Constructing Communities

Maybe I would have encouraged you to think that this as a project because I have seen the document as a three year project. While this is a three year research project this is not actually a project. Because we don’t know what the goals are. We don’t know where we are going and we don’t know what the end results are.

But the other way to look at it is the fact that we have to create, that I have a goal to move this program over the next three years. There is a lot of time to make it into a world class program. Which for me is defined purely as something that is a terrifyingly stimulating place. This place where student and staff genuinely taste freedom. Freedom in the way it was articulated in 1968, freedom in the way it was articulated prior to the French Revolution. Whatever notion of freedom you are talking about but freedom to essentially give yourself the confidence or the intellectual arrogance to construct theories or construct design or construct objects. That’s my goal.

I want to create this completely utopian society which can never be created but in the process of doing that I can come up with something that actually mirrors a certain kind of community. A community that is not afraid of anything. A completely unafraid community. There is a parallel to this.

When I did my Waste project I had 24 workers with me. They were people I picked off the streets. They were daily wage labourers. Many of them were drug users and they were manual labours. A lot of them were uneducated. One or two were educated. Most had no education, no background, no skills. I put them in this program and over the three years created an organization. The organization was called a new morning or a new dawn (Naya Savera). There was a new morning, a new dawn. Then I hired a social worker, a lady who worked with communities and asked her to come and talk to these workers and she spent a whole year talking to them, and almost every other day she would come in and sit where they were working and talk to them. And in the process of dialogue they finally said ‘okay, we trust you’.
I said I can assure you one thing. Not a lot of money but I can assure you that you can move from being a daily wage worker where some day you will get work and someday you wont get work, to somebody who will get work everyday. And I will construct an organization which will be a community based organization which will have 24 of these people as members – so it is their cooperative. Which is what we did. We set up a cooperative and told them how to work with a cooperative.

And in this process you can take anybody to any point to bring them to a position where they look after their own interest and work together to look after the general interest. Don’t hurt anybody. What we had with the situation at RMIT before my coming where everybody was hurting everybody. And then you sort of isolate yourself. You don’t want to be hurt anymore so you wall yourself in. And the whole thing then festers and festers and it comes to a point where it is not very good.