Mutual training for-by portal workers

Mutual Training for/by Portal Workers

Infrastructural Rehearsals worksession, organised by TITiPI
Brussels, from Thursday 27 November (dinner) until Sunday 30 November 2025 (brunch)

Page under construction / participation by invitation

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That Which Will Have Had to Happen

Under fossil-fuel driven racial capitalism today, life takes place in-between the continuation of deadly Modernity and a yet unknown set-up. The everyday happens in juxtaposed and contradictory portals, suspended in their pre-conditional determination of how a collective future should be or will have had to be.

We understand portals as spacetimes of and for transition and change. But how these transitions take place, and what modes of existence they carry along, expand or reproduce, is one of the biggest contemporary controversies. Ecocidal, genocidal, epistemicidal tendencies are normalised in the monocultural reality project of tech capitalists and supremacist states, which of course leave no room for imagining how to transition, or maybe rotate otherwise.

In such reality project, imaginaries of and for transition are predominantly being shaped as the so-called twin-transition: an unsurprising knot of computational infrastructures and greenwashing practices that at best tend to reform, keeping close to the values of the liberal order. The twinning of the so-called green and digital transitions keeps the green colonial worldview intact, limiting the perception of transition as if their skinny isthmus was the only possible threshold to cross.

We find ourselves surrounded by a landscape of contradictory Green New Deals, or what Jose Iglesias García-Arenal calls 'green-and-chrome transitions', full of thinly veiled propaganda for business as usual, top-to-bottom as usual, contentious as usual, harmful as usual. And precisely because of that, we are committed to conceptualize, study and test what kind of solidary practices, analytics and theories it might take to transition otherwise. As our contribution to the multilateral and tentative process of abolishing the worldview that is contained by the twin transition regime, and therefore propose a mutual training ground for and by portal workers.

Portal works are modes of doing and thinking for transitioning, and they can happen otherwise. They enact change on a daily basis, reckon with the massive world order rotation and persistently operate along it. We consider portal works to be sets of intentional acts of saying, showing, remembering, moving, projecting and imagining towards liberation. They are aesthetic operations because they engage with the redistribution of the sensible. We count on the politicization of aesthetics as a powerful attuning to complex realities. Learning from Romi Morrison's work on Black computational futures that haven’t yet happened, but must, we wonder how to radically inhabit transitions as key technocultural struggles; we consider discomfortable, opaque, disobedient, unapologetic, ambiguous and demanding modes of doing and thinking significant as portal work, and in need of our collective attention, reflection and documentation.

The mutual training ground for/by portal workers will be an occasion for taking three days together with known and to-be-known comrades, to practice with thresholds, impasses and their 'tenses of possibility'.

Mutual Training

This worksession brings together a group of 20 'portal workers' to engage in mutual training as a form of collective inquiry. The session will provide participants with modes of attunement to each other's rehearsals for collective life that are sometimes-depleted, some-times wild and feral and shiny -- reclaiming, letting go and shaking assumptions against the imposed narratives of the self-centered powers, from their very very centers and also not. Through the joyfully dissident technosciences, mourning humanities, rebel poethics, organising tactics and complex crafts that continue to try to world otherwise the many worlds that fit in this.

The session is designed as a mutual training ground for and by portal workers. It is a spacetime to actively attend to, register and acknowledge the sensibilities, perspectives and modes of intervention that portal work towards liberation might entail. As an insurgent collective research situation, it will allow us to read each other's work in resonance and in solidarity with each other but without the need to cohere.

Training is about collectively engaging in a set of exercises, and repeating them in a more-or-less contained context to build capacity for applying that later on. Mutual training, then, implies collectivities arriving to the situation with a clarity of their practice ready to be shared, but also with an opening to be porous to the exercises and practices proposed by others. The time we can be together will be short -- but by documenting portal practices in an ongoing repertoire, "a kaleidoscope of portals", we will continue to work on the building of theories and practices of transition, acknowledging the longer span of such works and their potential to contribute to ongoing rehearsals in every collectivity's specific habitats.

The session will be convened by multiple local and transnational collectives that struggle from the peripheries, the vortex of privilege and all the areas that connect them. It means that the portal workers that will join to train each other are not only participating as individuals but also as contributors to wider collective endeavors.

The meeting will take place in English, at a collective space where also the desks of TITiPI are located, in Brussels, capital of €urope. The program includes inputs, collective exercises and excursions plus time for reflection and groupal idea-development.

Programme

Thursday 27/11

[TRAVEL DAY]

• 18:00 Portal workers join opening at Constant, Hormonobotanik
  • Address: Constant, Fortstraat 5, 1060 Brussels
• 19:30 Move together to L'Eau Chaude / Het Warm Water from Fortstraat
• 20:00 Dinner and meeting each other
  • Address: Vegetarian canteen L'Eau Chaude / Het Warm Water, Rue Des Renards 25, 1000 Brussels

Friday 28/11

Address: Chaussee de Jette 388, 1081 Brussels

• 10:00 Welcome, coffee
• 10.30 Setup (intro and portal work framing)
• 11:45 Break
• 12:00 Mutual training IR (A), BMS (B)
• 13:30 Lunch
• 15:00 Mutual training BMS (B), WSG (C)
• 16:30 Break
• 17:00 Silent processing; movement, stretching, note taking
• 18:00 Apero with Flo*Souad Benaddi, Gender Tonic
• 19:00 Input/talk by Romi Morrison (semi-public)
• 20.00 End

Saturday 29/11

Address: Chaussee de Jette 388, 1081 Brussels

• 10:00 Input/attunement with Zoumana Meїté
• 11:00 Processing portal work, activation Kaleidoscope of portals
• 13:30 Lunch
• 15:00 Mutual training IR (A), WSG (C)
• 16:30 Break
• 17:00 Input Fondation Marius Jacob, conversation
• 18:00 End

Sunday 30/11

Address: Chaussee de Jette 388, 1081 Brussels

• 10:00 Input/attunement with Zoumana Meїté
• 11:00 Break
• 11:30 Processing portal work, activation Romi's installation
• 13:00 Soft ending with lunch for who wants/can to stay, cleaning up together

[TRAVEL DAY]

Training A = Infrastructural Rehearsals
Training B = BMS (outside, if weather permits)
Training C = We Smell Gas

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The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest (TITiPI) is a militant research structure for investigating, imagining and doing collective life with computational infrastructures otherwise.

Infrastructural Rehearsals: creative responses to the green and digital transition is a project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (2024-2028)-----------