Braiding Interdependent Redários: Part One: Nets of Net-Resting

Repeated as a mantra of the modern world, “Data is the new oil” has become the pervasive logic guiding our current dominant systems. It doesn’t come as a big surprise then that they operate within such extractivist and exploitative dynamics. As a result, our digital interactions are reduced to the question of privacy or not. However, imposing this question on the tropics, where the very notion of privacy doesn’t exist as such (or potentially in other ways of saturation and opacity), represents a dislocation in the patchworks of our social fabrics, reinforcing the homogenising force of the melting pot of globalism. Perhaps the question instead be reframed as: How do we aspire our systems to operate, and how do we want them to condition us? This leads us to consider how we might craft systems and worlds differently, as we think of Redários.

Braiding Interdependent Redários seeks to craft nets of net•resting, spaces/places where we can balance each other. It plays with the Brazilian Portuguese notion of “REDE”; a word that is used both for Network and Hammock. A collection of hammocks, or a net of nets, is called a Redário. With this in mind, we ask: What if we conceived, designed, and developed our networks as hammocks? More-than-binary nets or hammocks that don’t sustain themselves at the expense of other bodies and environments but instead are a spaces where we can balance each other–and can lie queer to avoid back pains.

Braiding Interdependent Redários manifests as a social protocol, a pocket infrastructure, and a hybrid installation at HEK. Through the formation of a Netting Group through Futura Trōpica Netroots*, diverse practitioners within the Tropical Belt come together to explore and perform SuSu street cooperatives dynamics on a planetary scale. A “sou-sou” (or SuSu) is a traditional micro-savings and finance system widely used in West Africa and the Caribbean. It is a form of rotating funds to help sustain, balance, and embrace each other’s dreams. In this sense, putting an InterPlanetary SuSu into motion is a way to potentially braid interdependent Redários–networks that extend beyond a mere collection of strings or safety nets, allowing our systems and ourselves to operate according to different logics.

At HEK, visitors will encounter an installation consisting of a circuit, or a series, of interconnected and interdependent hammocks – each influencing the gravity, weight and motion of the others. These hammocks are designed to encode relational patterns and principles, forming a repository of protocols. In parallel, a Futura Trōpica Rhizome Access Point, provides a wifi network that visitors can connect to while lying in the hammocks. Upon entering, they can explore various digital relational gardens that investigate situated knowledges and distribution systems. A series of blog posts will also be shared throughout the duration of the show.

*Futura Trōpica Netroots is an InterTropical net of grass-root local networks connecting communities and nets of support and affection within the Tropical Belt (Latin America, The African Continent, South Asia, South East Asia and the Pacific). Their first iterations gathered practitionaers in Bogotá & Sibundoy Colombia, Kinshasa DR Congo, and Bengaluru India, later on Kampala Uganda, Manila Philippines and Martinique. Current practitioners come from Belém do Pará Brazil, Lusaka Zambia, Karachi Pakistan, and Yogyakarta Indonesia.