited, channelling years and spaces of the commons and undercommons. Because we need it to be so, in the name of all the worlds that have continued to survive when they were meant to be annihilated, and which must be given a chance to emerge from the shadows and show other ways. Those worlds are certainly not beyond stars, they are right near us if we know where and how to look.