Snack Syndicate

Feature image description: Beneath two red and gold banners sit two people, both smiling. They are looking attentively towards a third person, seated on an orange chair in the foreground, back turned. A microphone has been mounted on a stand between the group, its cord loops the stand. On one of the banners is a building. The symbols on the other hanging banner include a decorative anchor, two hands shaking, and a word in caps: SOLIDARITY. [Other image descriptions embedded in alt text.]

These Thoughts Large and Public
📍 Victorian Trades Hall & Literary Institute

Live transcript of broadcast can be found here

How can we more intensely feel the physics of our surround, our social aesthetic, the gravity of our love and loss, our shared, radically sounded, radically sent incompleteness? 

— Stefano Harney and Fred Moten

Snack Syndicate will inhabit the Victorian Trades Hall in order to revive the historic 3KZ radio station for These Thoughts Large and Public (2022), a series of readings, talks and conversations around the history and future of labour, accompanied by tea and pastries. The program is open to the public and broadcast live over the Saturday and Sunday of the Open House Melbourne July Weekend, with the assistance of radio producer Jon Tjhia and Antony Moore, the Trades Hall Building and Logistics Manager. The talks will take place in Solidarity Hall, recently renovated by Lovell Chen, and comprise six conversations with invited guests to discuss labour history, First Nations’ organising, sex work and social reproduction, artistic labour, the gig economy and the history of the building.

Formed in 2014, Snack Syndicate (Andrew Brooks and Astrid Lorange) is a collective living and working on unceded Gadigal land. They are poets, teachers, artists, parents and unionists, but above all, they study. ‘We thought we wanted to learn, but actually, we need to study’, they write. ‘We sit at the kitchen table. We pass snacks and sip tea. We stay hidden, in the open. We have no end, only a common experiment or an experiment with being in common.’ And later: ‘We study in order to understand how our own unravelling is the condition of being together. We study to become better communists. Study is a way for us to find each other, a way to make a future.’ The two-day program they will curate at Trades Hall for Open House Weekend creates the conditions for study, and for listening. They have created a way for people to find each other, and perhaps, a way for us to make a future. The aspect they will consider over the weekend is the future of work. How we will work, and how we want to work, is especially urgent in the wake of the pandemic, when working from home became living from work, and so-called ‘essential workers’ became an underclass, exposed and at risk. 

As their friend Tom Melick intuits, Snack Syndicate’s work often focuses on others more than themselves. This, too, is an aspect of study (of course, study is not selfless). And so, an invitation to participate in Take Hold of the Clouds, is détourned, made more capacious by inviting others in, others who they want to listen to and study. Colloquially known as Trades Hall, the full name of this venerable institution is the Victorian Trades Hall & Literary Institute. Snack Syndicate’s program of events shifts emphasis to the latter part of this name, as they have also invited a number of Naarm-based poets to give readings. Tea will be provided, along with pastries from All Are Welcome bakery. —­­TM

References

Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, All Incomplete (Brooklyn: Minor Compositions, 2021), 26. 

Snack Syndicate, “Endless Study,” in Homework (Melbourne: Discipline, 2021), 22. 

Tom Melick, “Homework for Love and Trouble,” in Homework, 12.