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.

We tried to summarize prevailing questions like What does ‘success’ mean to XP? What is XP without the physical space? How to balance personal practice and Extra Practice? How can we keep XP alive? into one grand superquestion:

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.

📊 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

﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿📊 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