The supafast building, 6 Great Strand Street
The provisional university have taken up residence at the Supafast building, on Great Strand Street in Dublin 1. The building, which happens to be just across the street from the building occupied by Unlock NAMA last January, is an independently run art space and holds regular events.
We will mainly be researching and writing at the desks on the top floor, but we also hope to put an events here in the coming months. We decided to set up shop here for a couple of different reasons. First of all, as unemployed researchers we are going through the same experiences many others are – stuck at home sat in front of your laptop all day is hardly uplifting. Coming together is partially in response to the isolating, individualising experience common to precarious workers, free lancers, the unemployed and underemployed. But it also means that we can work together on common projects, and support each other in our individual ones.
The move is also connected to our current research – which is all about commoning. We have the sense that Supafast, like many independent spaces in our city (community gardens, men’s sheds, social centres), is a way of accessing resources, such as space, that high prices, extortionate rent and debt normally exclude us from. It’s about getting together so we can get together, if that makes sense. In this regard, it’s something of a commons. This also relates to our recent post about a Mark Fisher article, which talks about the importance of opening up:
“a kind of time that is now increasingly difficult to access: a time temporarily freed from the pressure to pay rent or the mortgage; an experimental time, in which the outcomes of activities could neither be predicted nor guaranteed; a time which might turn out to be wasted, but which might equally yield new concepts, perceptions, ways of being.”
provisional university 