Maryam Fanni

Essay

Friendship is radical or ’fuck that, we are working as friends’

When I recently told a colleague that I love reading the dedications and acknowledgements in books, he laughed. But I am serious. The reasons are plenty: it is a good source to find tips on where to apply for funding (typically, researchers thank their funding bodies in the acknowledgements), for the weak-hearted romantic it is a chance to feel sentimental (it is so sweet when books are dedicated to the author’s child or lover!), for the gossip-minded it offers an opportunity to speculate on the author’s personal life. But most importantly, the acknowledgements serve as a site where the circumstances in which the book or the research project came about are mentioned, where the author becomes less authoritative and more humble and human, and where the material and social dimensions of a writing process are made visible as opposed to a wide-spread idea of the author as an isolated body locked up in their writing cottage.

All the work we do, as writers, artists, designers etcetera, are done under influence of and in dialogue with others. Many forms of dissemination, like exhibitions for instance, do not offer the same clear format for crediting and sharing the social circumstances of the work, like the acknowledgements do to an author’s monography. Perhaps my desire to read acknowledgements reflects a thirstiness for seeing the elected affinities and relationships behind the cultural scene and artistic practices? The laughter of my colleague pushed me to think more seriously about what it is that draws me to the acknowledgements. Additionally, as I recently found myself writing the acknowledgements for my doctoral thesis, concluding seven years of hard work, I was struck by the depths of how friends—childhood friends, high school friends, friends I made in difficult episodes as an adult, and classmates, teachers, supervisors, mentors, collaborators, commissioners and colleagues ending up as friends—has formed by thinking and being in the world. Friends have enabled me to be who I am and to materialize my ideas.

I think of friendship as genuine interest and (sometimes long-term) engagement in following and understanding the other’s life trajectory.¹ Or perhaps it is much simpler than that: friendship is being in need of one another, paths crossing, inter-dependency (sometimes for a very short while). Either long-term or momentarily, friendship is being inevitably engraved in each other’s lives and paths, sometimes, or often times, we do not take notice of the friendships we make, how they form us, and to what consequences. Friendship should not be romanticized as a frictionless platonic love. Friendship is to be in constant negotiation about oneself in relation to the other. Friendship may include envy, competition, disappointments, conflicts and arguments, at times distance-taking or breaks. However, in order to maintain it’s status of friendship, it includes ethical considerations and acts of care. At best, friendship is loyalty and trust. Friendship offers a refuge and a springboard away from family background, religious or ideological background and cultural norms, the weight of class, and thus makes it possible for us to move beyond what we were born into, and in that move also push the direction of history.

In her book ”Teaching Community – A Pedagogy of Hope” (2003), bell hooks writes about how friendships between white people and people of colour challenge a white-supremacist patriarchal world, taking her friendship with Ron Scapp as example, a white heterosexual male professor and active anti-racist. She writes:

We still live in a culture where few white people include black people/people of color in their intimate kinship structures of love and friendship on terms that are fully and completely antiracist. We still need to hear about how inclusion of diversity changes the nature of intimacy, of how we see the world. When I walk out into the world with Ron, clearly indicating closeness by our body language and our speech, it changes how I am seen, how he is seen.²

What hooks points towards is a powerful potential of friendship to challenge social orders, a quality one might not think of in the simple acts and everydayness of friendship, taking a stroll and having a coffee. Similarly, philosopher Svetlana Boym argues that friendship for Hannah Arendt was ”about being molested by the world and responding in kind—by expanding, so to speak, the dimensions of existence and by co-creating on the worldly stage.”³ hooks example is highly transferreble to a Nordic context in a time of far-right politics, where Swedish cities are among Europe’s most segregated, and Sweden is being one of the most financially unequal countries in the world. In the Swedish society and in the current school system, despite the legacies of welfare state, one cannot take heterogeneous friendships across social categories for granted. The friendship of hooks and Scapp invites us to interrogate our own kinships – who do we typically make friends with, and what does that signal to the world?

Despite its radical potentials, friendship is a category of relationship that is paid less attention to and is less theorized and researched than romantic, professional and family relationships. And although there are numerous fictional novels centering female friendships⁴, in traditional history of philosophy, friendship is typically a discourse among men.⁵

Svetlana Boym has theorized friendship as an ”elective affinity without finality, a relationship without plot or place in our society, an experience for its own sake”.⁶ In this regard, friendship is perhaps as inexplicable and vital as the arts. Working in the cultural field, to me, the two seem to be dependent on each other—friends and art. When I look back, I see so many moments in life where friendships and the making of artistic experiments and cultural events were so closely intertwined that it seems to me that the way I ended up in the arts was only a result of an intensive need and desire to spend time with people (whom I didn’t even necessarily think of as friends, but rather as co-members of the same associations or cultural venues in which I also happened to invest most of my time and existence). The most unique works of art, both in my own production but also in others, seem to be coming out of the internal logics and ways of being, and the confidence built, within a crowd of friends. Friendship is to create oneself an audience, and to be in close dialogue with it—a critical fan club.

A few summers ago I co-organized a summer school, together with friends (in a professional context labelled collaborators), in the cultural center Ställbergs gruva in Bergslagen.⁷ The place is itself a result of friendship—in 2012, eleven friends, working across a variety of fields and practices, came together and started the cultural center, and a couple of years later they also invested in buying the property. Buying property, and starting a business with others, is always a risk-taking endeavor. It can easily be claimed that Ställbergs gruva would not have been possible and would not have existed without the glue of friendship. Their story is also a concrete example of how friendships, in professional life, can facilitate and result in transdisciplinarity in terms of trust, connectedness and shared values across disciplinary categories.

The summer school was not about friendship, its topic was center–periphery, urban–rural. It was successful in adressing the topic and all that, but what stuck with me, and what I have thought about ever since, was one argument that came up in the final panel when the week was being concluded through a public discussion: namely, that friendship can counter capitalist modes of production. Thanks to Michaela Casková, who represented the self-organized artist-residency Mustarinda, the concept of friendship was brought to the table. Here, and excerpt from the transcript of the public panel:

Maryam: Mustarinda is an organization that is largely driven by volunteers, basically, what Mustarinda does is much more than what financing allows. I think the struggle for many cultural organizations today is the mix between voluntary and paid labor. You put it so well earlier today that sometimes financial support and the transition from volunteer to employee cause so much tension that you almost want to say no to the money. I wanted to ask you to elaborate on what kind of relationships Mustarinda builds and consists of. In a previous session you read us a text by Céline Condorelli and brought the word friendship to the table. What does friendship mean in the context of Mustarinda and what does Mustarinda mean to you?

Michaela: I will start in the [Condorelli’s] text.

The reason why we’re sitting together talking is also because we are friends: and we’re working together at the same time. Another level has to do with friendship as a way of associating yourself with ideas or befriending issues. What Hannah Arendt called “this thinking business” (her description of the work that she and Mary McCarthy did individually and in relation to each other), is done from a position of closeness to something or someone and it requires a particular proximity that I believe is fundamental. In other words, there is intimacy in relationship to people, and also in relation to issues, that I would call friendship.⁸

I have been thinking a lot about why I am part of the group in Mustarinda, working like hell for five years, and after all the ideas and dreams and issues we’ve had together what stays is the friendship. That’s how I came to Mustarinda, through one friend, and that’s how I got to know so many new friends who are very dear to me. And that’s also why I’m here, because I was invited by a friend, to meet friends. Working as friends means you don’t compete, well you do compete with friends sometimes but not as in trying to get someone off the way. You support each other and care. And when I think in this way it really changes my working environment.

One of the other panelists and contributors to the summer school was permacultural farmer Joel Holmdahl from the neighboring municipality Ludvika. His family-driven farm, Rikkenstorp, is a CSA farm (Community-supported Agriculture) and member of the La Via Campesina International Farming Network. Being a CSA makes them more resilient in case of a drought, as happened the very year of the summer school. While many conventional farms run the risk of having to face bankruptcy in such situation, CSA’s have a consumer base—or ”friends”—who support them despite and through crises. Following Michaela Casková’s thinking on self-organization through Condorelli’s concept of friendship, Joel Holmdahl continued:

I think what all of you are talking about is the conflict between the values of us as humans, or to see us as consumers, and how the capital wants us to build relationships based on money. The human relationship doesn’t make profit. When you’re suggesting that we should work together as friends, already there you are in conflict with someone who does not want you to work as friends. They want you to work as professional workers to make an efficient production that makes money for someone who owns capital. It’s a revolutionary step to say ’fuck that, we are working as friends’. We are also trying to do this in our food production at the farm. We are not working as producers and consumers, we are saying we want to split the risk, and the beauty if it’s a good year. We do not want to just sell our cabbage as they sell cabbage in the store, we want to sell it to someone who knows us so that we can have a discussion about cabbage.

What I would like to highlight in particular is to ”split the risk and the beauty”. A couple of years later I found myself in the ground floor space of the self-organized book store Torpedo books in Oslo for a network meeting of NAP (Nordic Art Press) on art book distribution. Our Norwegian colleagues were investigating a subscription model for art book publishers, which would offer them more stability and less risk as opposed to how art books are typically consumed. While subscription models have become increasingly normalized in anything from film and music streaming services to socks, shaving razors and dust bags, that form of financial loyalty is decreasing in the fields of publishing of not only books but also newspapers and periodicals. The CSA’s in a year of drought serves as a concrete example of how a subscription model, and ”friendship” with a local producer, challenges and renegotiates the supposed alienation between consumer and producer. In the cultural field, the loyalties need not be financial, it can also be to merely ”show up” to events—what venues we populate is highly political.

In Gothenburg, once, an artist told me: ”when you go to an opening in Stockholm it is for networking, when you go to an opening in Gothenburg it is to pat on the back of the exhibiting artist”. This was to say that if the Stockholm art scene offers a concentration of state funded actors, decision-makers, financial opportunities, hyped curators etcetera, as capitals tend to, in contrast, the Gothenburg art scene offers artist-run galleries and initiatives, celebrating a tradition of horizontality (which of course is highly present in Stockholm too, and vice versa). The contrasting image of two different modes of operation at a gallery opening has stayed with me, and made me aware of the social structures behind the places we inhabit, and the ”cultures of place” that we co-create.⁹ Friendship is perhaps not only the social structure tying two individuals together, but also a fundament, and a result, of the loyalties and the continuities in relation to institutions, organizations, bars, cafes, galleries, bookshops and other places where we cultivate ourselves, as those we are and those we want to be.

Footnotes

Inspired by Ian Hamilton Finlay’s poetic attempts of defining friendship, I dare myself to propose my preliminary understandings of what friendship might be. See Ian Hamilton Finlay, Detached Sentences on Friendship, Wild Hawthorn Press 1991 (recently translated to Swedish by Tydningen Relä).
bell hooks, Teaching Community – A Pedagogy of Hope, Routledge 2003, pp. 105–106.
Svetlana Boym, Scenography of Friendship, Cabinet Magazine, No. 36, winter 2009–10, pp. 88–94.
The most commercially successful at the moment would probably be ”My brilliant friend” by Elena Ferrante.
See Too close to see: Notes on friendship, a conversation with Johan Frederik Hartle by Céline Condorelli, in Self-Organised, Open Editions 2013, pp. 62–73.
Svetlana Boym, Scenography of Friendship, Cabinet Magazine, No. 36, winter 2009–10, p. 88.
The summer school ”What Kind of Center” was organized in July 2018 by SIFAV and The Non-Existent Center and funded by Nordic Culture Point.
Céline Condorelli, The Company She Keeps, Book Works 2014. The text from which the quote is from is available online: https://howtoworktogether.org/wp-content/uploads/htwt-think_tank-celine_condorelli_avery_gordon-the_company_she_keeps_part_two.pdf
See bell hooks, Belonging – A Culture of Place, Routledge 2009

This text is for Karin Linderoth—commissioner of the text, friend and ally—and her/our students.

Maryam Fanni is Doctor in Design, reaearcher, designer and educator based in Stockholm.