The Photocopier: An Infrastructure of Affirmative Critique
By Yazan Khalili

For many years I have been working with questions of funding and resources in the arts and cultural field. This happened for a number of reasons: being subjected to the leftist critique of the financial economy and the need to engage with political economy instead; seeing how cultural institutions in Palestine (and elsewhere) became addicted to the donor economy, and how that played a big role in depoliticising and detaching the cultural field from the struggle for justice and social movements; but also from failing to become an artist who can live from the sales of his artworks, grants, production proposals or residency hopping. In 2011, I received thirteen rejections for grant and residency applications. These conditions forced me to find ways to engage with art through other forms of economy, to work for art institutions as a production coordinator, photographer, designer, organiser or in other roles that allowed me to stay within the field while having to live by doing different things within it. I became a jack of all trades, always trying to find new ways to stay relevant and balancing between my art practice and my work within the art field. This has made me think of all these supporting roles within the field as an art practice in itself, and that I need to find ways to explore that and expose it too. These rejections have grounded me: fewer residencies and less living in a different place every few months, less dependence on funding and more connection to my local economy and to social relations that can only be built through time and by staying in one place. I write this while knowing that this is also part of the neoliberal economy: doing the gig economy, having to keep developing my skills and learning new things in order to survive within a precarious economy where there is barely any social security or future guarantees, or, as in the case of Palestine, no state that I can depend on in the future. Yet this has also given me, and many of my friends and colleagues, skills and knowledge of how to work together, how to support each other, how to understand our economy of relations and ways of activating the deep resources embedded in social and infrastructural forms that we have been living with for many years.

The neoliberal economy is an economy of crisis, where crisis is what allows its cycles to work. Every crisis is a dip in its growth economy, but also a way to concentrate more power and wealth and to extract assets and resources that have been common, shared or accumulated over time within society. Yet these crises also create cracks in a system that has been closed through professionalisation and managerial policies. The crisis sometimes allows people to slip through its cracks and bring their affirmative critique to create new conditions of work and production. In 2015, I found myself in the middle of a financial crisis at Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center (KSCC), located in the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah. For many reasons, I became the chairperson and volunteered as a director. The crisis was deep and historical. Since the Arab Spring in 2011 and the repercussions that followed, KSCC, among other medium- and small-sized institutions, was facing the withdrawal of international funders who had supported such institutions. As many critiques and research have shown, this funding had already played a role in depoliticising and reorienting cultural practices, shifting them from grassroots, community-connected practices to donor-dependent, disconnected and top-down cultural practices. To affirmatively critique the conditions of the crisis, I worked towards turning the financial crisis the institution was going through into a cultural practice, making the crisis itself a common ground on which the institution and its community could stand to question, critique, imagine and build a cultural practice based on political economy rather than dependence on financial support.
The question of economy became central to the question of the cultural institution’s relevance and connectedness. We began to look differently at what the institution already had, not only at what it lacked. One long-standing contract the institution had was a lease for a Xerox photocopier with a company that provided us with the machine, ink and maintenance for around €300 every four months. We could print up to 10,000 pages within this package, but as a medium-sized cultural centre we never had to print more than around 1,000 pages each quarter, leaving around 9,000 pages unused. We began thinking about how to make this photocopier into a social commons, a resource that grassroots and independent groups could use to print their publications, zines and books. The photocopier was already paid for, the pages were already available and the institution already had the administrative and legal structure through which this resource existed. The question was how to activate what was already there and make it available beyond the institution itself.

For Lauren Berlant, practising the commons goes beyond sharing resources and spaces in egalitarian ways; it should be mobilised ‘as a tool, and often a weapon, for unlearning the world’ and as ‘a pedagogy for unlearning normative realism and rethinking structure as something in constant transition.’ [1] It should be a space of critical engagement and productive contestation, in which troubling established power structures and norms enables transformative practices and political imagination. At KSCC, we called this approach ‘inverted resources.’ By collectivising access to the power and assets that exist within the institution’s legal and administrative modes of existence, the institution could be transformed into a support infrastructure for an extended community.

The photocopier was a small example, yet it prompted us to think about the institution differently. What other resources were already present but remained unused, inaccessible or understood only in financial terms? A building, equipment, administrative knowledge, legal status, contracts, networks, time, access and the ability to receive and redistribute resources are all part of an institution’s economy, even if they do not appear as such in its budget. They are usually seen as the infrastructure behind the cultural programme, enabling it to happen. But they can also become the cultural practice itself. The question then becomes not only how an art institution can survive a crisis, but how it can use the crisis to rethink what it has, what it can share and what kind of relations it can sustain. Perhaps expanding an art institution into an infrastructure does not mean making the institution bigger, but rather expanding access to the resources and power it already holds, and understanding these resources as part of a wider economy of relations rather than as assets belonging to the institution alone.

[1] Lauren Berlant, ‘The Commons: Infrastructures for Troubling Times,’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Vol. 34, No. 3 (2016).