The Infrastructural Rehearsals Collective investigates and collaborates on imaginative community-led responses to the climate crisis under fossil-fuel driven racial capitalism today. We make proposals and interventions that challenge top-down hegemonic approaches from green-washing tech capitalists to state-sponsored initiatives. As academics, artists, designers, researchers, activists, organizers and cultural workers we bring our experiences from different fields of knowledge, practices and terrains of struggle (Barcelona, Basel, Brussels, Glasgow, London, and Rotterdam). Together we figure out tools, methods, creative strategies and technologies to build capacity for international solidarity and resistance. While being embedded in a wider network of associated groups and collaborators, the Infrastructural Rehearsals Collective came together through an initiative by the Critical Media Lab (https://criticalmedialab.ch/) and TITiPI (https://titipi.org/). Through this, we look for ways to: share knowledge for climate action storytelling, do bug-reporting on big tech, make toolkits, provide vocabularies or build community infrastructures. Drawing upon Ruth Wilson Gilmore's idea of abolition as life in rehearsal, we look to model “the future from the present” by using our institutional resources towards actively making platforms, generatively problematizing deadly technosocial paradigms, or facilitating knowledge and skills that can be openly shared and redistributed. As Big Tech Cloud abolitionists, we're rehearsing in its ruins, organizing towards a world in which many words fit.
