– is a platform/ digital space which bring together people in need of collective thinking.
Unqualified comments is the direct English translation for “unqualifiziertes Kommentar”, which in German language is used to dismiss or degrade someone else’s opinion.
We would like to come together here and discuss together, reflect - think and re-think together, build and, create together - connect with each other through the making and responding to each other.
With Unqualified we offer a space that has at its core two main objectives:
To strengthen existing bonds between people, to create new ones, to exchange knowledge and experience and step out of isolation be it physical or intellectual.
To encourage us all to speak up, to formulate and to share our rich knowledge in a public space - where we are/ can be shy or feel we have not enough to say.
Unqualified Comments is therefore a curated artist run space where we engage with one another to help us lower our fear to speak up and go public. .
The central strategy of fascist and oppressor tactics is to isolate, divide and break us appart this happens on many levels. Unqualified Comments attempt is to resist by uniting, combining and coming together. The importance of the personal point of view is key to connecting us all, to resist isolation and to build bonds and connections in resistance to threatening circumstances.
We seek to foster the discourse between contributor, reader and participant and vice versa, to encourage us all to participate in public discourse without a need to “deliver” the final, perfectly edited essay or work (of (art?), to allow us all to share a thought that is not thought to the end wherever that might be, but to trust our voices - in collective exchange - through text, video, drawing, photo, voice message - you name it. The importance of the personal point of view is key to connecting us all, to resist isolation and to build bonds and connections in resistance to threatening circumstances. Unqualified comments is built from personal connections and is promoting and celebrating thinking in progress.
The contributions we gather are intuitive and not necessarily coming from an “expert” or academic knowledge of the matter, but stem from deep personal concern and intuitive knowledge or sentiments towards a topic or a matter that is of meaning and concern to the contributor, commenter, participant. Such contributions are an open invitation to anyone’s response others to think about and respond. We believe that there is a valid and important realm between academic and populist. A sphere that hosts a vivid discourse and encourages discussion. Needless to say that forming strong bonds amongst individuals also across oceans, as well as language, national, cultural to name a few kinds of borders only is of urgency in the times we live in.
HOW UNQUALIFIED COMMENTS WORKS - Sections
3 interconnected sections: Unqualified Comments seeks to create a structure where initial contributions that we call Unqualified can trigger a conversation and an interconnected web of responses and engagement.
UNQUALIFIED
The Unqualified Section is what we call the initial contribution that starts a conversation. Unqualified can - and often does- take the form of a text: This can range from a short thought, a brief conversation about sth, to a long heart-felt passionate essay or fictional text about a topic or an in depth analysis.
We explicitly invite the contributors to also COMMENT and edit their own initial Unqualified contribution. This can be by adding a COMMENT in the COMMENT section as an annotated PDF of the initial Unqualified contribution or even a voice memo. Unqualified Comments invites all forms of contributions you can think of. Unqualified can take a non-text form – such as images, schemes, sketches, notes of or mind maps. A voice message, a podcast, a video, a photo, a drawing - you name it.
COMMENT
The 💗 of Unqualified Comments is the COMMENTt section. Here we hope to engage people with our UNQUALIFIED content such that they feel enticed to take the time forto share their thought – write a response, take a photo, annotate the original UNQUALIFIED contribution and send it back to us, record a song, a short audio comment, a video, a drawing or any other kind of response to an article and send it to us in the COMMENT section of the platform. We will visually curate and layout those Unqualified pages and are very excited to see what we receive.
The individual UNQUALIFIED pages may or may not grow little by little as we will add the received COMMENTS. A physical publication may follow once we have various COMMENTS together. Maybe we launch that publication in an event organized in collaboration with our various existing partners, friends and collaborators. Maybe we invite artists to make an edition from the UNQUALIFIED and its COMMENTS.
MOON LISTENING
Here we ask friends to regularly give us a summary an update on what is going on around them wherever they are in the world. This might include media coverage, personal concerns of the political situation, but also personal observations and reflections on daily life in the respective location. Moon Listening comes in the form of low key voice memos, we publish as we receive them.
MOON LISTENING might give us access to places and circumstances we otherwise might not hear about or get distorted information. MOON Listening is explicitly subjective and as we draw from our personal networks - the idea is to create a network of trust and connection to inform each other on what is going on in different places and to maintain and create awareness that the information we receive in different places and have access to are differing immensely. Our experience is that speaking to friends in different locations has always given us an ultimately different perspective on a situation from the outside and we would like to try to share this experience in a public form.
Warmly,
Fede & Ella