** This topic will be discussed in St. Imier during “Anarchy 2023”. The discussion will be based on a text that will be uploaded here one week before the event (on July 12th) **

• The discussion will take place on/in:
• July 19th, 20-22h
• St. Imier, ZAF (Route de Sonvilier)

We are a bunch of people who have been grappling with the need for psychoemotional self-defense in anti-authoritarian resistency for some time.

We came together by the lived experience that patriarchy_capitalism is deeply webbed into how we perceive and feel the world and how we interact with each other as well as how we treat and see ourselves.

We are convinced that if we want to realize anarchy in our lives, we have to transform all the shit that we are forced into, and defend ourselves against the toxic influences we are (unconsciously) absorbing in order to stop internalizing and reproducing dominated and dominating behavior.

Since in our experience there is a lack of resources, infrastructure, knowledge, anti-authoritarian skills, communities…, we want to create a setting that enables research, developing and sharing of skills as well as deeply connecting with ourselves and others. Presumably this project will include building up a physical place, but we are not sure yet.

Topics we want to deal with in any case are:

• Agency in handling the wounds/traumas of being dominated (gender, school, classism, racism, disconnection from what surrounds us, to name a few)
• Agency in creating trust and community
• Agency through awareness: bodily (sensing) awareness, emotional (feeling) awareness, narrative/thought-pattern awareness, awareness about behavioral patterns, ecosystem awareness
• Destroying/transforming authorities’ manifestations within us: all these traces of patriarchal_gendered_normative thinking, anthropocentric-disconnected egotist pseudo-independence, isolation, consumption_objectification_commodification, community dysphoria, social-intimate violence etc.
• Building of and caring for deep and committed friendships and collective resistency + dealing with the question of how to prevent them from being destroyed or intoxicated
• examining the impact of so-called civiliced life on our psyche, the way we were and are formed by technological „progress“, digitalized interactions, smartification, commodification

You can find more about what we mean with psychoemotional self defense in a text that will be uploaded on this blog at latest one week before the event.

We are looking forward to having an exchange about the project and the reflexions behind it and to getting to know new people and ideas.