COMMMUNE
A Pedagogy of Celebration and Liberation


“Study is what you do with other people.”
– Fred Moten & Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (2013)


1. The Club as Classroom

There are moments in the club when the music hits you – when rhythm and sound sync our emotions and we move as one. In that synthesis of sound, feeling, and motion, bodies learn. This is study.

Fred Moten and Stefano Harney write, “Study is what you do with other people.” It’s a simple definition, and a useful one. I think about it often – in the club, on the way home, in the quiet work of writing and archiving. Most of what I’ve learned has come from clubs. From people who never thought of themselves as teachers: DJs, organisers, sound engineers, light designers, dancers. Together they form a kind of school without building or books. It teaches through proximity, through the ways we listen and respond.

COMMUNE grows from these experiences, and from a question: what if celebration itself could be a form of learning? What if the club, the gathering, the group chat, the shared taxi, and the after-hours were all classrooms – places where we rehearse freedom in real time?

From Amsterdam to Kampala, from Mexico City to London, from Helsinki to Shanghai, we can trace the same pattern: rhythms move bodies in rooms made in community. Here, study doesn’t begin with theory, but with tempo, with time, with surrender.



“But ecstatic rituals are also good, and expressive of our artistic temperament and spiritual yearnings as well as our solidarity.”
– Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets: A History Of Collective Joy (2006)


2. Celebration as Method
If the club is a classroom, then celebration is its method – a way of learning that begins with the body. Celebration teaches through energy and encounter. It gathers us, lowers our defences, and builds relation. It treats life as an experiment in how to desire the world differently. Like study, it is collective improvisation: a rehearsal of freedom not yet here. What we can do, we do with others.

For Baruch Spinoza, joy is the affect through which the body gains power to act – a change from limit towards possibility. Joy changes through relation; our capacities increase when we meet others. It turns solitude into company, isolation into contact. To feel joy together is to gather strength together. The body stops being a border and becomes a bridge. Celebration makes that change real. It teaches how collective motion becomes collective movement.   

Joy is not a flash of intensity; it needs care and continuity. In COMMUNE, I think of this as joy in practice – the daily, shared work of staying open to change. Celebration is the form this practice often takes: through action, attention, and return, it teaches joy to last. In time, celebration becomes study – a way of listening and composing life together, as joy moves quietly into the small, hidden spaces where study gathers and survives.



“We demand the right to opacity for everyone.”
– Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (1990)


3. Club Culture as Fugitive Pedagogy

The dance floor, the DJ booth, and the dark room are temporary shelters – places of rest and release – but also points of pressure where the social contract loosens. The rhythm may be four-four, but what moves through it is fugitive.

Fred Moten and Stefano Harney call this the undercommons – a space of study, refusal, and invention that lives within and against the institution. In COMMUNE, this becomes the undercommune: the backstage break, the after-hours drift, the conversation that continues on the night bus home. Here, it is the lived experience of Moten and Harney’s idea, not a departure from it. In the undercommune, knowledge moves differently – through sound, presence, and proximity. We learn through what we feel: solidarity, opacity, freedom.

Thinking with Jarvis Givens, author of Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching (2021), this can be read as part of a longer lineage of fugitive pedagogy: the Black traditions of teaching and learning carried out within and against domination. Givens traces how generations of educators and students built lessons that could survive the violence of the classroom – knowledge shared in secrecy, through gesture and passing. Teaching became protection; learning, resistance. To study under such conditions is to move like sound through a wall: invisibly but registered, felt through vibration. This is study as escape; study as survival.

Édouard Glissant calls this the right to opacity – the choice not to be fully seen or known within systems that demand visibility. For Glissant, opacity is a way to stay alive, to keep complexity and difference intact when the world seeks to flatten them. What cannot be translated is held instead. On the dance floor, opacity becomes visceral: a language made of gesture, resonance, and rhythm. Knowledge moves this way when it needs to protect itself.

COMMUNE approaches opacity as collective preservation – a precondition for rehearsing liberation. It gathers the practices that form when people organise through sound: a DJ set as playlist, a dance floor as a site of unlearning, house rules as a manual for abolition. Here, pedagogy reverberates until it becomes a resonant frequency. This is what makes it fugitive: learning that avoids capture, extraction, and appropriation. You see it in soundchecks, group chats, and shared rides home, all small acts of care that keep people linked through the night. In those moments, study takes form and relation offers cover. The night teaches.

These practices of learning are fragile but resilient. They stretch from Kingston to Kampala, from Detroit to Helsinki, from Mexico City to Amsterdam. The undercommons is a pattern: a relation maintained through music, movement, and memory.

The undercommune, then, names the lived form of fugitive study that COMMUNE seeks to trace and sustain – a collective practice of becoming that refuses erasure.



"We do this 'til we free us."
– Mariame Kaba, We Do This 'Til We Free Us (2021)


4. Building Counter-Power

Capitalism is killing us. Governments speak of transition while deepening the extraction that makes life unliveable. This system will not save us. We build the infrastructures of care we need to survive outside it – through the daily work of mutual aid, cooperation, and shared creativity.

COMMUNE begins from this fact: survival has become a collective creative task. It calls for imagination, solidarity, and composition under pressure. It draws from anarchist, Indigenous, and abolitionist traditions that show how to organise without permission: to build the social and material infrastructures that states neglect or destroy. In these practices, politics turns material: cooking, housing, repairing, and healing together in the ruins of extraction. What emerges is not charity but counter-power – a shared capacity to live differently.

COMMUNE’s pedagogy is experimental, embodied, and grounded. It looks at how we already practise other futures in the present – in sound systems, community kitchens, mutual aid networks, and local assemblies. From these gatherings emerge fugitive infrastructures: makeshift systems for survival that reach beyond the world as it stands. They take shape in our defiance of the state and endure as the people's alternatives.

COMMUNE learns from Dean Spade, for whom mutual aid is the foundation for survival; from Mariame Kaba, for whom hope is a discipline; and from Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, for whom land and relation are the first pedagogies. This lineage – extending from Barbara Ehrenreich’s history of collective joy to adrienne maree brown’s emergent strategy – reveals that celebration and organisation are not opposites, but a circuit. They are both expressions of a collective life that insists on continuation, on association, on autonomy.

To build counter-power is to nurture that collective life: to turn exhaustion into drive, despair into coordination, and obedience into refusal. Abolition, like celebration, is a rehearsal for a world without domination. Within the undercommune, we rehearse with every body in the place.



"Transition is not a journey from one identity to another. It is the invention of a form of life that escapes all capture."
– Paul B. Preciado, An Apartment on Uranus (2019)    


5. Queer Futurity, Abolition & Mutual Aid
COMMUNE draws on queer futurism, understood with José Esteban Muñoz, Kara Keeling, and Tavia Nyong’o as a politics of the not-yet. This futurism resonates with bell hooks’ expansive definition of the queer as “not about who you’re having sex with (that can be a dimension of it), but about the self that is at odds with everything around it and that has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.” Queerness, in this sense, is a method of world-making that transposes the pressures of the imperialist, white-supremacist, capitalist patriarchy – what bell hooks names as the total architecture of domination – into the materials of our power: abolition, mutual aid, fugitive study, collective joy, and liberation.

Queerness is less an identity than a temporal practice – the ability to imagine and inhabit futures that the present denies. The dance floor becomes a queer chronotope – a space where we step out of linear time and glimpse what Muñoz calls “the not-yet-here.” In these moments, celebration becomes study in anticipation – a way of feeling freedom before we have it.

This futurity runs on labour and love. Dean Spade defines mutual aid as “collective coordination to meet each other’s needs” from an awareness that “the systems we live under will not.” Mariame Kaba describes abolition as a practice of “building a new world where we have everything we need: food, shelter, health, freedom, safety, everything.” Read together, their work treats affinity as the affective and material basis of survival.

If mutual aid and abolition build the infrastructures of survival, celebration sustains them. Celebration is how we honour survival – a collective act of remembering and continuation. It is also, with Fred Moten, a form of fugitive planning: improvisation as preparation, joy as rehearsal. Every celebration also mourns – for lives, for worlds, for possibilities. To gather in joy is to insist on survival amid destruction. To move together in time is to practise the coordination that collective life requires. These gestures, too, draw on trans understandings of transition – not as a solitary crossing, but as a shared, ongoing experiment in living beyond what was imposed; a collective practice of becoming.

Queer futurity, abolition, mutual aid, fugitivity, joy, and freedom meet here as a single pedagogy of survival – a discipline of hope enacted through anticipation, invention, and shared possession, or what ballroom calls “you own everything.” (As Junior LaBeija declares in Paris is Burning: “Opulence. You own everything.”) Fugitive infrastructures move beyond endurance toward collective ownership. The rehearsal becomes the claim.



“Music and its rituals can be used to create a model whereby identity can be understood neither as a fixed essence nor as a vague and utterly contingent construction.”
– Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousnes (1993)


6. Transglobal Underground

These fugitive pedagogies refuse capture. They travel like the music itself – diasporic, labyrinthine, continuous. The undercommune moves through ports and servers, across sound systems and encrypted networks, wherever people make space for listening, learning, and care. In these movements, COMMUNE works in affinity with a wider ecology of practice: insurgent communities salvaging collective life in gentrifying cities – from Kampala to Mexico City, from Helsinki to Lisbon, from Shanghai to Amsterdam.

As Édouard Glissant writes, relation is not fusion but exchange. The undercommune exists – and expands – through relation: connections that hold difference while creating solidarity.

Progress Bar (2015–2020) was one such node – “a club night devoted to communal desire and collective joy,” where conversation, screening, and performance merged into study. It demonstrated that the club could be an assembly, a syllabus, and a political party. Each line-up, each scenography, each season was a lesson in being together otherwise. The work of those years continues through COMMUNE – in the attention to atmosphere, the ethics of invitation, and the choreography of generosity. What began as an experiment in club culture became a method for building transglobal infrastructures of learning, celebrating, and liberating.

Across these connected ecologies, study takes the form of creation, relation, and adaptation. Each gathering – at Nyege Nyege in Kampala, NAAFI in Mexico City, Príncipe in Lisbon, Genome 6.66 Mbp in Shanghai – rehearses freedom in the present tense. These are not scenes but lineages: temporary institutions where futures are tested and sustained. The undercommune endures through circulation, through exchange. Its rhythm holds us in time; it sustains life quietly, beneath the world’s noise.



“There is no liberation without the freedom to fail.”
– adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (2017)


7. The Limits of the Dance Floor

The club promises freedom, but it is never free. Every night of collective joy contains its limits: who enters, who feels safe, who is left outside. The same infrastructures that carry sound also carry exclusion – cost, access, surveillance, and social capital.

Age, ability, class, race, gender, and sexuality continue to shape who is seen, heard, and welcomed. The dance floor rehearses equality, yet often repeats hierarchy. Music circulates through economies that extract from the very communities that sustain it. These tensions do not cancel the club’s radical potential – they define it.

Speaking of freedom in nightlife means facing its failures and learning from those who resist them: organisers who prioritise access and care, crews who design safer spaces and sliding-scale entries, collectives who rebuild the club with patience and intention. They practise the invitation, hospitality, and generosity that COMMUNE seeks to study and extend.

The club’s radicality is not its perfection but its persistence. It keeps testing freedom against everything that denies it. Each night is another attempt, another rehearsal still unfinished.



“Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”
– Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven (1971)


8. Rehearsing Liberation

To rehearse is to practise possibility. It means gathering, coordinating, and adapting with others – testing ways of working together. Every rehearsal is an act of trust: people staying together long enough to make another world possible.

In COMMUNE, rehearsal is the form liberation takes before it is realised: a freedom practised in advance.

This practice appears everywhere: when we lose ourselves in trance; when we support a friend through gender-affirming care; when we house comrades in need. We teach – and learn – that liberation begins now: that world-making is learned in the act of doing, that – as Paulo Freire taught us – “whoever teaches learns in the act of teaching, and whoever learns teaches in the act of learning.”

COMMUNE operates as a temporary undercommune – a working space where we can observe, join, and share rehearsals for freedom. The club is one site among many – alongside studios, record stores, and radio stations.

When we rehearse liberation, we act – as Angela Davis reminds us – as if transformation is possible. We create conditions for what does not yet exist, and we do so with joy.



“To be truly visionary we have to root our imagination in our concrete reality while simultaneously imagining possibilities beyond that reality.”
– bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (2003)


9. A Total Ecology of Practice

COMMUNE is a total ecology of practice – a living system where making, learning, and organising sustain each other. It weaves the threads of queer futurity and fugitive study, mutual aid and abolition, collective joy and liberation into a single fabric.

COMMUNE asks what it means to celebrate in order to survive together. It begins in sound but extends beyond it – into joy, relation, and care.

To celebrate, then, is to rehearse liberation: to create the conditions for collective freedom, not in theory but as praxis – a reoccupation of time wrested from the machinery of extraction.

–

Note on Sources and Lineage

With gratitude to the lineages that sustain this practice:

Baruch Spinoza, Fred Moten & Stefano Harney, bell hooks, Édouard Glissant, Paulo Freire, Mariame Kaba, Dean Spade, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Paul B. Preciado, José Esteban Muñoz, Paul Gilroy, Kara Keeling, Tavia Nyong’o, Jarvis Givens, Barbara Ehrenreich, adrienne maree brown, Ursula K. Le Guin, Alexander Dunlap, Nkisi, Rosa Pistola, Elysia Crampton Chuquimia, Jam City, Elly Vineyard, Yves Tumor, Philip Jeck, Michael Oswell, Gideon Kiers, Manique Hendricks, Lucas van der Velden, Stefan Wharton, Pim Sem Benjamin, Karl Klomp, Lars Holdhus, Arnau Sala Saez, George Knegtel, Amie Galbraith, Pieter Kers, Maurits de Bruijn and Guusje Segond von Banchet – and to all the collectives, crews, and comrades named within.

Note on the Sound
This is an unreleased recording of Philip Jeck performing live at the Bimhuis in January 2008. Its presence here is an act of gratitude and continuation.