Mutual training for-by portal workers

That Which Will Have Had To Happen (working title)

Infrastructural Rehearsals worksession, organised by TITiPI
Brussels, 25 November until 29 November 2025

Page under construction!

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

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

In such reality project, imaginaries of and for transition appear in the form of 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. Twin transitions keep the green colonial worldview intact, limiting the perception of transition as if their skinny isthmus was the only possible portal to cross.

In 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, controversial as usual, deadly as usual, we are committed to providing ourselves in a wide, solidary with research situations to conceptualize and execute change otherwise, as our contribution to the process of abolition of such worldview.

We have named such transitional practices 'portal works', because they work towards change on a daily basis, reckoning with the massive world order rotation and persistently operating along it. Portal works are aesthetic operations because they engage with the redistribution of the sensible; sets of intentional acts of doing, saying, showing, moving, projecting and imagining. Learning from Romi Morrison's work on Black computational futures that haven’t yet happened, but must, we wonder how to radicalize transitions as key technocultural struggles.

That Which Will Have Had to Happen will be an occasion for taking three days together (plus a dinner and a breakfast) with fellow portal workers, to practice with thresholds, passages and their 'tenses of possibility'.

Methodology

Organised by TITiPI, a militant research structure for investigating, imagining and doing life with computational infrastructures otherwise, and in the framework of Infrastructural Rehearsals, we propose to bring together a group of 'portal workers' to engage in mutual training as a form of collective inquiry to provide modes of attunement of participants to each other's rehearsals for collective life. Sometimes-depleted, some-times wild and feral and shiny -- reclaiming, letting go and shaking assumptions against the imposed narratives of the center of power, 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 will be 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/practices, 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 collectively documenting portal practices in an ongoing collection of "a kaleidoscope of portals", (doing research on portal work to understand what is portal work, and what conditions it might need to happen, how to train for it), is this a transition or another conception- such as a multidirectional, different space, scales, we continue to work on the building of theories and practices of transition [EXPAND, research outcome], acknowledging the longer span of such work and its potential to contribute to ongoing rehearsals in every collectivity's specific places of practice and action. The session will be collectively convened by multiple local and transnational collectives that struggle from the peripheries, the cores 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 a wider collective endeavors.

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Infrastructural Rehearsals: creative responses to the green and digital transition is a project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (2024-2028), lead by Helen Pritchard in collaboration with Miriyam Aouragh, University of Westminster School of Media and Communication College of Design, Creative and Digital Indu, Great Britain and Northern Ireland (Co.Applicant).