Monday 21 December 2009

The obligation to make profit


The obligation to sell, how awful...
Yesterday while watching Blade Runner I made a necklaze, just to have my hands busy and as kind of relaxing multytasking... While into it I realized that I could not justify this production as something to sell and make money out of it, I could not think about selling it, neither it was for personal use, I do not use much jewelry myself. So why I was producing this item, it was not necesary, not specially pretty, not even money valuable, though someone would like I am sure. By now I have a box full of simillar necklaces, made from collected or my own ceramic beads, I thread them using the macrame knotting technique, which is time consuming... It would make me happy to just give them away, which I do sometimes. But in any case I feel this guilt for not making a profit out of them, not spending my time on making good marketable goods...I just do what I want, what capricious of me...Am I going to be punish?
My last selling outing was last Saturday, at the Abney hall in Stoke Newington Hackney, London. Funny enough, the venue was one of my former squatts, and even more I was bellow my old room, so many memories... The place is now a community hall, which gets rented for functions and events. More than community space is an asset to make profit out of it, not sure if the money goes to the community or if it is cheaper to rent than other places. When we were living there we run it as a community center. We made dinners once a week for £1, they worked as a social for people from the area, obviously more to the leftft alternative activist type and youngsters looking for somewhere to crash and score. Due to us being mainly spanish that affected sometimes the diversity of the non political users. We also offered the space for community meetings, quite succesfuly, workshops including theater and rehearsal space. We did gigs and then started to run a cafe with live music, it got really trendy, but we started to had power strugles when the possibility of making a bit of money appeared. We were supposed to be non profit oriented. A lot of manipulative assholes and ass-lickers also appeared, which worked/courted their way in to make mischief. We got popular, everybody liked us and wanted to be our friends, some of us did not know how to deal with this...So many stories, so many fights...I would like to write them...
I think I have opened the lid to something...

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