I began working on micro-publics as a response to the question of what positive or hopeful futures do the radio practices of the 1970s and 80s cast forward? What was it that made those works hold our collective imagination of a socialist potential of the present and future? Ultimately, my response was to follow in their footsteps. To deprioritise the radio and instead look at the people, what they said and what they saw in the practices enacted.
Ash Amin coined the term micro publics as a response to racist talking points of the 1990’s and early 2000’s. An urban theorist, he saw localised and national plans that reinforce community boundaries and identities as arming racist talking points around who had claim to ‘Englishness’ as a community identity. His counter was an increased attention on micro publics, localised social spaces that are rooted in everyday cultural exchange’s; youth centres, parks, schools, cafes and community gardens.
micro-publics was about centering Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of a “molecular revolution”. Focusing on what it means to make small and meaningful changes in the world, against scalability or dreams of grand and sweeping changes. micro-publics isn’t about sitting and waiting for a revolution or a wider movement to change the world. It’s about the revolution that’s present, the work being done and work still to do now. It’s about opening things up, ourselves, our eyes, our scope, our desires and putting them into the world.
It’s about wanting and seeing where that exists or can still exist. Looking both at our feet and at the ground around it, searching for others feet nearby.
micro-publics is a reminder that politics lives and breathes in the streets and on the pavements. It’s about the importance of regularity and the banal or mundane. That love is fostered and deepened through these repeats. It’s a reminder that the potential for these repeats are everywhere. It’s to say that the man in the grocery store is your neighbour, he is a friend, his a loved one and should be treated as such. He can be curious too and you should let him be. Be curious back.
It’s about the labour and importance of social reproduction. It’s about unpicking the pretence of power and aesthetics of authority by taking political discussions out of the gallery, the lecture theatre, the discourse space and into the street. Where it lives and truly breathes on contact with the living world. To enact a living politics in the people present. It’s about, where productive, bringing public space and it’s people into the gallery, the lecture theatre and the discourse space. Claiming back those spaces and making them spaces of exchanging more than just money and power.
It’s about selling apples in the gallery and making art in the grocery store.
The first iteration of micro-publics debuted as part of In/Human Infrastructures by Xeno-Futurism and taking place on the street outside Gossamer Fog.
04.06.2026 - micro publics and spaces of social reproduction