kinderbolo

workshop sketch

draft .08
rough
(bb for bolo league/b.shepard@udk-berlin.de)

Kinderbolo is a 2 hour long workshop wherein students will collectively

design and create a utopian form called a bolo.

The participants will learn:

(1) exactly what a bolo is, why it matters, and several words in special
bolo languge (asa’pili)
(2) what kind of cooperative sibi (workshop/office/startup/institution)
they would like to work in
(3) what it is like to figure out collective tasks (kene) with others.
 stage one: introduction
(narrativize the following in language appropriate to the
students)

1. the global division of labor:

who does what and how they are connected.

2. how the global division of labor creates structural pathology: war,

poverty, and ecocide.

3. although it seems permanent, hard, material; is in fact a kind of mass

performance; a dream enacted by humans together.

4. we are free to dream other dreams, and to try to live according to

these dreams.

5. one of these other dreams is called bolo’bolo

6. it was written first in a book published in 1988

7. in bolo bolo people live and work together in bolos. there are 300 to
500 people in each bolo.

(math question for students: if there are 8 billion people, how many
bolos will there be on earth)

8. bolos will take MANY different forms. they will be nomadic and fixed,
traditional and experimental, democratic and oligarchical and monarchal;
high tech and primativist.

9. bolo’bolo does have a special langguage called asa’pili. every word in

asa’pili has a symbol as well. draw a circle with a dot in it. this is an ibu: the
asa’pilo word for a person.
 10. in today’s workshop, we will create our own bolo together.

this process will take three steps:

(a) design our ibus

(2) form our kana

3) make our sibis and

(4) figure out the kene of our bolo

stage two: design your ibus (solo)

1. for the sake of the kinderbolo game, every participant gets to play as
5 different ibus.

2. therefore, the first step is for the participants to design their bolos.

3. the basic requirements: name, age, and interest.

4. for example, one of my ibus might be called Eugene Isaacsohn, and

xe would be 75 years old, and be interested in meditation, macrobiotic
cooking, minimal techno, and cooking as a performance.

5. participants can, if they want, also draw their ibu, but optionality
should be given for the different modes of expression - whatever way they
can imagine these other people work

stage three: form the kanas (group work)

kana, in asapili, is the basic household unit of the bolo;

 15-30 people who live in close proximity

to form our kinderKanas, split the workshop into groups of 3 participants

each participant will have developed 5 ibus

each kana has to answer two basic questions

1. what do we like to do together?

2. what kind of work would we like to do?

once every kana has writte at least 15 answers to question two, the
whole group can move into

stage three: create the sibis (intergroup work)

Groups work with each other to make ‘sibis’

sibis are workshops or companies or institutions or startups

sibis are important functional units of bolos

each kana meets with every other kana for 7 minutes

to develop ideas for seven sibis.

this should be hard, but not impossible.

there are no consequences whatsoever to not failing to make 7.

rotate the activity until every kana has met with every other kana

stage four: create the kene (whole group work)

Now every participant has five ibu

who belong together to a kana and also

to one of the 30 or so different sibis inside the kinderbolo

so we have something like an initial sketch of the bolo

but what ties it together?

one thing are kene: the communal work we must do

to make the bolo keep going

in this last part of the conversation

we will figure out FIVE basic kene that the whole bolo

has to do together

these might have to do with cleaning

or they might have to do with collective learning

each bolo will be different.