varia.begin

Welcome! ---
title: varia.begin
language: en
---



`[How to Read]`

`One person reads a word/sentence/paragraph/none`

`When you are ready please pass this script onto the person next to you`

`They can continue reading from where you paused.`

**Collective Script to begin ATNOFS**

Hello everyone, welcome to this weekend. We are here, all together finally at Varia.
We are very happy to have you present in this space.

This weekend, together with the radio broadcast on Wednesday, is the starting point of a bigger and expanded project called "A Traversal Network of Feminist Servers."

Or ATNOFS in short.

To say a few words about the space hosting us today, Varia is a member-based cultural organisation in Rotterdam, which brings a group of 20 people together who work as artists, designers, programmers, writers and educators.

`[BREATH]`

Varia is a collective-space in Rotterdam focused on everyday technologies. We believe technology shouldn't be the exclusive domain of specialists. It affects everyone and should enable, rather than preclude, diverse ways of living.

Focusing on everyday technology means questioning the hierarchies in place within technical objects and therefore the valorisation of skills needed to design or use these objects. This means reconsidering the hegemony of high tech: cheap, artisanal solutions are our method of choice.

Everyday technology means that a sewing machine is no less important than a laptop, that a tailor's work is by no means less meaningful than that of a computer scientist.

Everyday technology means keeping in mind multiple and entangled perspectives, needs, and aspirations when it comes to the understanding and framing of a technical object.

The shared efforts of Varia these days extend towards, amongst other things, a collective infrastructure using and providing digital, print and electronic facilities, resource sharing initiatives, this collective European project around feminist servers, and a public programme focused on dialogical learning.

`[BREATH]`

We are gathering around A Traversal Network of Feminist Servers (ATNOFS), a collaborative project learning about intersectional feminist, ecological servers. Understanding servers as computers that host space and services for communities around and with them, this project exists inside, and in between, roaming servers and different networks.

Our decentralized programme will occur in 5 locations (The Netherlands, Belgium, Romania, Greece, Austria) with the collaboration of 6 partners (Varia, LURK, Constant, HYPHA, Feminist Hack Meetings, and ESC).

Today there are people from each of these partners present, as well as other people who we have invited to learn, experiment and converse together.

`[BREATH]`

This is the first session of ATNOFS. We will focus on tools and methods to make space for understanding what feminist publishing infrastructures could be. During the weekend we will be experimenting with publishing infrastructures. The tools and methods that will emerge can later be used for further knowledge sharing as the project moves location and the programme evolves.

There will be a publication at the end of the year, documenting all of the different ATNOFS projects.

During this weekend we propose to make a collective chapter of this publication, and gather, record or generate materials for it.

During these two days we all will be documenting, writing, collecting traces, editing our work together into something legible - or not - into a form that can be published eventually at the end of the year.

`[BREATH]`

We have been preparing for this weekend in the last months. A big part of that has been setting up a server called Rosa.

Now Cristina will give a short introduction to making a chapter during this weekend and later Alice and Manetta will introduce us to the publishing infrastructure of Rosa.

We hope y'all enjoy your time. amy, Alice, Cristina, Julia and Manetta will be around as facilitators.

`[BREATH]`

`[The end, thank you for reading with us]`