MANIFESTING MARGINS
A framework by Lily Matras (Plaisir d’offrir)

A manifesto merely surfaces what is already there. Some overlooked evidence, waiting to be shaped by a deliberate act of cutting through the real. Margins, as well, are an act of cutting. They are a line traced not as a limitation, but as the beginning of something. They are a decision of spacemaking, just like a sculptor gives shape by carving an outline.

Manifesting Margins is this (somewhat catchy) movement of outlining the outline, in an attempt to find a way.

Through a rainforest of intricate crises.
Across mountain ranges of artificial divisions.
Out of an inward-focused abyss.

So what is the way?


1. HOLD THE PAGE

Migratory bird flocks are led by their edges: individuals at the periphery open the way, while the center follows blindfolded. As cultural practitioners in Europe, we naturally speak from the periphery. Our work fosters unheard, unseen, unfelt sensoriums and proposes different distributions. Our initiatives of worldbuilding invest, cultivate and groom our imaginary margins, in a relentless practice of dissensus.

In search of a space to unfold those marginary imaginaries, we tend to our physical margins. We refuse to reduce them to spaces of ruination and collapse. They are robust fields of transference: restless, porous, mediatic. As we shape invented spaces, we approach them as spaces of invention.

We trade our crowded centres, our huddled scenes, our off-ground institutions for outward looking ex-titutions—ones that mingle, ones that negotiate, ones that ‘can't keep good distinctions between natures and cultures straight’. Turning to the margins is hardly an act of decentring, only of desanthropocentering. For where is the center in nature?


2. SPAN THE NET

We join the porous margins and we make them touch. We connect our imaginary confines to the confines of our territory, of our systems, of our species—around shared practices of sustenance. We weave a situated fabric along those adhesions, allowing new forms of coordination. We ask: which ecosystem can stand alone?

We relocate to co-construct and reinforce through mutual nourishment, entanglement, attention. We connect the margins and their various components to invoke them as essential spaces of experimentation and otherness. We merge the margins, not for them to become new centers, but for them to gain weight, visibility, agency, within their own marginary presencing.

We remember nets have holes. We acknowledge disparities, partialities and specificities, and let them emerge from the field to fill those alveoli. We hope to learn from this polyvocal commoning and develop tools to communicate with each other, and nurture the wider audience.


3. BUILD A SHIP

We spanned a net, but we seek movement. We need to navigate our margins without disturbing their precious porosity. Some suggest it’s a Netship, not a network. We build a Netship to sustain the waves those swampy, twisted entities throw towards our centers. The nods of the net become archipelagos, islands of initiative one is able to visit. Take a trip across those abundant waters. It doesn’t have to be forever. It can be a time-off, a suspension, a vacancy. A tiny possibility for your bodies to be used in another way than what they have been unassigned to by our derealized cores.

The marginary archipelago of the Netship recalls our expelled bodies and gives us space to move toward something else. We can listen to different stories and develop a taste for conversation, remember our grandmothers and greet the migratory birds, expand and get lost, and build new capacities, sensibilities and cares. This will not save the world, but we could bring some of it back home as a souvenir, and that might be of a little help for what is to come.