By now we share an affinity

...although we haven't met. It appears we are aligned, through metropolitan associations that imply shared sentiments. Which is how we arrive. In this form. Implied and implicated,together. But amidst this grass-roots solidarity, enacted through D.I.Y. aesthetics, low production values, necessity and good will, mustn't we attempt, at the very least, to detonate the axioms that position us 'here' and not 'there'? Free markets require a sense of morality, fairness, justice, legitimacy, and yet we steep our opposition in normative behaviors that barely dissent, barely deviate, and barely transcend. We imagine rebellion is the refusal to accumulate. We measure resistance through diminished returns. Failure is good! We fail! We are good! The logic of our battle cry replaces one value system with another. And this amalgamation makes it difficult to hone in on issues that are more complex... Capitalism, like other oppressions, is violent precisely because it is difficult to lose. It transmits through our attachments.

(Sarah Pierce, "By now we share an affinity", A4 flyer produced for the Unfair fair, curated by Cecilia Canziani and Vincent Honoré, Rome from Friday 29 February to Monday 3 March 2008. The Unfair fair was a sort of event, situation, exhibition, intervention, action and infiltration timed to coincide with two new contemporary art fairs in Rome - ARTE and ROMA. Whereas the raison d'être of the contemporary art fair may be characterised by maximization and accumulation, the conditions of the Unfair fair relate more comfortably to the states of minimization and disintegration. Photograph courtesy SKC Archive, Belgrade.)