Business Energy & Champagne Socialism 🤝

It is March and we are marching into spring, and into the future, as always to the beat of our own XP drum🥁 (we actually have a drum kit in the studio right now waiting for a jam session to happen... but that's a topic for another newsletter). In this e-mail, we want to catch you up on some current XP affairs. Prepare for business energy, financial transparency, communal goals and a strong desire for CONCRETE ACTION. We’ll take you along on the journey that lead us here, maybe it will inspire you to march towards something as well. This newsletter is brought to you by Emma and Jack: in part 1 Emma recaps the second XP business day and the ideas that emerged from workshops, which Jack explores further in part 2 where he discusses individualism in art, medieval guilds, and salary pooling... A long one but this feels urgent to us right now, so we hope you enjoy the read.

Let’s rewind to about 7,5 weeks ago. It was a Friday, January 17th, when we scheduled part two of our XP Away Day, which came out of a desire to be more intentional about our future together: we felt like we wanted to decide on what direction we want to move or grow in, and how. If you read the newsletter about part one (Grown Up Business Trip 🛝) you may know that we didn’t get much future planning done on those first Away Days, but mostly ran around in the forest… the workshops did bring us new, playful ideas that definitely felt meaningful but never turned into anything concrete. And despite loving the unorganized poetic chaos of it all, we still felt the necessity of ‘maturing’ as XP – finding ways to make the poetic chaos sustainable! That’s why we planned another business day, no overnight stays this time but a strict schedule and sharp goal of getting some actual clarity. Ben and Emma formed the planning committee and organised a program, two locations in Tilburg, and dress code ‘business’

Kirsten guided an I-ching reading, where you throw coins to create a hexagram that refers to an ancient Chinese divination text for spiritual guidance. We formulated a question together (which was a good start of the day, defining WHAT we were actually trying to find out), throw the coins, and then interpret the resulting hexagram to shape the conversation around that question and maybe unlock some subconscious truths.

The cauldron symbolizes nourishment, rejuvenation, and transformation. It suggests that doing good, spreading joy, and pursuing dreams eventually bring rewards. Rejuvenation is a return to one's natural desires and a recharge for progress. Similarly, the cooking pot represents essential sustenance that meets our deepest needs when society is in balance. When people pursuing their dreams are nourished and valued, revitalizing old habits can lead to breakthrough achievements.

Which resonated pretty hard. Kirsten prompted us to do little drawings of our interpretations, which sparked some interesting ideas and conversations. If we see XP as a cauldron, then what is the wood, the fire, the pot, and the contents of it? Who keeps the fire going and why, where does the wood come from, what are we actually trying to fill this cauldron with, who is it feeding? Could the logs from our individual practices keep the fire burning, instead of us having to sacrifice or invest time to get wood elsewhere?

For example: one extreme on the scale of ⇠MONEY⇢ said that XP is completely member-funded⇠ (we members pay for everything that happens in and around XP with our self earned euros from external work) and the other extreme would be XP is ⇢profitable (not only can we pay the rent and expenses with revenue of the XP company, we somehow make a profit)

It was interesting to define these together (and sweet to see we wanted to grow closer to becoming eachother’s professional family 💙). We then continued with an exercise where worked out two speculative scenarios: XP without a space, and XP as a larger institution. Ben and Emma proposed that XP without a space would become both a nomadic event-hosting-body that organizes and promotes events at other studios, and an online publishing platform and online community; everything would revolve around ‘Alternative Models for Making/Working/Living Together’. Jack and Kirsten presented the hypothetical XP institute as a huge place with a library, and a café, a workshop, and desk spaces, with member-funded hubs all over the world. From this crazy scenario came the idea of Extra Practice as a sort of record label, representing different artists and disciplines but maintaining a ‘general XP vibe’....

For my XP-future-workshop I combined my mapping-workshop-experience with my newfound interest in agroecosystems;) The idea was to think about XP as a farm, with a certain context (location, soil type, resources, skills, community) where we, the farmers, decide what we want to grow there (what thrives naturally, what’s needed, what takes time vs. quick yield?). To get there,we first wrote down answers to big questions like What are your values?; What are XP’s values?; What do you bring to the XP table?; What do you need to grow? and What do you want to grow (more) at XP?/in your practice? on separate colored notes. We began building with those blocks, starting with defining our different areas/fields. Roughly three themes (fields) became clear on the paper:

We placed crops (projects), tools (resources), and needs within these fields. It was interesting to see how almost everything we want to do fits under or between those three pillars – felt like we have organically grown into this ecosystem that is actually quite stable even if we didn’t think about the structure while ‘building’ it, like bees and their hive.

Of course this took ages and we never got around to actual map-drawing, but we concluded the workshop later on by looking at XP’s core needs—work-life balance, meaningful creation, financial stability—and brainstorming extremely concrete ideas that XP could start developing NOW to move closer to those needs: an education package for art school students on how to start & sustain your own support structure after graduating? a summer school? a paid subscription to a printed newsletter? a consultancy service? (‘tea with Jack’--> book now!) This movement from vague ideas to concrete plans feels very good to practice. TBC!

We arrived at the Volta office in our suits and sat down in a large meeting room at a big square table. The office manager brought cappuccinos and cookies. We had no idea what to expect from this. Koen has been reading our newsletter from the beginning, so he is probably the most XP-aware businessman out there, but still it was quite a challenge explaining to him what we do exactly, and what we had been doing that morning. He did not seem to see the point in throwing coins and drawing cauldrons, lol.

We talked for what felt like hours. The office manager brought beers and crisps. Interesting ideas came up, but it seemed like we kept circling back to the same issue: XP has grown into what it is in a very organic way, with extra time and energy we had outside of our personal work and there is a lot of things we would like to create and do (more) in the future, but those things take extra time to develop further, and we don’t have much extra time, because we need money to survive and pay rent, so most of our time goes into work that makes us that money. And so we kept coming back to the question: what if XP somehow helped us in getting that money? If XP is a support structure, could it somehow offer a form of financial support as well?

Something sprouted then and there that we have been thinking about since. Jack and Gijs even organised a 'Champagne Socialism' meetup with varia and post-office where we shared and discussed these first ideas, and got a feel of how others approach finances within collectivity. Jack has been diving deeper into all of this lately, which I am very thankful for because he is giving words and structure and grounding to this scary, abstract thing, and that is step 1 in facing it together.

It was the end of our away day and we all stood, beer in hand in Koen's office space, donning our best business attire. After a lot of discussion and a bit of confusion from Koen (and us) as to what it was we actually did and what we wanted to change he suggested that perhaps we needed some “skin in the game”; some money that we were investing into XP as some form of commitment. This soon led to a different idea, one that felt more inline with the cauldrons we had been exploring that day. What if we pooled our incomes into a central pot and then paid ourselves a salary? In my head this was the beginning of a mini socialist society, a way to conspire and subvert the system we find ourselves in…for Koen this was not so radical, for lawyers and medical professionals this is a pretty common practice. Which begs the question, what are we afraid of? Just commitment? Or are we so far down this romantic pursuit of the lone wolf artist/designer that we can’t imagine a structure where we share financial gains and losses? Not even as a crew?

Since this Extra Practice away-day I have had many conversations with friends, housemates and collaborators. I get the feeling that we are reaching a breaking point, or at the very least we are fed up. Sepp Eckenhaussen in his article “Is There an Art of the Working Class?” gives a pretty matter of fact and dire description of our financial situation:

“If one were to make a list of precarian occupations, ‘artist’ would certainly feature on it. The Netherlands, where I live and work, is usually known for its ‘attractive’ funding system and relatively good social provisions. But the average artist in the Netherlands earned a gross income of just over 18 thousand euros in 2019 (compared to the average income of 32 thousand among the working population), with 80% of people in the visual arts working as freelancers. This is, of course, not new. In 2016, a government-commissioned independent review concluded that art workers have poor bargaining positions, are often not insured against occupational disability, have a low pension accrual, and have a high risk of unemployment. Artists are, in other words, at the forefront of flexibilization and precarization, alongside delivery riders, taxi drivers, and other (mostly platform-mediated) gig workers. If art workers today can make any claim of avant-gardism, it must be their membership of the flex-work avant-garde.”

I doubted putting these sorts of statistics in because everyone I have spoken to knows it’s not working for them. We are exhausted from a loop of working below the national average, of not being able to plan ahead or working ourselves into the ground to do so. But also because I think, this idea didn’t come from a place of despondency, it came from a desire for more; more joy in the work that we do, more money for doing it, more time to think and plan and play together. These statistics are useful perhaps if only to gain some perspective. It is easy to normalise this way of working and it is even easier for apathy to creep in. Discussing a potential action though has given me a glimpse of excitement, a sliver of hope. I am afraid of losing this. It seems fragile right now, which is why I want to write this newsletter but it is also why it has been such a struggle to do so and why it is over two weeks late! (sorry).

For risk of this slipping into pessimistic spiral I have left out all the 2025 budget stats for the Netherlands, you can look them up here but there is a shift happening, a realignment of priorities across Europe and it doesn’t look good especially for a creative sector, which has spent the last 25 years steering the ship towards research and academia as its form of financial and cultural validation.

So what are we so afraid of? It should not come as a surprise that we are fearful of losing our autonomy. The education system trains us to become “...independent and self-aware artists and designers…with a distinctive conceptual and visual ability” (from the KABK mission statement), when you leave you set yourself up as a sole-trader, an entrepreneur and then we go on to get work based on you as an individual with a "distinctive conceptual and visual ability" and, let's be honest, often because it’s cheaper than hiring a company that has pesky overheads such as paying their employers pensions or sick leave or holiday. The recent design Biennale held here in Rotterdam reinforced this; individual designers who have a specific aesthetic or material are put on a pedestal, held up as the epitome of design. This isn't to say it isn't necessary or even a desirable level of creative freedom, perhaps it is, many disciplines have held up individuals as the ultimate authors of the work, it is more to look it in the eye and acknowledge the setup.

Much of the rhetoric around collaboration, equality and equity in our circles seems to deny this reality in favour of creating an alternative that sits outside of the system entirely, but we are so entangled it is inescapable in the immediate future. Simone Robutti puts it simply: “There is no outside”. If we keep denying this entanglement it will keep tripping us up, if we acknowledge it then we can use it to our advantage. There is a huge network of us working in this way.

I think this is part of the reason this idea got me fired up. Precisely because it seemed simultaneously radical, a kind of subversion of the system and something quite simple that could take root right now. It could address a large part of what we were struggling with, while not ignoring the fact that we are working in this atomised, competitive structure, it is how we were trained and it’s how we function.

For a long time I thought this prevalent individualist attitude was trickling down from the top, that we were inheriting these ideas from big business, the ideas of free market capitalism oozing down to us through the mechanisms of society, but just like trickle down economics it turns out this is a fallacy. I recently went to a talk by Grace Blakeley about her new book Vulture Capitalism, which kind of flipped my thinking on this. Blakeley points out that we are no longer in a competitive free market system, where the best product/service wins. Our purchasing power no longer exists because if you are unhappy with a company and you decide change the product, the likelihood is it is still owned by Unilever. Or, if a company like Boeing fails, the government bail them out and they keep operating unscathed. They do not fail, there is no survival of the fittest this is a myth. In fact she continues, large corporations are the best collaborators of all, much better than our ‘collaborative’ art and design practices (ok...that was my addition). The yarn that has been spun then, while those hoarding the wealth are collaborating is that the only way you will make it out of this underpaid over worked cycle is by working harder and more importantly alone.

On my previous trip home to London I was on a walk with my Mum in the local park. I have been walking and playing here with my family since I was a kid. The park is now owned by the heritage and nature conservation charity and membership organisation called the National Trust and it contains a few old snuff mills, the stones of which lie outside on the grass, relics of a now dead economy (and way of consuming tobacco) in England. This time on the walk I noticed some plaques explaining that the River Wandle, a chalk stream that runs through the park, was once the “hardest working river in the whole of Europe”, with more than 90 mills along its banks, including William Morris’s textile print works at Colliers Wood. This fact re-ignited my interest in William Morris and I found a PDF of his “A Factory as it Might Be” in which he outlines in 1884 a vision for the way in which industry and education might be connected in a socialist society. There is a passage which reminded me of some of the exercises we were doing on our away day, imagining XP as it might be.

“In a recent article we tried to look through the present into the future and see a factory as it might be, and got as far as the surroundings outside of it; but those externals of a true palace of industry can be only realised, naturally and without affectation by the work which is to be done in them being in all ways reasonable and fit for human beings; I mean no mere whim of some one rich and philanthropic manufacturer will make even one factory permanently pleasant and agreeable for the workers in it; he will die or be sold up, his heir will be poorer or more single-hearted in his devotion to profit, and all the beauty and order will vanish from the short-lived dream: even the external beauty in industrial concerns must be the work of society and not of individuals.” – A Factory as it Might be, William Morris

William Morris is an interesting example because, on one hand, he embodied the quintessential capitalist factory owner, while on the other, he was a staunch revolutionary socialist, fighting for more equitable working conditions. Although he was implementing these ideas within the system through the way that he ran his factories, he also realised that this had to be part of a larger strategy to change the system at large. This effort partly came in the form of the Arts and Crafts movement, which fought against a perceived drop in standards and peoples understanding of materials and their production due to industrialised processes. It was, in a sense, an educational movement that re-framed the value of the arts in society. An aesthetic and educational battle that bolstered a political one. In his description of a factory of the future there is a focus on the beauty and joy of the work. What could emerge from our collectivised incentive, also in terms of a shared vision for the creative industry? How could collective financial struggle begin to shape the industry and its value at large?

Another even older example are guilds. Medieval guilds were set up to protect the quality of different crafts and to provide support and training for their members. From this framework across Europe emerged the first Universities in Bologna, Paris and Oxford. This is interesting in the context of Extra Practice which we often describe as a “School after School” and many of our shared ambitions come back to education in one form or another.

The guild structure meant that each craft had a guild and this was directly associated with the city in which it operated. The guilds then, through informal education (an apprenticeship > journeyman > master) system decided who and who could not trade in the city as a result they had a lot of power over the economy. Some similar examples of this still exist like the RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) of which you can only become a member once you are a registered Architect. Many others only exist now in a purely symbolic form acting as exclusive members clubs with dated costumes and rituals. There has however, been interest in the ideas behind the guilds since the mediaeval period. In his 1928 book Roads to Freedom, Bertrand Russell wrote of a new type of guild structure for workers. He lucidly describes the difference between Socialists, that want a bigger state and Syndicalists (read unionists) that would like to see the eventual abolition of the state. He goes on to outline a third way, called Guild Socialism in which guilds look after the workers as “producers” and the state provides for people as “consumers”. What might this structure look like today? All the various associations and artists run spaces across Europe acting as guilds, all connected, setting rates and providing support structures for the creative sector?

Such historic examples are evocative and exciting as they align with a specific political picture I have in my head…and perhaps because it is fun to cosplay an alternative medieval reality. They are risky because they carry so much baggage and align the work with a particular political movement that can ostracise people rather than tackling the issue itself: What actions will help us live better, more fulfilled lives and have more agency in the future of our field as a whole? So before I get carried away with guilds and overthrowing the system, let’s go back down to the scale of XP.

In his brilliant essay/newsletter Seven Mantras for Political Holism, Simone Robutti uses the mantra “Our Enemy is Netfilx” to explain that if we are trying to do any community organising within an attention economy it will have to be more enjoyable than Netflix or any other platform vying for our attention. We have to want to do this at the end of the working day, it has to be fun. With this in mind, let's talk spreadsheets…

We began to run the numbers and see how this income pooling could smooth out this precarity? This after all seems like a good first step, to give us some breathing space. The graph shows how things can smooth out, how we could have a regular pay-check, how for some, right now it would mean more pay, for some less (obviously). It also revealed certain trends; when we are getting paid and when the collective down times are. What it doesn’t show is the potential social ramifications (positive and negative). For this to be worth while and motivating there has to be a belief that this will do more than average out wages.

I woke up excited to work on this (not watch Netflix), to see how it might change our situations. This feeling also gave me a glimpse back into the period during covid where I was living with Ben and Kirsten and we were receiving the TOZO grant, which covered our living costs. It could have been a great test for a Universal Basic Income, except any money extra that you generated had to be paid back against what you received. Even so, this regular income and changed social dynamic relieved a feeling of competitiveness which I didn’t even realise was there. It was also the period that we were free to develop many meaningless (hand sewing a top which I then shrunk in the wash) and meaningful projects and collaborations including Good Times Bad Times Radio. Could we learn from these experiences and re-create these conditions ourselves?

So will Extra Practice actually do this I hear you ask? Where can I sign up to this new socialist guild society?! As you will see from the XP responses below talking to people about the idea has brought up a lot of concerns as well as enthusiasm. Working through these concerns and thinking about how they could be taken into consideration in the system has been revealing of just how little we are doing in this space. Why did we not know each other's salaries or discuss our financial ambitions? Why had we not sat down to calculate how much it was actually costing us to run a business, agreed on rates, or set working conditions for the types of projects we were working on? Really enacting this salary pooling idea obviously takes a lot of trust but all the things that we should put in place before we start sharing our income, that we can do with no real risk. For now, as a thought experiment it is a really useful tool to make us think about all the things we should be sharing and backing each other up on. Already doing this I think can give us a glimpse of the benefits of collective power. If when we get there we decide to share our incomes then so be it. If we learnt anything from the Extra Practice opening party it’s that if you pretend to dance you are actually dancing.

PS. Here we have created an open document where you can anonymously fill in your 2024 income. As Emma mentioned we have almost 400 people in this newsletter, which would be a pretty interesting pool of information and a vision of what this could look like as a larger solidarity effort. So if you are a freelancer and reading this newsletter please feel free to fill it in and take a peak!

Elliott: It made me feel like running away. I just don’t know… it seems a bit… utopian. I wonder how it will work. It seems ideal… but the practicalities of it… also, it feels like, I’d be worried that it would create more work for us all. And also like, emotional work too. I just wouldn’t want to create, like, problems. Not that it would, but like... It would have the potential to create more problems. It takes a lot more communication. It’s like defining the relationship, sharing the bankaccount. It’s like a marriage. I think something like… you all said like, in the interview for TCR, with this concept like, the money comes from outside of the space, so we don’t have to think about that inside of the space, cause that can be stressful and create problems. I thought that was really nice concept. But I also understand the reason for, wanting to make things more financially stable.

Gijs:
Excitement. A kind of pioneers-fever from thinking radically together. Could we pay ourselves a wage? 🏡 Could XP be like a record label? Lil shame. When realising that what sounded radical was perhaps a bit like what others call a ‘company’Fear. Not so much about losing control over my money or being a burden on lesser months, as these luckily were already represented by others (as you can probably read here), but about opening the books. Personal finance usually remains just that, personal, but when sharing income it seems wise to align on what we earn, have, and think we need. Would it turn out I’m earning way less, like it always does with my non-art friends? Or am I suddenly one of the richest, with my relatively stable buffer? And how does this all affect expectations? How does everyone even relate to money?! Excitement. Again, as I realise these questions are where it becomes real, and I feel both curious to learn about our money-relations and eager to start trying things, even when small and not very radical, yet.

Ben:
Right now, as I take a kind of forced work hiatus, the idea of combining incomes gives me a feeling of conflicted anxiety. On the one hand, I know that this financial model is built exactly for this kind of moment I find myself in, where one of us can't work or doesn't have work and that it can act as the support net. On the other hand, I have this inner-entrepreneur/capitalist/professional Ben telling me that "you should be able to stand on my own two feet and not need support from anyone else". This is a type of Ben that I would like to unlearn and it makes me wonder what else I/we will need to do in order to move away from prioritising individual independence? What kind of social/spatial/infrastructural changes will we implement to complement this financial interdependence? I think the anxiousness I have might just be a reflection of my current state, because I know on a deeper level I am truly excited to see how this might function and how it might impact our day-to-day lives.

Kirsten: My initial gut feeling during the Away Day was one of skepticism, which may have been amplified by the fact that others seemed so positive and eager to jump on board. I didn’t feel as ready to share such financial responsibility and become further entangled as a group on this level. Not sure if it was just internalised capitalism speaking, but I feared losing autonomy. How would we navigate different individual needs, privileges, struggles, and desires? After some deeper reflection, I’ve become more in touch again with my curiosity around UBI and how a collective model like this could foster healthier ways of working and living. Right now, I’m at a point where I still find it hard to pin-point and pick apart my remaining fears, but I do want to explore, articulate and challenge them, and ultimately give those radical financial propositions a chance.

Emma: In the moment it made me really excited. Some boldness, yes, something radical, some real fucking commitment!!!!! It surprised me a lot that suddenly most of us seemed quite down for this idea, it made me feel proud (also cause my dad was there haha) and hopeful. However, inserting my numbers into our income overview of 2024 humbled me a bit; I didn’t expect to be the lowest earner and that suddenly made me feel like my enthusiasm could be interpreted in a very different way..:p But then I remembered painting the walls and laying the floor of the new studio last year and how a basic income would make stuff like that feel like fairly compensated work. I think energy and time are the most important currencies flowing within XP, money is just another one – why not treat them all as equally important shared resources?

🕳️ Gijs' Self-model-making group will sometimes have 'shadow sessions' to dive deeper into things that come up in the main monthly session. On April 1 from 19.00 to 21.30 an on-site shadow session with Savva Dudin will start from Sylvia Wynter's genre's of being human, and use explorative diagramming as a tool to find other genres.

🪞 April 17 19.00 - 21.30 (hybrid) ~ Self-model-making session 2: 'Isolated Selves', on reviewing ruling ideas of the self behind phenomena like self-help, self-employment, self-improvement. More info and stay tuned via the self-model-making newsletter

🧵 on April 24 at 19:30 we host another Mending Circle with Wietske! Come fix, darn, mend your clothes (and soul) with us. RSVP is appreciated, send an e-mail to wietskenutma@hotmail.nl - we will share some more details on what to bring/expect on our IG soon.

📊 XP Away Day / Business Trip Attempt nr. 2

䷱ Mini Workshop 4: I-Ching with Kirsten

⇠❑❍⇢Mini-workshop 5: Polarities with Gijs

🐝 Mini-workshop 6: XP as farmland with Emma

🤝 Coaching with Koen the consultant

A Solid Crew?

Reality Check

A shared consciousness…for individualism

Historical precedent and fear of taking sides

A Freak in the Sheets

🏃‍♂️

💸

🏝️

🕸️

🔋

🌻 UPCOMING EVENTS AT XP

Thank you for reading, we are very curious about your thoughts so please DO NOT HESITATE to hit reply and rant back at us!

xpxpxpxpxpxp

﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿📊 XP Away Day / Business Trip Attempt nr. 2

﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿䷱ Mini Workshop 4: I-Ching with Kirsten

﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿⇠❑❍⇢Mini-workshop 5: Polarities with Gijs

﻿🐝 Mini-workshop 6: XP as farmland with Emma

﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿🤝 Coaching with Koen the consultant

﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿A Solid Crew?

﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿

﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿Reality Check

﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿A shared consciousness…for individualism