As part of a mapping of sustainable practices in rural Romania, we have invited a number of artistic initiatives to send us around five-minute videos that capture the atmosphere of the places where they are, in villages, in the middle of nature, outside the big cities. These represent only a few from a series of such initiatives, which are part of a relatively recent and growing tendency. We started from only a few examples of artists who grow gardens, installed their studios in their grandparents’ village or built residency places for other artists in places outside of the centres where they normally live. We organised a seminar in January 2022 and discussed their motivations and common grounds. Then we started to look around, in Romania and the region and invited more artists and cultural workers to contribute to this collection, with short, poetic or descriptive comments on their own experience. To each iteration of the montage, we added more. There are now 23 examples and it is still work in progress. Meanwhile some of the initiatives are on pause: personal lives that make it hard to commit to the presence in these places; difficulties in maintaining them without additional support; disenchantments with local authorities and communities; while others have grown, opened up, connected to each other. We see these practices not as an idyllic return to nature, but as a foregrounding of a certain type of living in nature without colonising it, and an invitation to rethink artistic work on more ecological principles, as well as an acceptance of fragility as a reason to plant life around. With: Carambach/ Adriana Chiruță, Sibiu county, Romania Cecălaca/Csekelaka Cultural Studio/ Oana Fărcaș, Cecălaca village, Mureș county, Romania Crețești Studio-Garden/ Delia Popa, Ilfov county, Romania Cucuieți Permaculture/ Otilia & Radu Boeru, Cucuieți Village, Călărași County, Romania Dom Jan Hálá cultural center/ Zuzana Janečková, Važec village, Tatra mountains, Slovakia Drenart/ Stoyan Dechev, Olivia Mihălțianu, Dren village, Pernik region, Bulgaria The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life/ Dana Andrei, Eduard Constantin, Florian Niculae, Siliștea Snagovului village, Ilfov county, Romania The House of Light and Information/ Matei Bejenaru, Bârnova commune, Iași county, Romania Intersecția Residency/ Emanuela Ascari, Brădet village, Întorsura Buzăului commune, Covasna county, Romania Khata-Maysternya/House-Workshop/ Bogdan Velgan, Taras Grytsiuk, Olga Dyatel, Ekaterina and Olga Zarko, Alyona Karavai, Yulia Kniupa, Taras Kovalchuk, Magda Lapshyn, Anna Mygal, Sasha Moskovchuk, Svyat Popov, Tanya Sklyar, Natalia Trambovetska, Vilya and Ivanka Chupak, Babyn, Ivano-Frankivsk region, Ukraine LATERAL AIR/ Cristina Curcan, Lucian Indrei, at the crossroards between Mureșenii Bârgăului and Colibița, Bistrița-Năsăud county, Romania Muze. Gemüse Initiative/ Maria Balabaș & Vlad Mihăescu, Șomartin village, Sibiu county, Romania Rajka Orchard/ Martin Piacek, Győr-Moson-Sopron region, Hungary Rădești House/ Irina Botea Bucan & Jon Dean, Rădești village, Argeș county, Romania Reforesting Project/ Aris Papadopoulos, Candy Karra, Dora Zoumpa, Elena Novakovitc, Sotiris Tsiganos, Jonian Bisai, Vasilis Ntouros, Christina Reinhart, Klio Apostolaki, Lia Chamilothori, Kalentzi village, municipality of North Tzoumerka, Epirus, Greece Romanii de Jos Dendrological Park/ V. Leac, Vâlcea county, Romania Siliștea Future Studios/ Adelina Ivan, Ioana Gheorghiu, Virginia Toma, Ramon Sadîc, Robert Blaj, Vlad Brăteanu, Siliștea Snagovului village, Ilfov county, Romania Slon residencies/ META Cultural Foundation/ Raluca Doroftei, Slon Village, Cerasu Commune, Prahova County, Romania SOLAR Gallery/ Ariana Hodorcă & Albert Kaan, Gulia village, Dâmbovița county, Romania symbiopoiesis/ Andrei Nacu, Pădureni village, Iași county, Romania Watermelon Residency/ Daniela Pălimariu, Alexandru Niculescu, Bechet, Dolj county, Romania What Could Should Curating Do/ Biljana Ćirić, Gornja Gorevnica VILLAGE, Serbia Na záhradke [At the Garden] Gallery/ Oto Hudec, Košice, Slovakia Artistic initiatives in nature and in villages is part of a mapping of sustainable practices in rural Romania, developed in the frame of the project C4R – Cultures for Resilience in 2022-2023. Iterations: Halfway to Paradise. Hybrid seminar, Bucharest, January 2022 (5 initiatives) It´s risky to let they see you alive and almost frangible. Screening at One World Romania film festival, May 2022 (14 initiatives) Now the Impulse is to Live! Exhibition at the Order of Architects, Bucharest, July 2022 (17 initiatives) Now the Impulse is to Live! Edition Sofia. Exhibition at Toplocentrala, Sofia, September 2022 (20 initiatives) Now the Impulse is to Live! Timisoara Edition. Exhibition at Riverside Pavilion / Children’s Park, Timisoara, co-organised with Minitremu Association, July 2023 (22 initiatives) Publication editing: Raluca Voinea, Adelina Luft, Dana Andrei Video montage and publication design: Eduard Constantin

A Protocol of Fairness Sergiu Nisioi, 2023 Additive Increase Multiplicative Decrease by TCP Reno. The chainsaw graph illustrates how a node renounces its network resource usage once it identifies congestion. I would like to start this short essay with a metaphor from the Internet. It’s about a way of allocating resources (bandwidth) in a fair manner so that everyone (both home-users and large organizations) can use the network. The network represents the Internet and it is made of nodes (phones, laptops, printers, servers, connected devices) and middleboxes (routers, switches, proxies, firewalls etc.) which are engaged in a time-consuming process of reading and processing packets coming from the nodes. Sometimes nodes are sending packets at very high rates. The middleboxes get congested and have to drop the surplus packets they cannot handle. When this happens, nodes usually resend the dropped packets which further aggravates the congestion, thus making the middleboxes even slower. This situation is called Congestion collapse and it was firstly observed in the NSFNET in October 1986 when the transmission rates dropped by 800 times. A most elementary solution to the Congestion collapse problem would be to assign a special node that would be responsible for limiting the traffic of the other existing nodes. But this would actually prove to be an impractical and impossible solution, since nodes have a dynamic behavior and the network has different capacities at different times. A solution is to establish a protocol (i.e., a set of common rules) so that nodes can figure out by themselves if the network is overloaded and to reduce the amount of resource consumption. The rules must be fair and must allow new peers to join the network without discriminating in favor of other ones. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a collective responsible for designing the rules and establishing the Internet protocols. Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is currently one of the most widely used protocols of the Internet (probably the one you are using to read this text in your browser). This protocol has been proposed in 1981 and has sustained several modifications since then. TCP is responsible for governing the transmission of data and to ensure the data arrives at the destination in order, without errors, without flooding a receiver, and without congesting the entire network. The underlying principle of the congestion control mechanism is called Additive Increase Multiplicative Decrease (AIMD). More specifically, each node starts consuming resources gradually, increasing the rate of consumption additively one by one. As soon as congestion is detected, the rate is decreased multiplicatively (let’s assume by half), giving back to the network half of its resources. See a visualization of this process in the figure above. This allows new nodes to join in and gives more time to the middleboxes to complete their work without dropping any new incoming messages. But as new nodes join in, the network can get congested again, and so each node will give back to the network half of its resources which will free up even more resources to the entire network. After going through this cycle multiple times, the network will reach a stable state where the resources are fairly distributed across all the nodes. The Internet Cybersyn operations room. CGI Photograph by Rama, Wikimedia Commons, Cc-by-sa-2.0-fr The Internet today still preserves the relics of a decentralized design from the early days, as far back as the ’60s, when the major work of designing its layers came out from state-funded research and the ownership of the infrastructure was public . Similarly to how the welfare state emerged as a response to the socialist world , so the birth of the computer networks in the US can be regarded as a government response to the Soviet accomplishments in science, cybernetics, and space travel. In the socialist world, computer networks were developed with the greater purpose of conducting economic planning, see for example ОГАС (Statewide Automated Management System) developed in the ’60s in the Soviet Union or the Cybersyn project in Allende’s Chile . In Romania, the first computer networks were developed in the ’70s as part of RENOD/RENAC and CAMELEON (Connectivity, Adaptability, Modularity, Extensibility, Local, Efficiency, Openness, Networking) projects and were used for communicating information from factories such as the now defunct and privatized Laminated Electric Cable Company [Compania de Cablu Electric Laminat] in Zalău to the planning authorities in Bucharest. However, the network of networks that we all use today is very far from the ideas of decentralization and public ownership. In fact, the Internet infrastructure (NSFNET) has been privatized in the ’90s, like many different public services across the world. From a public good of the US National Science Foundation (NSF) to a handful of US Corporations . This type of ownership monopoly has not changed over the years, on the contrary, it has been replicated across the world in all the capitalist countries. In the early days of the ’90s the Internet in Romania was provided by RNC (National Research Network) and by many small neighborhood companies. Hacking culture, cracking, and file sharing was widely popular . However, as the internet became more and more an instrument for financial gainings and money-making, and as the free-market became more powerful, extending to infiltrate post-socialist countries, these neighborhood networks have been gradually taken over by larger companies which have been mostly taken over by international corporations, leading to currently 5 major Internet Service Providers. In order for the Internet monopolies to maintain their large-scale networks and ensure customer satisfaction [sic], special hardware middleboxes are created specifically to process the millions of packets going through them every second. These devices are usually proprietary, come at very high costs, and special contracts tie a company’s infrastructure to a device manufacturer. Unlike the ideas of reproductible open research which fuel innovation and helps towards a better Internet, in this system, the capitalist chains of relations converge towards tech monopolies which translate to high degree of surveillance, prohibitively high internet prices for some end-users, and the exclusion of certain groups from the benefits of the Internet. Beyond the Physical Infrastructure (C) SayCheeeeeese, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons The privatization of the physical infrastructure was lobbied by companies because more and more willing-to-pay users wanted to join this network. From a state-funded research and non-profit entity, the network quickly became a market that was promoted as more democratic, where any small manufacturer can sell its products and therefore its work to the entire world. However, in the capitalist mode of production, it turned into a blind venture investment in startups that promised a new economy. Inevitably, the dot-com bubble crashed in the early 2000s. Survivors of the crash became tech monopolies who control up to this day the content being delivered, which products are promoted, the hosting infrastructure, the means to search online content, and the general information flow. It is interesting how the ideas of hacking (as tinkering and repurposing) and the hacking culture of the nineties was captured by the capitalist mode of production and re-directed towards a cult of innovation . Anything that was not aligned with for-profit activities, such as media sharing, cracking, reverse engineering, and other forms of tinkering, were criminalized with the help of law enforcement. In this hostile context, the open culture of hacking was captured and shattered by capitalist production and ownership. The business models that emerged after the dot-com bubble are being driven by a paid subscription, by charging users with their data, or by both. Something we are very familiar with today. Media companies found new legislative methods to forbid music and films from being redistributed. Similarly, academic publishers rent their author’s PDFs at prohibitively-high prices just for being hosted on their websites. Unlike physical objects that are consumed and enter a recycling life, digital objects can be recreated indefinitely and new profits can be obtained out of them regardless of the time and effort invested in their creation. Human laborers annotating data for training artificial intelligence are paid only once with an extremely low wage, but how much more can be extracted by indefinitely mining that data? Today, the largest tech companies drive their profits from advertisements, marketing, the manipulation of desire, and behavioral prediction and the Internet is the space where all of this happens. Far from being a public space, the Internet is a highly privatized one both in terms of physical and software infrastructures. Steps Towards Digital Literacy Most if not all the present technological advancements emerged from state-funded open and reproducible research. Usually omitted and treated as a historical event, deprived of its political and economic meaning, this fact should not be forgotten when re-envisioning and rebuilding the Internet as a collective open resource. Neither should be the fact that the physical infrastructure is grounded in the natural resources of the planet. As long as the internet is not regarded as a public good, but it remains privately owned by profit-oriented entities, then our alternatives are very little. But let’s not abandon all hopes as we can at least strive for digital emancipation, to gain more knowledge on how the underlying technologies function, to encourage hacking, and to find platforms that respect user privacy and do not treat users as a source of data to be mined. To start somewhere, maybe the first step would be to gather some comrades and convince them to start tinkering together. See the online collaborative tools published by Framasoft or CryptPad for de-googling the internet. Consider trying alternative open services such as peertube - a peer-to-peer protocol where videos are both viewed and uploaded to other users at the same time. Or Mastodon - an alternative to extractivist social media based on ActivityPub protocol. Try to join an existing instance to see how it looks like. Most importantly, join with a couple of friends. Collectives such as systerserver and riseup offer services for activists and people who are interested in digital emancipation. Experiment with alternative ways of accessing the internet using privacy-focused tools such as I2P, Tor, or Freenet. Using alternative software and services might be a good place to start, but if you wish to gain technical knowledge, among the first things to try would be to install a free and open-source operating system, Linux-based or BSD. Such a radical transition on your personal computer might be shocking or impractical, but you can try to install it on a Raspberry Pi or on some old machine that you recover from scrap. It doesn’t have to be a very fast up-to-date computer, Linux distributions can be lightweight enough to run on an old machine with few resources. This can become your low-fi server and it can give you an idea of what running a Unix system is about. Then you should try to self-host a service, which can mean a lot of work, but consider it more of a process to acquire digital skills than creating something for providing reliable services. If you went on the path of recovering an old computer from scrap, the best thing to host might just be a static website . If the machine is somewhat comparable to your PC, then the easiest way to start self-hosting is to install yunohost on the computer that you designate as a server. Yunohost is a Debian-based operating system that comes with a web interface and a set of pre-configured services such as WordPress, Nextcloud, Etherpad, etc. These processes can be done on a computer that does not need to be connected to the Internet. You can access the server by connecting it on your local network via WiFi or cable. This is a good way to learn how to configure a server and how to install services. It also gives a better understanding of what sort of configurations can be done at the level of a local network. Self-hosting a reliable service is difficult, do not expect everything to work perfectly from the start. Treat this as a learning process. Play with the server locally. If you wish to share the content with a small group of friends, create a Mesh VPN Network by installing zerotier on your devices. This will create a virtual network that will allow you and your friends to connect to your server from any device that has joined the same virtual network. For true Internet connectivity, you can use a dynamic DNS from your internet service provider or obtain a domain name and configure it to point to your server. After obtaining a domain name, it is a good habit to also obtain a certificate for your name that can be used to encrypt connections between your server and the users through HTTPS. You can obtain a free certificate from Let’s Encrypt. DNS is responsible for mapping the human-readable name to an IP address. A simple way of blocking ads and trackers on your local network at home is to use a blacklist with all the well-known trackers and their domain names. A pi-hole is exactly that, a tiny Raspberry Pi that you put on your local network to act as a fake DNS server. Every time your browser makes a request to a tracker the pi-hole will return a false IP address, so it will not be able to access pages from the blacklisted domains. After gaining more experience with configuring a server, you may even consider self-hosting your own Mastodon instance and invite your friends or connect with other instances. In every step above, keep a journal of what worked or not, this is a way of redistributing knowledge. And do not forget that to achieve systemic change we must put pressure on the current system, strike against digital imperialism, and demand the Internet to become a public infrastructure in the interest of all the people. Sergiu Nisioi is a research scientist and professor at the University of Bucharest where he teaches Computer Networking, Machine Translation, and Archaeology of Intelligent Machines - an experi-mental course in the history of artificial intelligence. His research covers areas related to computational linguistics, artificial learning theory, and the history of cybernetics in socialism. A text commissioned by tranzit.ro, as part of a mapping of resilient practices in Romania and Eastern Europe, in the frame of C4R project.

A Protocol of Fairness Sergiu Nisioi, 2023 Additive Increase Multiplicative Decrease by TCP Reno. The chainsaw graph illustrates how a node renounces its network resource usage once it identifies congestion. I would like to start this short essay with a metaphor from the Internet. It’s about a way of allocating resources (bandwidth) in a fair manner so that everyone (both home-users and large organizations) can use the network. The network represents the Internet and it is made of nodes (phones, laptops, printers, servers, connected devices) and middleboxes (routers, switches, proxies, firewalls etc.) which are engaged in a time-consuming process of reading and processing packets coming from the nodes. Sometimes nodes are sending packets at very high rates. The middleboxes get congested and have to drop the surplus packets they cannot handle. When this happens, nodes usually resend the dropped packets which further aggravates the congestion, thus making the middleboxes even slower. This situation is called Congestion collapse and it was firstly observed in the NSFNET in October 1986 when the transmission rates dropped by 800 times. A most elementary solution to the Congestion collapse problem would be to assign a special node that would be responsible for limiting the traffic of the other existing nodes. But this would actually prove to be an impractical and impossible solution, since nodes have a dynamic behavior and the network has different capacities at different times. A solution is to establish a protocol (i.e., a set of common rules) so that nodes can figure out by themselves if the network is overloaded and to reduce the amount of resource consumption. The rules must be fair and must allow new peers to join the network without discriminating in favor of other ones. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a collective responsible for designing the rules and establishing the Internet protocols. Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is currently one of the most widely used protocols of the Internet (probably the one you are using to read this text in your browser). This protocol has been proposed in 1981 and has sustained several modifications since then. TCP is responsible for governing the transmission of data and to ensure the data arrives at the destination in order, without errors, without flooding a receiver, and without congesting the entire network. The underlying principle of the congestion control mechanism is called Additive Increase Multiplicative Decrease (AIMD). More specifically, each node starts consuming resources gradually, increasing the rate of consumption additively one by one. As soon as congestion is detected, the rate is decreased multiplicatively (let’s assume by half), giving back to the network half of its resources. See a visualization of this process in the figure above. This allows new nodes to join in and gives more time to the middleboxes to complete their work without dropping any new incoming messages. But as new nodes join in, the network can get congested again, and so each node will give back to the network half of its resources which will free up even more resources to the entire network. After going through this cycle multiple times, the network will reach a stable state where the resources are fairly distributed across all the nodes. The Internet Cybersyn operations room. CGI Photograph by Rama, Wikimedia Commons, Cc-by-sa-2.0-fr The Internet today still preserves the relics of a decentralized design from the early days, as far back as the ’60s, when the major work of designing its layers came out from state-funded research and the ownership of the infrastructure was public . Similarly to how the welfare state emerged as a response to the socialist world , so the birth of the computer networks in the US can be regarded as a government response to the Soviet accomplishments in science, cybernetics, and space travel. In the socialist world, computer networks were developed with the greater purpose of conducting economic planning, see for example ОГАС (Statewide Automated Management System) developed in the ’60s in the Soviet Union or the Cybersyn project in Allende’s Chile . In Romania, the first computer networks were developed in the ’70s as part of RENOD/RENAC and CAMELEON (Connectivity, Adaptability, Modularity, Extensibility, Local, Efficiency, Openness, Networking) projects and were used for communicating information from factories such as the now defunct and privatized Laminated Electric Cable Company [Compania de Cablu Electric Laminat] in Zalău to the planning authorities in Bucharest. However, the network of networks that we all use today is very far from the ideas of decentralization and public ownership. In fact, the Internet infrastructure (NSFNET) has been privatized in the ’90s, like many different public services across the world. From a public good of the US National Science Foundation (NSF) to a handful of US Corporations . This type of ownership monopoly has not changed over the years, on the contrary, it has been replicated across the world in all the capitalist countries. In the early days of the ’90s the Internet in Romania was provided by RNC (National Research Network) and by many small neighborhood companies. Hacking culture, cracking, and file sharing was widely popular . However, as the internet became more and more an instrument for financial gainings and money-making, and as the free-market became more powerful, extending to infiltrate post-socialist countries, these neighborhood networks have been gradually taken over by larger companies which have been mostly taken over by international corporations, leading to currently 5 major Internet Service Providers. In order for the Internet monopolies to maintain their large-scale networks and ensure customer satisfaction [sic], special hardware middleboxes are created specifically to process the millions of packets going through them every second. These devices are usually proprietary, come at very high costs, and special contracts tie a company’s infrastructure to a device manufacturer. Unlike the ideas of reproductible open research which fuel innovation and helps towards a better Internet, in this system, the capitalist chains of relations converge towards tech monopolies which translate to high degree of surveillance, prohibitively high internet prices for some end-users, and the exclusion of certain groups from the benefits of the Internet. Beyond the Physical Infrastructure (C) SayCheeeeeese, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons The privatization of the physical infrastructure was lobbied by companies because more and more willing-to-pay users wanted to join this network. From a state-funded research and non-profit entity, the network quickly became a market that was promoted as more democratic, where any small manufacturer can sell its products and therefore its work to the entire world. However, in the capitalist mode of production, it turned into a blind venture investment in startups that promised a new economy. Inevitably, the dot-com bubble crashed in the early 2000s. Survivors of the crash became tech monopolies who control up to this day the content being delivered, which products are promoted, the hosting infrastructure, the means to search online content, and the general information flow. It is interesting how the ideas of hacking (as tinkering and repurposing) and the hacking culture of the nineties was captured by the capitalist mode of production and re-directed towards a cult of innovation . Anything that was not aligned with for-profit activities, such as media sharing, cracking, reverse engineering, and other forms of tinkering, were criminalized with the help of law enforcement. In this hostile context, the open culture of hacking was captured and shattered by capitalist production and ownership. The business models that emerged after the dot-com bubble are being driven by a paid subscription, by charging users with their data, or by both. Something we are very familiar with today. Media companies found new legislative methods to forbid music and films from being redistributed. Similarly, academic publishers rent their author’s PDFs at prohibitively-high prices just for being hosted on their websites. Unlike physical objects that are consumed and enter a recycling life, digital objects can be recreated indefinitely and new profits can be obtained out of them regardless of the time and effort invested in their creation. Human laborers annotating data for training artificial intelligence are paid only once with an extremely low wage, but how much more can be extracted by indefinitely mining that data? Today, the largest tech companies drive their profits from advertisements, marketing, the manipulation of desire, and behavioral prediction and the Internet is the space where all of this happens. Far from being a public space, the Internet is a highly privatized one both in terms of physical and software infrastructures. Steps Towards Digital Literacy Most if not all the present technological advancements emerged from state-funded open and reproducible research. Usually omitted and treated as a historical event, deprived of its political and economic meaning, this fact should not be forgotten when re-envisioning and rebuilding the Internet as a collective open resource. Neither should be the fact that the physical infrastructure is grounded in the natural resources of the planet. As long as the internet is not regarded as a public good, but it remains privately owned by profit-oriented entities, then our alternatives are very little. But let’s not abandon all hopes as we can at least strive for digital emancipation, to gain more knowledge on how the underlying technologies function, to encourage hacking, and to find platforms that respect user privacy and do not treat users as a source of data to be mined. To start somewhere, maybe the first step would be to gather some comrades and convince them to start tinkering together. See the online collaborative tools published by Framasoft or CryptPad for de-googling the internet. Consider trying alternative open services such as peertube - a peer-to-peer protocol where videos are both viewed and uploaded to other users at the same time. Or Mastodon - an alternative to extractivist social media based on ActivityPub protocol. Try to join an existing instance to see how it looks like. Most importantly, join with a couple of friends. Collectives such as systerserver and riseup offer services for activists and people who are interested in digital emancipation. Experiment with alternative ways of accessing the internet using privacy-focused tools such as I2P, Tor, or Freenet. Using alternative software and services might be a good place to start, but if you wish to gain technical knowledge, among the first things to try would be to install a free and open-source operating system, Linux-based or BSD. Such a radical transition on your personal computer might be shocking or impractical, but you can try to install it on a Raspberry Pi or on some old machine that you recover from scrap. It doesn’t have to be a very fast up-to-date computer, Linux distributions can be lightweight enough to run on an old machine with few resources. This can become your low-fi server and it can give you an idea of what running a Unix system is about. Then you should try to self-host a service, which can mean a lot of work, but consider it more of a process to acquire digital skills than creating something for providing reliable services. If you went on the path of recovering an old computer from scrap, the best thing to host might just be a static website . If the machine is somewhat comparable to your PC, then the easiest way to start self-hosting is to install yunohost on the computer that you designate as a server. Yunohost is a Debian-based operating system that comes with a web interface and a set of pre-configured services such as WordPress, Nextcloud, Etherpad, etc. These processes can be done on a computer that does not need to be connected to the Internet. You can access the server by connecting it on your local network via WiFi or cable. This is a good way to learn how to configure a server and how to install services. It also gives a better understanding of what sort of configurations can be done at the level of a local network. Self-hosting a reliable service is difficult, do not expect everything to work perfectly from the start. Treat this as a learning process. Play with the server locally. If you wish to share the content with a small group of friends, create a Mesh VPN Network by installing zerotier on your devices. This will create a virtual network that will allow you and your friends to connect to your server from any device that has joined the same virtual network. For true Internet connectivity, you can use a dynamic DNS from your internet service provider or obtain a domain name and configure it to point to your server. After obtaining a domain name, it is a good habit to also obtain a certificate for your name that can be used to encrypt connections between your server and the users through HTTPS. You can obtain a free certificate from Let’s Encrypt. DNS is responsible for mapping the human-readable name to an IP address. A simple way of blocking ads and trackers on your local network at home is to use a blacklist with all the well-known trackers and their domain names. A pi-hole is exactly that, a tiny Raspberry Pi that you put on your local network to act as a fake DNS server. Every time your browser makes a request to a tracker the pi-hole will return a false IP address, so it will not be able to access pages from the blacklisted domains. After gaining more experience with configuring a server, you may even consider self-hosting your own Mastodon instance and invite your friends or connect with other instances. In every step above, keep a journal of what worked or not, this is a way of redistributing knowledge. And do not forget that to achieve systemic change we must put pressure on the current system, strike against digital imperialism, and demand the Internet to become a public infrastructure in the interest of all the people. Sergiu Nisioi is a research scientist and professor at the University of Bucharest where he teaches Computer Networking, Machine Translation, and Archaeology of Intelligent Machines - an experi-mental course in the history of artificial intelligence. His research covers areas related to computational linguistics, artificial learning theory, and the history of cybernetics in socialism. A text commissioned by tranzit.ro, as part of a mapping of resilient practices in Romania and Eastern Europe, in the frame of C4R project.

November 2023 At the end of the mapping of artistic initiatives in the countryside, realised by tranzit.ro in the frame of C4R project, we invited London-based artist Andrei Nacu to spend a short residency in Bucharest and at the Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life in Silistea Snagovului, as a wrap up of this stage of the mapping and to open up future collaboration with Andrei. Andrei has initiated symbiopoiesis, which we included in our survey. Situated in Pădureni village, Iași county, Romania, symbiopoiesis is a site for experimentation, learning on one hand and unlearning on the other. Situated in a transition zone, at the edge of the forest, in a small village called Pădureni, 20 km South from Iași, a city on the Eastern edge of the European Union, this project came into being with no initial great plan or well-defined strategy, but more as an urge and a need to hide, to root, to grow, to sense, to react, to adapt, to regenerate, to survive... Finding ways of changing today’s mythology to align with the symbiotic reality of our planet involves reshaping societal beliefs, narratives, and values to reflect a more interconnected relationship with the environment. symbiopoiesis aims to explore interspecies relations through cohabitation and interaction, with the hope of discovering new ways (or re-discovering old ones) of practising care and mutual modulation. As Lynn Margulis describes it, symbiosis is “simply the living together in physical contact of organisms of different species. Partners in symbiosis, fellow symbionts abide in the same place at the same time, literally touching each other or even inside each other.” At the end of the residency we asked Andrei to share with us a few thoughts on resilience in relation to art and the land. How would you define resilience in relation to artistic practice? I have an ambivalent relation with the idea of resilience in general. On one hand it’s fascinating how beings and ecosystems are capable to adapt to change and absorb disturbance. Nonetheless, as any organism has some material limitations, the limits of resilience are also real and sometimes it’s very hard, or even impossible to maintain the fragile equilibrium necessary for achieving it. One should not praise resilience, without questioning the source of adversity. Also, I think it’s very important to avoid the emphasis on individual adaptability as it has the potential to normalize structurally induced suffering. There is always this risk to obscure injustices or structural violence with an individual strengths based approach. We first need a form of collective subjectivity to achieve and inform each-other’s resilience as a group, as a complete ecosystem rather than as individuals on their own. Everything is interconnected and we must understand that, as self-preservation over class struggle means fascism, in the same way, self-preservation over group survival means death. Furthermore, there might be situations when a revolution is preferable rather than the mirage of never-ending resilience that inevitable leads to exhaustion. Art is always political, so any artistic practice would have to define its resilience in relation to politics. The resilience in one’s artistic practice I think it means finding ways to justify the necessity or the usefulness of one’s practice in a political struggle that would then help the resilience of our entire ecosystem. Could you list some of the motivations that determined you to start symbiopoesis? I've long been captivated by plants and devoted five years to studying Horticulture and Landscape Design for my first BA. Although I haven't actively practiced in these fields since graduating 15 years ago, the dream of having access to a plot of land that I could share with friends and loved ones, where we could explore, experiment, and share companionship with plants and other beings has always lingered in my thoughts. The project emerged without a grand plan or a clearly defined strategy, but rather as an innate urge - an essential need to find solace but in the same time community, establish roots, grow, sense, react, adapt, regenerate, and ultimately survive... For a while, I was just exploring various locations trying to discover places that could inspire me, in order to better understand what I’m looking for exactly and also what are my limitations, and to find the right compromise with the available resources I had. Growing older, but also the experience of the pandemic only intensified these needs, making them more urgent and propelling me into action. At this point, my motivation stems from the aspiration for this space to serve as a platform where we can delve into interspecies relations through cohabitation and interaction. It's about coming together and discovering innovative methods (or rediscovering old ones) to practice care and foster a more sustainable way of life. What can artists bring as a specific difference in the broader discussion about the (re)turn to a closer attention to land, nature, sustainable living? Challenging today's mythology and finding ways to align with the symbiotic reality of our planet involves reshaping societal beliefs, narratives, and values to reflect a more interconnected relationship with the environment. In this process, artists could disrupt the hegemonic discourse, to (re)create dialog, conversations, and narratives, and to develop or rediscover the conceptual tools to work against the notion of nature as defined by modernity, which used it for creating categories like natural resources and human resources, just for the sole purpose of exploitation. I think that one of the most powerful things that artists can do is to imagine and render utopias. I strongly believe this is of most importance because once imagined, things are inevitably influencing reality, shaping it towards those possibilities. But envisioning radical, alternative ways to the current suicidal growth model would also need redefining the idea of sustainability from a holistic, ecological, anti-capitalist perspective. Imagining better worlds is the precondition for making them happen and this is where artists can play a vital role. Andrei Nacu (b. 1984) lives and works in London, U.K. and Iasi, Romania. In his creative practice he is using documentary photography, the family album and the photographic archive to create stories which analyze the junction between personal memory and social history. His most recent work includes video, installation and performance and focuses on the politics of representation and media archaeology. Currently he is working as a Photo Curator at the Royal Anthropological Institute, London. In 2013 he graduated with an MA in Documentary Photography from the University of Wales, Newport and previously studied Photography and Video at the George Enescu National University of Arts, Iasi, Romania.

And all roads lead to the abodes of men Iuliana Dumitru, 2023 I know that the ideal world is only a phantasm and nothing would convince me otherwise but sometimes I arrive in places that give me a spark of hope. The short period of time that I am spending there makes me rethink my position. There actually is an ideal world to be discovered in a lavender garden, a field in which delicious vegetables grow or a parcel of land invaded by sunroots. In order for these worlds to exist, someone had to imagine them and work for them, work really hard. A rebellion against a fast-paced and unjust society that consumes us gives birth to these worlds. An imperfect world brings to the foreground the need of (almost) perfect places, maybe even utopian places. A sheltered environment, which unfortunately has to obey the big world, could change the mainstream views. Such places are in need of one or two visionary people, some leader(s) that can make things move around and a team that helps with the building process. Alone by ones’ self, such project is unattainable — it is always a matter of community, it is either your given family or the chosen one. Building such a world is a continuous work, one that becomes your identity, one that can add a nickname to your name like for Felicia and Marius from Green Mogo or Ionuț and Alex from Sol și Suflet . I will start to narrate my experience with both of these spaces from an auto-anthropological point of view, relating to them as being part of the Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life collective. According to the presentation on its site, Green Mogo is a “centre for education and counselling on energy, a space dedicated to dialogues on eco-friendly housing and easy to follow solutions for an eco-conscious life ”. Practically, Green Mogo is a meeting place where caring for the environment is the core subject and caring for the others is a lifestyle. Felicia and Marius founded Green Initiative association in 2006. In 2008 they bought a parcel of land in Mogoșoaia where they built a green house that has an earth roof, a garden, as well as a communal space dedicated to meetings, workshops and learning. What surprises me about the Green Mogo story is that, even though the space in question is a private one, — a family lives in there — it is still opened for the local community and others. Felicia and Marius are always receiving guests that they treat with lessons, knowledge and good food. Our visit there was a hybrid type of visit in which we received information about the place and the ways in which it developed along the years. We were also treated with delicious food cooked by their son, Daniel. After a guided tour through the garden in which we gathered tomatoes and bitter apples, we went up the green roof of the training hall. There, up high, Felicia and Marius proceeded to narrate the story of the building that we had below our feet. It was made with recycled materials, including car tires. The building itself became a didactic material. They video-documented the entire process so it could serve others interested by this type of building and they also collaborated with students from Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Urbanism. They prefer to engage the young in their projects in order to give them a chance to gain that experience that society already expects of them even in the first years of university. Of all their projects, the one that impresses me the most is the Summer school dedicated to children from the village. Green Mogo is not only a place near Bucharest that uses a resourceful and renowned area, it actually improves the place by giving and holding space for the residents of Mogoșoaia, thus Green Mogo becomes itself an important resource. Felicia is also involved in local politics where she advocates for green areas protection and banning investors’ real estate projects that would erase a big portion of the nearby forest. She advocates for education even outside Green Mogo. She managed to bring “A doua șansă” programme in Mogoșoaia, thus aiding 60 people. Felicia and Marius succeeded to create a meeting space through Green Mogo, a space where local needs and resources can meet with outside ideas and resources. I first heard about Sol și Suflet when it was still merely a sketch. Back then, it did not even have an official name and the vision seemed impossible to attain. I cannot even imagine the amount of work needed up until this point. I met Ionuț Bănică at tranzit. ro/București and knew him as this godfather of the permaculture that took place in the communal garden from street Gazelei 44. After tranzit. ro/București vacated the place in December 2019, Ionuț and an ensemble of colleagues and collaborators took over the space and kept its legacy. It even took upon itself the name of “The Legacy Bucharest”, a co-working space interested in developing ethical entrepreneurship and honouring the natural eco-system. During the weekend, you can find here fresh vegetables, either sourced by them or other local farmers, honey, teas and herbs. I find more than fascinating the way in which these initiatives and their initiators cross paths upon different occasions and timelines, and how each of these meetings generate new ideas, collaborations and projects. In July 2021, we were eagerly heading towards Sol și Suflet to discover the first regenerative farm in Romania, which is situated in Dâmbovița county. We saw the food baskets online and I was impatient to bargain the colourful vegetables. The vastness and openness of the farm amazed me, everything seemed so large, almost limitless. I immediately realised the amount of time it takes to get from a solar to another. To this adding the amount of physical work that the farmers go through everyday; from Monday to Sunday and then, on repeat. Even though the effort seems overwhelming, Ionuț and Alex greeted us with joy, ready to tell us about their adventure. We received a special guided tour and tasted the freshly ripen tomatoes. The nearly commercial moment was the presentation of all of the equipment used to work the land. The role of these tools is to make the farmer’s life easier without polluting engines. I liked the perfectly straight lines made by the manual hoeing and covered with mulch netting that stops the grass from taking over the crops. We entered the market house, still in the building process. This was to become the primary line for basket preparations, shipping and selling. At this point there was only a table inside but as we were being told the story and the vision for this place, I began to imagine everything. There are plans for the future of crop-less land: a mixed orchard for biodiversity, a pond for collecting irrigation water and also for attracting biodiversity. 10% of the land will remain wild in order to honour the spirit of regenerative agriculture and spontaneous flora. Sol și Suflet is a space to be experimented, and the simplest way to do so is to consume its foods. For Alex and Ionuț the general goal is to produce vegetables without the use of pesticides, and the final goal is for their practice to be adopted by other local vegetable growers. They do not wish to be exceptional on the market, they wish for this system to become the norm so we could all benefit of access to clean food. Of the Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life is both easy and hard to write about. I am way too involved in its process not to be passioned about it and maybe even have some biases. The experience gained at the Station helps me see the other initiatives from a similar point of view, facilitating my understanding to their processes and stories and also to the roads took by people in order to arrive at this point. For us, the Station is “a bet and a promise, an experiment and an investment in a future that we can still shape.” For me it is another home. It is the first time my name appears on a property document and not consider it my own. I consider it to be a common good for many. By this I do not only mean the co-owners, but also the society at large. The station is going to be a place for contemporary arts, an open-space to any curious visitor. I tried to encompass the ethos of these universes that I managed to assist and I hope that I have succeeded to write about these places and people with the subjectivity and objectivity of a committed anthropologist. These worlds are being built in an eco-system that we have the duty to preserve and grow. There is a single eco-system that embraces the world and each of us has to continuously nurture connection and the practice of building roads. For this purpose many resources are needed: economical, emotional, resources of resistance and resilience. Connection matters because these worlds grow one upon each other and nurture one another. It is essential that the information spreads, thereby reaching everyone, not only those interested in sustainable living and harmonising with the environment. These initiative show how society, damaged as it is, is still capable of producing ideal worlds through people, firstly through their dreams and then through their actions. People that have access to resources grow and build roads towards the others. “But it happened that after walking for a long time through sand, and rocks, and snow, the little prince at last came upon a road. And all roads lead to the abodes of men. ” Research realised in 2021, part of the mapping of eco-farms and other resilient practices in Romania, commissioned by tranzit in the frame of C4R project. Text: Iuliana Dumitru Photographs: Raluca Voinea Translation by Octavia Anghel

The C4R platform powered by blob, has now been launched at https://cultures4resilience.net/. Stay tuned!

Crișan Neighbourhood Resilience, Timisoara Ana Kun, 2023 These descriptions of forms of resilience resulted from many conversations with my mother-in-law and her neighbours, from the Crișan neighbourhood in Timișoara, and for which I am grateful. These forms of resilience have been practiced in the Crișan neighbourhood from the time of its establishment up until the present day. Against the backdrop of world wars, fiscal crisis, regime changes and living consistently within a patriarchal system, practices such as gardening on public and private land, animal husbandry, community crafts (for housing construction), domestic and everyday labor, with the occasional addition of working in one of the city's factories, show the ability of people to form a viable community, against the backdrop of world wars, bank debts, regime changes, and a continuous patriarchal system, in an ever changing place. In illustrating these stories, I will refer to three periods: keeping in mind that the transitions between them were gradual and that more general practices were not always found at the level of the neighborhood: colonisation (starting in 1918, in 2 waves), the Dej and Ceaușescu regimes (around 1947-1989) and present-day (post 1989 revolution). For the colony these transitions between these periods and the impact of the changes in political periods was felt very gradually. Geographical and Historical Positioning The Crișan colony, as it was originally called, was attached to Timișoara together and the Plopi neighbourhood, were incorporated into Timișoara after the Second World War (post 1945). Plopi was named in 1940, by the local sculptor Romulus Ladea. Back in 1930 the colony was called I.G. Duca (after the liberal prime minister assassinated by right wing extremists in 1933). Before that it was called the Kardos colony, and before that, in 1918, the land of these two colonies belonged to a count who sold it off as housing lots for settlers. Going back even further, the area was known as the town's rice field plantations. This was a failed agricultural experiment initiated by count Florimund de Mercy, a military and civil governor of the Banat of Timiș, after the Austrian occupation of the city in 1716. The Crișan neighbourhood is also known as New Ghiroda (not to be mixed with the nearby old commune of Ghiroda), and Plopi is attached to the Kuncz neighbourhood, know as Plopi-Kuncz. Crișan and Plopi-Kuncz are situated in the eastern part of Timișoara, each one on one side of the Bega river, with the water plant between them. Since the establishment of the colony it has been important for the residents to be self-managed, and for local community cooperation to play a central role, having the effect that the colony sometimes ignores and reversely is ignored by the city administration. In recent years people from other neighbourhoods have started to launch their leisure boats on the weekends, overcrowding the river nearby, and ruining the fishing and swimming for everybody. Before this, many people learnt to swim in the river at their own leisure. My mother-in-law remembers how in the early 1960s older women would swim in their dresses, with tin drums strapped on their backs to stay afloat. On the Levee The Bega river’s water level is the same level as the neighbourhood is, so after several floods of the cob houses, the banks were raised with two steps of sand; the small levee and the large levee (dâlmă). The large levee soon became and still is a kind of promenade. The two levees are looked after by the levee master (dâlmaș) who checks the condition of the land and vegetation, and intervenes when needed. To prevent flooding in the neighbourhood, each street also has a partially open sewer system, with one person in charge on each street. On the small levee next to the river, local inhabitants who live on or close to the levee, have set up gardens, fishing spots, pontoons and bathing spots. Some areas are fenced off, others not, such as the bathing areas, but all are maintained by neighbours (the land belongs to the state, however, there are no contracts and no rents are charged). On one of these gardens I found a sign on which was printed that we should use, maintain and preserve the Crișan biosphere. These refuges, some cultivated some not, appeared after 1989. Before the revolution it was part of the levee master’s duties of the levee master, to eradicate any use of these areas, and ensure they were not used. In almost every neighbourhood before 1989, community gardens on public land were a common practice before 1989 in almost every neighborhood, the most famous being in the Antenna Area (where my grandparents used to have a garden), which is now occupied by a shopping mall. However, in Crișan and Plopi, there were no community gardens, only private ones near housing or on specifically purchased plots, and hence the practice of gardening was extended informally onto factories premises, terraces and flat roofs, where vegetables were mainly grown; tomatoes and peppers in raised beds for example. In many of the green spaces in the factories' yards, the employees planted and harvested fruit trees. Today various crops are grown on the levee, from tomatoes to corn, in combination with fruit trees and raspberry bushes, either for immediate consumption or conservation, but also for exchange between neighbours. Whilst talking to my mother-in-law’s former neighbours who moved out of the area 25 years ago, we were invited to adopt a piece of the land for gardening. Apparently the best tomatoes grow on the levee, thanks to fish waste. Not all the land is cultivated and fenced off and there are also many spaces on the banks that are open to everyone, furnished with chairs, benches, sofas and shade, where birds, dogs, frogs, snakes, insects and people take refuge. Annexes or new houses are now being built on the sites of the old gardens between the houses, and the cultivated space in the neighbourhood is getting smaller by the day. Being able to walk on the river banks during the pandemic was a great consolation for all who were fortunate to have local access to them. Income, Food and Work Before 1989, most of the inhabitants of Crișan and Plopi worked in one of the many factories in the surrounding area. The reason for the two colonies creation was to house the labor force for the factories, ensuring a stable local and available labour force. In their private gardens, before 1989, the women of Crișan, especially those who did not have a formal job in the factory, who raised children, cared for the elderly and did the domestic work, used to grow everything for their households, trying to be as autonomous and self-sufficient as possible. The surplus was exchanged or sold informally in the neighbourhood. Families were not completely self-sufficient and had several sources of supply (garden, neighbours, market). The gardens were partially cultivated with fruit trees bought from the surplus of the Republican Station of Young Miciurinists established in 1956 (Miciurin for short, after the name of the Russian biologist who created several hybrid species), and which is now known as the Station of Young Naturalists. My mother-in-law remembers the pineapple-apricot and greengage plum very fondly. Every year families who had vineyards contributed grapes towards the Grape Ball at the Cultural House. Each family donated sandwiches and cakes, which were sold to raise money to pay the musicians. Crișan does not have a patron saint’s day (rugă), so the Grape Ball was a version of an annual neighbourhood fair, held for many decades until a few years ago when it degenerated into drunkenness and violence, and now has been cancelled. Up until the 1980s some women raised pigs and poultry for consumption for their families, and would sell livestock products to the neighbourhood too. Erszi tanti, my mother-in-law's mother, also raised geese for feathers and down. Another woman sold cow's milk to her neighbours, on a type of pre-order subscription basis. Rozsi tanti crocheted miles of wool and knitted flannels, other women cut patterns and sewed clothes, and many other items for their neighbours. Rudi baci had a private taxi service with a feacher, a kind of carriage with one horse. On the side he raised what was called “meat rabbits”, for his own consumption. My mother-in-law's father was a photographer for the surrounding villages, before he was employed by the County Hospital, so part of the family garden was occupied by his photo laboratory. Gosza baci fished on the Bega river for his own consumption and to sell to the neighbourhood. Other people worked as day labourers, doing field work, digging, carrying sand for the levees, washing bottles at the brewery, or occasionally as musicians. Nobody relied on just one source of income, or one source of food, and everybody tried as hard as possible (especially the women) to use their skills to ensure some sort of stability. During the 1980s, exchanges between employees of different factories proliferated, the most popular being Comtim, which specialised in the sale of pork. New recipes with fewer fresh ingredients and more substitutes became popular, and as the gardens grew smaller, fewer people raised animals for meat consumption. Since its invention in 1959, the Croatian Vegeta, a flavour enhancer consisting of dehydrated vegetables, spices, and salt, was used primarily as a substitute for poultry, and has become one of the staple ingredients in the regional diet. A very popular Sunday soup with poultry and fine pasta, now has a vegan spinoff using Croatian Vegeta. One kilo packets of Vegeta were recently found together with turbo chewing-gum and bluejeans in metal boxes, in various markets in Timișoara, sold by Serbian citizens. These days the majority of people are employed in the new factories on the Buziaș platform, with a few of them employed by the private ecological gardens of a rich family in Timișoara, which is built on the site of fish ponds of a former cannery. House and Garden Plots (plațuri) In the interwar period, the entire Crișan-Plopi area was parcelled off and sold off for the construction of houses for the inhabitants of the nearby villages. Land was purchased with bank loans, and they built cob houses, with the help of neighbours. After the Second World War, the first brick houses appeared, which were also built by the collective efforts of neighbours. None of these properties in Crișan were nationalised after 1948, unlike other neighbourhoods in Timișoara. The bricks used to build the first houses were not only from the factory in Kuncz (which closed in 1945), but also from a group of Romani brick makers, who formed and fired them in a kiln on the large levee, built at the entrance to the neighbourhood. They used the clay removed from the Bega after it was dredged. Neither the kiln nor this practice exists in the neighbourhood today. The Old Cemetery With the formation of the area, a lot of land was donated to the community for a cemetery. The old cemetery does not belong to any church or sect, and is maintained by the locals who have family members buried there, free of any charges. After 1989, an Orthodox church was built with an adjacent cemetery; this cemetery is taxed by the church. The old cemetery is also a place to socialise; during the period of preparation for the Day of the Dead, on November the second, families come to do maintenance work and socialise together. The walnut and mulberry trees at the entrance are leftovers from the time of the rice plantations, and are harvested by the neighbours. I still pick purslane for salad from the old graves, and I hope that my partner and I can be buried here, when the time comes. The Bridges between Neighbourhoods Before 1989, there was a dispensary and a school in Plopi, along with a coal depot. Residents crossed the Bega river every day, but there wasn’t always a bridge. Until the 1950s, upstream from the exclusion zone of the water plant, there was a braided wire-rope and a floating raft/platform, called a komp (similar to a small ferry), which was pulled by a crank by Dinu baci; after his death his wife, Dinu neni, would work the ferry. It would cost 15 ban for a trip. It was a private initiative, which was taxed by the state, and which was discontinued after the death of Mrs. Dinu. When the Bega froze during the winter, the komp was pulled out and people could cross over with sleds, holding onto the braided wire-rope. There was also a komp operating similarly to this, in the south of Timisoara, in the Iosefin neighbourhood. During the 1960s, the first wooden bridge was built, which after rotting away was replaced by a metal bridge made by UMT (Mechanical Plants Timișoara), and which was altered in the 1980s, to raise up in the middle. This is the same bridge that connects the two neighbourhoods today, maintained by Aquatim, the regional water and sewage operator, although there is less need to use it to cross over these days. In recent years, the gardens have expanded significantly on the river banks, probably in part because of the new houses constructed on the former gardens, but also because of the revival of grow-your-own food initiatives. In another neighbourhood in the west of Timișoara (Ronaț), a private plot of land (which was historically used for gardening) was transformed by the owners into a community garden with free open access to neighbours. Pandemic gardening has also led to a proliferation of gardens in and around apartments, balconies, on the tops of blocks of flats, parking lots, or in my case in the bedroom, where I've secured a pretty nice crop of basil and mint to eat, share and write about. Research, text and illustrations by artist Ana Kun A text commissioned by tranzit.ro, as part of a mapping of resilient practices in Romania and Eastern Europe, in the frame of C4R project.

In 2021 a group of cultural workers together with tranzit.ro, bought together a plot of land 40 km. north of Bucharest, where we are building The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life. Amongst others, the Station aims to become a working place for artists and researchers interested in thinking a different relationship to nature. As such, we are striving to plant and maintain a garden that is responding to the challenges of climate change, which is paying attention to the local biodiversity and is at the same time permeable to metissage and cultural embedding. Cosmos Garden, drawing its name from the plant originating from Mexico, Cosmos bipinnatus, is proposed by landscape designer Georgiana Strat as “a living laboratory of experimentation for nature, art and life. The purpose is testing, observing and foregrounding of models that creatively answer to themes such as: the decrease of water resources, conservation of biodiversity, migration of plants and animal species, models of sustainable feeding, fighting desertification etc.” Georgiana Strat proposed a site analysis, a concept for the Cosmos Garden and a plan for the planting, and we presented these plans as part of the itinerating exhibition “Now the Impulse is to Live!”.

citydev.brussels and the Brussels Studies Institute are jointly organising the 7th edition of their inter-university chair. This edition is about The Co-Resilient City. Participants are also invited to reflect on that theme during several workshops. Co-resilience is the ability of groups and communities to thrive and connect with others in times of crisis. The chair’s programme will address co-resilience processes, including key aspects such as Actors & Resources; Infrastructure & Tools; Organisation, Governance & Policy; Ecology, Economy & Wellbeing. It will also explore ways to map those aspects and create future scenarios. The aim is to learn from local and global initiatives and define forms of collaboration and strategic action that can have more impact and agency at the city scale. The inaugural address introduces these issues through the experience of R-Urban, a project of the Atelier d’Architecture Autogérée as a commons-based network of civic resilience. R-Urban shows how architects, designers and other actors can collaborate with citizens and municipalities to design and manage urban commons. These commons can provide solutions to the complex transition process towards more resilient forms of governance at different scales, from the neighbourhood to the city, the region and beyond. Interested? Meet for the inaugural speech on 10 March at 2.30pm at the Solvay Library, on Rue Belliard 137, 1040 Brussels. This will be followed by four more classes and two workshops. Info and registration: https://bsi.brussels/nl/event/inaugurele-les-bsi-citydev-brussels-leerstoel-2023/https://bsi.brussels/event/lecon-inaugurale-chaire-bsi-citydev-brussels-2023/

R-Urban and its two units in Bagneux - Agrocité and Recyclab - are winners in the "reconnecting with nature" category of the New European Bauhaus 2022 prize, one of the most prestigious prizes in contemporary architecture. The award recognizes projects that embody the spirit of the New European Bauhaus: beautiful, sustainable and inclusive. It is a great recognition for this collective work initiated by AAA (Atelier d'Architecture Autogérée) on civil resilience and ecological transition in the city. This evening was an opportunity to celebrate together with local actors the award and to renew our common commitment to the initiative "Bagneux, European ground for citizen ecology".