Responding to the Parisian communards revolutionary demands for the reconfiguration of urban space as a flourishing commons, Peter Kropotkin asked: “To what should the two million citizens of Paris turn their attention when they would no longer be catering to the luxurious fads and amusements of Russian princes, Romanian grandees, and the wives of Berlin financiers?” And his answer? The conversion of Paris’ senselessly luxurious parks, squares and aristocratic chateauxs into lush, vital, world sustaining community gardens.

And so, taking this revolutionary historical vision of urban gardening as our starting point, the ULWC (Ultimate Leisure Workers’ Club), together with Pauline Perplexe, welcomes you for a week-long convergence in the Bièvre district garden. Over the week we will communally explore strategies for the enchanting of Bièvre as a site of insurgent festivity – asking how gardens and gardening may be assumed as standpoints against the compulsory world of work, domesticity and alienation. Approaching this site as a medium for communal joy and autonomous artistic expression, we imagine these activities taking the form of what Kristin Ross described in our Assembly last year, as a “semi-autonomous space of care, festivity, mutual-aid”.

ULTIMATE LEISURE WORKERS’ CLUB
Drawing their initial inspiration from the 19th century Parisian workers’ clubs that laid the social foundations for the rise of the Paris Commune, the ULWC is a school of nightly conspiracy against the world of work, a militant research collective, a launching pad for driftage and a shelter for uncouth revellers of the night.