wares infoshop library

wares carves out space for autonomous gathering, study, rest, and agitation beyond capital. Functioning day-to-day as a reading room, we share a lovingly curated library of books, zines, rare printed matter, and tools for communal use, but the infoshop is more than a static depository of objects. As a meeting place, rest stop, distro, and more, it opens possibilities for affinity, friendship, and action through encounter. Come visit, explore liberatory worlds, and find each other! An end with beginnings For four years since 2018, wares has been a self-funded volunteer-run project. The generosity of larger creative groups afforded it physical space, as friends shared time, labour, ideas, materials, tools, and money between each other, allowing us a rare freedom to experiment and evolve with its form and trajectory. February 2022 brings us to a new juncture. The unexpected means moving out of our space, which isn't easy in this most expensive city. Yet the desire to build remains: something holding the basics for welcoming all to a cosy library for the non-normative again; something more accessible in terms of disability, mobility, stratification, and transportation; something to help us grow more into what we want an infoshop and social space to do – support potentials in collective study, rest, care, agitation, and autonomy beyond capital. With lots of help, we made it, finding and moving to a new home within two months. Now, we turn to Patreon to help us get a sense of what recurring community support is possible – crucially, for a project not promising to deliver commodities but rather roots itself in sharing collaborative resources and possibility – while also giving us tools to cultivate that very shared life we'd like to be entangled in. An appeal to possibilities We are asking for help from you, our friends, comrades, fellow travellers, and everyone whom we've yet to meet due to the pandemic and our own lapses in capacity in crisis normal. Your support will help fund and realise this dream for a different kind of space, here and now – one that isn't shaped by consuming some product or experience that tells us all is well, instead centring encounters and how we are to relate with each other through radical care and commons.  Hostile circumstances have made meeting ever more difficult, but we believe it is necessary to create avenues to still find, be, and conspire with each other against isolation and fatigue, such that fragmented worlds can come into contact, to bridge affinities and share dreams across adversity and joy, to form a basis for material solidarities, towards the worlds we'd like to manifest. Our immediate goal is to alleviate the major worry that is rent, which would let us devote more time to keeping the infoshop open as a resource, develop new ways of sharing the ideas held within the library's material and between ourselves, and better understand how it all fits in our local context. We aim to continue offering a space for groups that need somewhere to meet, organise, or present, and folks who need a place to rest, study, hide, work, hang out, or be energised and inspired. It is also important that direct, relational mutual aid for community needs is interwoven and supported as a practice within what we do. Perhaps collective research, writing, publishing, printing, or all manner of communal creation may also sprout from where people, skills, and passions meet. A question of desires Could this kind of an autonomous, anti-authoritarian space exist here, helping build forms of life we can hold in common, an otherwise to the domination of this world held up by its racist, ableist, cishetero-patriarchal, colonialist, militarist, extractive, capitalist totalities? How would such a space and its inhabitants interact with and contribute to existing communities? Could it demonstrate and transform potentials, inspire others to do similar, better, different, and germinate more in a constellation of connected efforts? In what ways could these questions be sustainably explored, not to continue indefinitely for its own sake, but such that paths to other, liberatory, queer, ecological, destituent, liveable futures may be illuminated? We know times are hard, and they've been hard, so please don't feel obliged if you're not in a position to pledge something – we will never gate the infoshop behind a fee, and the materials wares can offer are on a sliding scale. If you believe in this project, you can help us by spreading the word too and letting friends know why you want to see it go on. It's also possible to send money via other ways, such as by local bank transfer, especially if you're looking to make a one time contribution, or a recurring one above $40, or want us to get the full amount, just get in touch to arrange this. For other practical matters, such as Patreon fees, how we will use the funds, the thinking and approach guiding this, and current plans and what happens if they change, we explain further in this first post. Thank you for reading this far and for your support, any amount truly helps (you can state a custom amount when you pledge), and we hope to share time and space with you soon! wares.noblogs.org linktr.ee/wares