the right to swim -- 24/06/2026

Despite its placement directly on a large river bed, opportunities to swim in London are highly limited to the paid infrastructures of gym pools, lido’s and the ponds (specifically speaking the Hampstead Heath Ponds). Some of these are so-so but most of them are fairly great. Specifically the outdoor pool at Better Gyms ‘Oasis’ centre (near TCR and Covent Garden), is magical, with a sauna, garden and sunbathing area and even an indoor pool for when it’s too cold. The pool itself is fairly rudimentary and mostly built for laps, but the experience of swimming there is never undercut by a lack of things to do. It almost feels cut out of the yuppie culture of the 80s-90s with its cramped but aspirational sauna and its topless sunbathing balcony. At roughly £5 per entry, for a once every-so-often treat it’s not too expensive.

oasis pool

No doubt there are those that can afford to make the trip more regularly either through how they prioritise their budget, having a larger income or memberships. This shapes the social landscape of the space. On most days the pool is frequented by those working locally at various white collar jobs in the city and the chatter reflects that. It’s a great place to hang out and get to know what its like to work and live in London.

Other Better Gyms reflect their more suburban status. Wavelengths in Deptford is a great place for Sauna chat and hearing about the local celebrities. They amplify the social landscape and culture surrounding them, operating as a gathering point for cultural exchange. Like libraries, local stores and other spaces of everyday exchange, they act as, what Ash Amin calls, a ‘micro public’. A site of everyday social and cultural exchange, one which strengthens forms of community building and organising. However, despite this infrastructure being somewhat publicly managed (through the UK council system), these spaces aren’t public, they are spaces of private admission.

The Better brand (legally Greenwich Leisure Ltd) are a success of the private management model in the UK. A social enterprise organisation that grew from managing library and gym infrastructure in Greenwich, to quickly becoming the largest provider of fitness centres in London. Taking over the management and provisioning of social infrastructure from councils struggling to maintain them, they apply commercial strategies to keep them open and functioning, while making sure costs are still somewhat accessible. In terms of this type of privatisation, this is far from the most predatory. The gyms are nice, the spaces clean and the prices low in comparison to their fully private equivalents. All this to say, go use their facilities where you can afford it. They are more than worth it and do still serve a social and community focus.

But they are also emblematic of general changes in social infrastructure in the UK. Councils or government run institutions can’t afford to maintain services and so, rather than looking to provide better infrastructure in order to manage funding across the UK, the solution provided is that it must be privatised. This is visible across a broad range of institutions, from health services to power and water, even the public spaces and parks we gather in.

As observed by philosopher and social critic Simone Weil, we don’t value the social needs represented by our roots to a community and history. A part of the current malaise of rising anxiety, depression and isolation, is due to the way our society dehumanises and denies the need of the soul. We have a government that actively allows the literal starvation of its people, privatising access to housing and even access to reliable sources of food. What then must it think of our social needs, those fulfilled through spaces of social gathering and exchange?

This isn’t to simply move the responsibility over these things to government infrastructures. Shrug our shoulders and say “what could we do in the face of systematic issues?”. No this exchange is mirrored back through how we now view these needs. To trace an obvious contemporary connection to the words of philosopher Byung Chul Han, we live in a society that uses positive reinforcement as a cohesive force. We are encouraged to better ourselves through achievement and competitive factors, hustle culture and fitness, not for the emotional benefits, but to sate a craving to be more than what we were yesterday. The consequence is a lack of time spent seeing oneself reflected in the community that surrounds them. Not speaking competitively, but instead convivially. What if you weren’t unique and instead the same as everyone else and thereby worthy of not needing to always be taking a step forward? That in constantly seeking to move forward we are cognitively elevating and isolating ourselves from those around us, thereby stifling our spiritual need for roots and community.

this is the most attractive site on earth

Burgess Park is a large green space located just below Elephant and Castle in South London. In it, there is a fairly large artificially created lake. Currently it’s a private fishing pond leased out to a local fishing group, but speaking to one of the members of that group, he tells me that it was once a community outdoor pool. Kids from the local area would go swimming and hangout on its banks. Oddly I can’t verify this beyond first hand accounts but at some point it was filled with fish and hence was a registered fishing spot and people stopped swimming there. It went from being a public social space provisioning the community to something only accessible to those with a licence.

It’s beautiful that community infrastructure such as what is provided by Better Gyms exists and is still providing a space for connection, however, its privatisation and pay-to-access structure still isolates it to those that can afford to see swimming as less of a luxury and more as a social or spiritual necessity. My first memory comes from a public pool. From a swimming lesson when I was 4, what it felt like to crash into and under the water for the first time. The muffled soundscape of splashing and crashing around me. I still become that kid again when I spend time by the water and it fills a joy that is hard to reproduce outside of the feeling of slipping under the water, feeling the weight of the water and being totally at one with my body.

Maybe it’s silly to pick swimming as a social necessity, but it represents a point of conviviality that can exist outside of capitalist structures. Hanging out by the pool is important. Friends and colleagues more in touch with today’s late teens and early 20 somethings tell me that drinking culture is massively on the decline. People don’t want to go out drinking together anymore. On the one side this is a net good for health. ‘England has an alcohol problem’ has been an international joke for a while, but it really is true. However, there is a large amount of social and community culture in the UK built out of drinking. It was a space to talk and share ideas, political and non-political. Now people seem more interested in the gym, but are people really in community in those spaces? I wouldn’t really know, it’s not my scene, but the descriptions of my friends who paint a bleak picture of people mostly keeping to themselves.

other spaces to swim

Despite the convenience of Better Gyms, my favourite place to swim in London is Shadwell Basin, a small dock just off the Thames, that explicitly bans swimming. The water quality is poor (at best) on a good day and it’s really best not to think about it. Everyday in the summer a random assortment of people from different parts of London gather, listen to music, cook and eat food and jump off the docks into the water below. It’s beautiful. Sometimes I don’t go to swim, just to sit and read in amongst this small community that has little in common beyond wanting a space to gather, swim and hangout by the water. It’s not lack of paid entry that brings me there, but simply how open and free the space feels. It’s never too crowded but also never empty, always buzzing with people excited to hangout and play around the water.

a pool party i had at shadwell basin last year

24.06.2026 - the right to swim

more ->

kat

my body without organs - a brief attempt -- 23/06/2026

Just over a year ago I started reading through Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari A Thousand Plateaus (1980). I never finished it. I began chronologically, but upon getting to The Geology of Morals with its stratums and substratums, I then skipped around, roughly covering maybe 5-7 chapters in total. Regardless, I loved the idea of The Body Without Organs and grabbed a loose (but useful to my own work) definition of it.

there is a lot of memes about this online

In this post I want to try to outline my understanding of The Body Without Organs, perhaps as a kind of ground level reasoning rather than anything holistic or exhaustive. I want to really highlight that this isn’t supposed to be definitive. Over the course of A Thousand Plateaus, the concept shifts and changes to embody pretty much whatever it needs to for the analogy they are making. This is more just something to maybe start with and build off of if you are working with the term for the first time or trying to make your own attempt at reading it.

To start The Body Without Organs despite its allusions to the material, is more of a lens and less of a tangible ‘thing’ or ‘infrastructure’. It operates more as a thought exercise, through which one can encounter interesting relations. The Body Without Organs is a form of open ontology. Pulling from container theory, it’s a way of gathering and understanding information. As an exercise, get a piece of blank paper and write say; land, suncream and portraits. Leave lots of space between them and lots of room at the sides.

example

Now, add other elements to this page, either from what’s around you or other elements. Remove any lines or links between these data points and add yourself to the page. What you’ve formed is A Body Without Organs. A set of information, not pre formed around their relations but instead fragmentary. Now that they’ve been brought into conversation with one another, you can start building loose relationships, and through that some kind of meaning can take form. Let’s take suncream and portraits. Both are often oil based, there is an almost painterly way that sunscreen is applied and both centre somewhat around the idea of masking the self, either through interpretation or physically. We can keep going but the idea is that there is no concrete or one logic to the grouping, it’s multifacitied and open to discovery and curiosity.

A Body Without Organs is literal, it’s a structure that has no binding or core framework, something where information is prioritised equally regardless of how tangential it may be. This idea was building in contrast to the rigidity of Freudian analysis. In Freud’s conception of Psychoanalysis, everything is rooted by core archetypes (eg. the mother and the father), which then define their surroundings. But in The Body Without Organs, we want to break out of those constraints to find other connections and forms of knowledge, mimicking communism’s drive to equalise people through their labor, Deleuze and Guattari seek to equalise information in its analysis.

In The Body Without Organs, relations are not hard bindings but instead something to loosely tease out and explore. There is also no true border for this information, as it requires that one can bring anything in from outside that space and so find relationships between information already present. All conceptualisations have some form of link, but the point of this exercise is to try to shake off easy or socially constructed relations, to instead find something ‘new’. To ‘think outside the box’ so to speak. By no means is this done from a top down position, but instead, you yourself are immersed within these relations. When starting to trace faint lines between data points, you must also be able to understand your own relationship and how that might lead to how you view information. It’s far less about sitting back and viewing it like a blueprint and far more about sitting within it and feeling it out.

I like their image of the transparent map. A way of temporarily linking different concepts or ideas, without marking those relations as fixed or permanent placements on a grid. The impermanence is important here as without it, it quickly becomes its own set of predeterminate relations.

It’s a helpful exercise to do when you are feeling trapped by cultural or social contexts, to pull the information all together into one space, to let it breathe before expecting anything from it. Umberto Eco extols a similar philosophy in his book The Name Of The Rose, where his protagonist, William of Baskerville, admitting to the potential of false relations, addresses our POV character and states “ instead of conceiving only one, I imagine many, so I become the slave of none.” It’s a similar philosophy, instead of searching through information, seeking a ‘true’ relation between different data points, we can instead open ourselves to the potential of a diverse set of relations.

This interpretation is by no means holistic, or even correct. However, when dealing with philosophers like Deleuze and Guattari a productive definition or interpretation is far far more valuable than something pursuing a ‘truth’. A Thousand Plateaus famously ties itself in knots, contradicting itself or adding new qualifiers of to what ‘A Body Without Organs’ truly is. Some of these bring up other interesting questions, but the base layer - a lens through which data points are presented abstract of a hierarchy - feels an interesting enough concept. Like a field of possibilities, but one in which you are immersed rather than detached.

23.06.2026 - my body without organs

kat

micro publics and spaces of social reproduction -- 04/06/2026

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

kat

what would it take to make that now? -- 27/05/2026

I saw the Wooster Group perform the other week at the Cornet, the type of theatre its so rare to see getting made nowadays. With all the hallmarks and energy of that period of the 1970s in which everything new in art seemed to be happening in New York. Coming out of the theatre we decided to walk off our pent up excitement, tracing past Hyde Park and then into Soho, myself lost in nostalgia for my own background in experimental theatre, and Yasamin with a longing to try recreate it somehow. We both reached a conclusion that this type of work just can’t be made in London anymore, not because it’s not the 1970s or it’s not New York or we don’t have the same kind of training, but simply that it seems impossible to get the kind of freedom and space they had to make it.

For much of the past ten years I’ve been obsessed with the culture and work that came out of the 1960s-1980s New York experimental art scene. Your Tina Girouard’s, Yoko Ono’s, Teching Hesih’s and Philip Glass’, even going so far as to make multiple works in conversation with two of those names, the most overt being 2022 - 2023’s I Love Or Hate Everyday, which was an interpretation of Hesih’s One Year Performance 1980–1981, or Time Piece for short. While making that work, I constantly felt the difference between our conditions when making these supposedly similar works. Mine constantly had to bend and fit around my day, truly taking place in the gaps between photos, while Hesih didn’t have to interact with the pressures of work and life admin. He spent an entire year just on this one piece, secluded from concerns around rent payment and the responsibilities of a job. It became a constant nagging of “if only, if only, if only” and felt like a stark reminder that times have changed and the lost of living has only ever gone up.

Looking at reviews of the recent Wooster Group tour, people seem to agree, you can’t make this type of art in this type of economy. Largely I agree, the price of space is astronomical (more than £200 a month for a studio space seems criminal) and most artists must be working at least a side hustle if not two, just to keep a roof over their head. But something within this forfeit seems overly pessimistic. What if, if not materially, than spiritually, we could recreate something of the magic produced under those conditions.

Running several of my own projects and groups that lie outside of structures of institutional support (LCLO and Temporary Space), the expectation that one can make any money from this feels squarely off the table. It’s impractical and feels frankly naive to go into it with any kind of expectation other than that you’ll spend far more than you’ll make. But did the Wooster Group start as a business venture? I highly doubt they felt lucky or indebted to the wider economic system that they were founded within. The 1970s in New York was notorious for its lack of support or funding for artists. While maybe not as foolhardy as it seems now, becoming an artist during that period was just as difficult and unstable. As the recent film adaptation of Linda Rosenkrantz’s 1974 interview with photographer Peter Hujar beautifully paints, artists of the 70s also spent most of their time worrying about invoices, rent and who knew who.

So what would it take to make something spiritually similar to the Wooster Group today? Fine space is at a premium, but then why not host it in the park or the street? Or even your living room or bedroom? It would be remiss of me not to highlight that these settings also were big textual considerations of the day. While you would lose some of the advantages that a regular rehearsal space and a stage gives in terms of props and materials, that loss also brings its own set of advantages and textures to play with. While we can look at some of these works as impossible feats of days gone by, they all started with broadly the same question. What would it take to make something that came before but with our budget or reach? And how can we make the most of that difference?

27.05.2026 - what would it take to make that now?

kat

ears to hear, mouth to speak -- 19/05/2026

“The other Algerians present in the room would receive the echo of this voice through the privileged interpreter who, at the end of the broadcast, was literally besieged. Specific questions would then be asked of this incarnated voice. Those present wanted to know about a particular battle mentioned by the French press in the last twenty-four hours, and the interpreter, embarrassed, feeling guilty, would sometimes have to admit that the Voice had not mentioned it.”

Frantz Fanon, This is Voice of Algeria, from A Dying Colonialism (1959)

Since reading Frantz Fanon’s This is the Voice of Algeria, I’ve been obsessed with this passage. In it he describes how people would listen to the revolutionary broadcasting conducted by The Voice Of Fighting Algeria, during the Algerian Revolution of the 1950’s. It brings out a yearning in me that is difficult to articulate, something I feel I’m missing and struggling to find a space for. It’s not just the community or the hope present in the image it paints - one where everyone is listening and waiting for their world to change - it’s something deeper, something that feels rarer in our current moment. A moment in which objective realism and social constructivism feel like two totalising oppositions to one another, rather than responses to each other, useful structures that together, help to give our world some meaning.

I want to focus on Fanon’s text here as his work is the origin point for everything contained in the performance (Micro-Publics) this essay is attached to. It’s a companion piece rather than a summary. This image carries into the piece, it haunts it, but is something I won’t be discussing too much in the performance, which is more focused on the ideas and infrastructure that was built on top of these images. Consider this the prelude to an action, or hopefully something more.

During the broadcast the interpreter becomes akin to a hunter in pursuit of The Voice. With the French Colonial Government enacting what Fanon describes as “sound-wave warfare” (an attempt to jam wave lengths by broadcasting over them, thereby making them inaudible) the interpreter, using precise wrist movements, must follow the path of the broadcast, around and in avoidance of the French signals, in hope of reaching The Voice. Even once audible to them, the signal is fugitive, on the run from the occupations counter broadcast, forever finding and slipping through the cracks. Sometimes the signal wouldn’t speak directly, but through proxies, other channels that could hear The Voice and were tasked with relaying its messages. The interpreter must be plugged in and switched on, listening, open to multiple channels.

In its fugitivity, The Voice also escapes its need for credibility or qualification. In direct conflict with the colonial engines that produce and authenticate ‘objective truth’, it sees the hypocrisy and decides not to participate. ‘Objectivity’ as a qualification to be held against meaning¹, stands oppositional to truth, rather than in pursuit of it. The declaration of ‘objective truth’ is like the counter broadcast of the occupation, an act of pursuit, something that forces meaning underground, tries to make it inaudible. The Voice refuses the structures presented by the French occupation, seeing them for what they are; infrastructures of oppression, only upheld by attempts to engage with or critique them.

The information received by the interpreter represents a fissure, where parts of it remain but others are only present in their absence. That absence opens up space, allowing gaps that social knowledge can then fill. When data is incomplete we are built to make assumptions, form connections and build meaning. Those gaps only become visible when someone has the space to invest time and labour into the question, creating a subjectivity that helps in reading the absences. Intelligent critique doesn’t just come from a familiarity with the topic but with an investment, an emotional relationship. As described by philosopher Byung Chul-Han, prior to the internet, getting access to a piece of information would be a labour, but one important for the cultivation of curiosity and vital to the construction of meaning. First you start with a question, following that with the pursuit of a book or person that might hold the answer and through this a relationship is formed with the question. You have to sit with your question, the gratification is delayed. It takes on a personal dimension, giving space to hold this information against other sources or your own understanding, find it lacking and move forward looking for other answers. Something I’d like to add to this observation is its social dimension. When we attempt a fixed and rigid relationship, both to the delivery of information and that information itself, we leave little room to build curiosity and challenge things as they are present. It all just becomes noise.

“Very often only the operator, his ear glued to the receiver, had the unhoped-for opportunity of hearing the Voice.”

The interpreter acts as a representative of the information that’s being passed on. Through the laborious process of pursuing The Voice, he must now grapple with the parts he managed to hold onto. The people in the room have questions, and in vocalising these questions, allow for the information to interact with meaning. While only the interpreter can hear, the people are waiting, though not passively. Through their questions they are bringing knowledge from outside the group, asking about “particular battles” and events that they’ve heard about elsewhere. In this vignette, it’s the interpreters job to facilitate the community discussion. Translating the information into something useful, something that serves those in the community. From this collective activation, meaning is assembled outside and against structures of control, measured by the people and applied to the world. Information only breathes in its contact with a broader and collective (though not always unanimous) ‘meaning’.

The image Fanon uses, is itself an act of meaning making. It’s not made clear that it comes from a specific moment witnessed by Fanon, instead he is retelling a history but in the aural tradition. Not date stamped and without dressing the information in the guise of ‘objectivity’, but instead looking at the broader situation and considering how best to form and convey meaning from it. Forcing the validation of the ‘objective’ on his retelling, would only limit its impact, its emotional conveyance and the meaning at the core of his writing.

“The listener would compensate for the fragmentary nature of the news by an autonomous creation of information.”

In our present context, we live besieged by the requirements of ‘objectivity’. Verification and authentication are the currencies of modern day information exchange, so much so that ‘objectivity’ is enshrined as something taken for granted in most of our interactions with technology. Large Language Models through their ability to sort through millions of data points, manufacture ‘objectivity’ within their results (despite ChatGPT’s small disclaimer that it is sometimes inaccurate). They construct meaning on your behalf, collating thousands of opinions and fragments of information, they present you with a ‘truth’. They are built to hide the process by which this ‘truth’ emerges, obscuring the role of translation and interpretation, ensuring that you can never truly know a piece of information presented by these models. It lacks a complexity that can only be found in grasping and wrestling with the thing itself. Its base assumption fails at the first hurdle, to assume a singular and total understanding is a fallacy. We live steeped in coincidences and contradictions, but these models don’t engage and can’t account for that. It’s deemed inconvenient for something to be beyond a simplistic or impersonal account.

Fanon gets at something lacking in the contemporary formation of meaning. When meeting reality, multifaceted and community driven forms of meaning making are vital in upending structures of control. While it’s important to believe in some basic principles, one’s own relationship to these structures is vital for the information to be more just context-light facts. We must hold this information to communities and worlds larger than our own. What fascinates me about Fanon’s image is not its lack of the scientific (the technology of the radio) or dissemination of the specialist (the interpreter), it’s how these elements are tested, their direct engagements with the community. The way it focuses on the social, the group on hand to measure these statements, hold them to account and evaluate their value. This community isn’t made up of specialists, Fanon doesn’t paint an image of fighters receiving orders, people whose relationship to the information is formed by action. Instead he focuses on ordinary people, engaged and invested in the revolution and participating through their belief.

The structures of ‘objectivity’ often leave me feeling suffocated, anxious to claim any kind of meaning or understanding worth discussing. When you take meaning and significance, and hold it to the standard of an ‘objective truth’, it becomes both the most important measure of the world and thereby so big that it becomes personally meaningless. Currently, we can have ‘answers’ to everything instantly. No conflict or friction, no need for pursuit or more curiosity than the fleeting and instantaneous. You don’t get time with the information, or space to question or build an emotional relationship to it. So we turn inwards, we seek some form of answer to ourselves. Make ourselves into something unknowable, but we forget that meaning is only truly made in its interaction with the tangible world that exists around us. Without meaning, subjectivity applied to information, it all just becomes rhetoric, emotionally disconnected and abstract, where it’s only important that blue is blue because ‘it is’ rather than because this information means something about our world or our relationship to it. It’s situated in a broader and deeper set of relations and thereby takes the form of a living knowledge.

That’s what’s beautiful about this image, it activates the idea of the passive. It doesn’t just imagine that this information is important, it gives emotional weight to its importance. It puts ‘objectivity’ in its place and treasures the act of meaning making, being in conversation with one’s world and conditions. That information must breathe and be reformulated in our social relationships, encouraged to exist in the parks, in the street, in the home, in the office, in the city, in the countryside, in the revolution, in the day-to-day, the 9-5, on the radio, on the phone, on the loudspeaker, and on, and on, and on.

19.05.2026 - ears to hear, mouth to speak

kat