POSSIBLES - Manifesto

Alternate Routes to a Reborn City

Alternate routes is another name for shortcuts, the footpaths made by citizens to cut across a space, itineraries not desired by city planners.

Alternate routes are the footpaths across the grass, the short beelines to the subway station or the bus stop.

Alternate routes are the holes in the fencing along the railway track that offer the best way to get from one neighbourhood to another.

Alternate routes are a way of moving quickly to reconstruct the city in accordance with our movements, of reinventing it to coincide with our ideals, far from the uninformed centralized decisions that do not take how we live into account.

Alternate routes are the road to emancipation, indeed emancipation itself.

We have taken these alternate routes, we have traced them.

Now we know what we can do, and that awareness is galvanizing. It gives us strength to act. It tells us that we are as powerful as the powerful. It turns our obstacles into pillars, our fragilities into promises and our anger into steadfastness.

The city is our first horizon, our refuge. We want to rebuild it. We do not see it as smooth or calm, but as fluid, prosperous, bustling, respectful, breathable, welcoming in its imperfection, accessible in its abundance.

Alternate Route number 1

Repossessing the City

We believe that the municipal entity is now the perimeter where anything is possible.

Where democracy can rise once again – restless, agile, exuberant. We want to develop our "awareness of place".

We want the city – the alleys, streets, neighbourhoods, buildings, boroughs, territory – to become or to once again become OURS. We want neighbourhoods where no one can stop us, apartments from which no one can evict us.

We want to design beaches, give new life to overgrown empty lots, raise our flag in forgotten wasteland. We want to unearth the sparkling rivers hidden under the concrete and asphalt of our streets and our habits.

We are rising up against the dispossession of our lives because of top-down decisions. We want to dream in order to act, and to act in order to dream. We believe that this re-appropriation can be achieved through art, that art is the condition for this effervescence.

Alternate Route number 2

Concern for Others

The city is a forest of thorns for many of us, a merciless trap, and we want to encourage the dispossessed to organize, to rise like a swelling wave or hurricane, to burst through our cocoons, shake up our creature comforts.

We want the silent and the quiet to flare up and speak out. It is up to us to create a close knit city where the needs of disadvantaged communities are listened to, where regulations and indifference wither away.

We want a "mother city" that takes to her breast the oldest and the least mobile among us. We believe that it is electrifying to be oneself with and for others. We want to blow on the embers of that within us that longs to hug and to embrace.

Alternate Route number 3

Building the Immediate Future

We want all of our lives to have meaning. We want to be ushered into the future, not toward disintegration.

We have a plan, we know what to do.

We want to swim in an ocean of empirical knowledge, climb a mountain of good practices, learn from the experience of those who have already ventured down those paths so that we can invent our chaotic, fruitful tomorrows.

Our gardens will flourish, our systems of transport will be fluid and communal, our economy in service to the community. We shall sow beauty.

We will have found, in the daily spectacle of people, places and faces, the energy of desire. We will have regained the desire to want desire.

POSSIBLES is the place where those desires intersect and interact.

POSSIBLES is the encounter that leads to stark yet hopeful images, electrifying metamorphosis, disconcerting language, life-saving plunges, magical objects, exciting shelters, desires full of hope, colourful, succulent appetizers, mystical singing, bracing gusts of liberation, thirst for recognition, moments of silence.

POSSIBLES conveys our desires as citizens thirsting for emancipation.

POSSIBLES is the path that lies within each of US, a bud about to blossom.

POSSIBLES is a sense of urgency, because the sky is full of coal.

POSSIBLES is art that sheds light on our words, uttered in darkness.

The planet is faltering, it cries out for our help. It's time to act. We will no longer suppress our thoughts. Let us be torrential in expressing our ideas, let's make our city a dynamic impetus for change. Let these POSSIBLES take root in our communities, full of meaning and bound for the future.

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