Extraction policies assume that value is not intrinsic but is given by an aggregation process. Value is something bestowed from the outside onto something that, in itself, is worth nothing. This is another of the many ways in which austerity policies, for example, continue a colonial narrative: the world as empty for conquest. Empty of value, meaning, beauty, knowledge, life, rights, agency.

There is a particular cruelty in being seen only as something with potential, waiting to be actualised (and capitalised) by the magical hand of development. It is a gaze that treats you as something that lacks the ability to do, that only has the ability to receive while at the same time blaming you for not being enough to have deserved more, holding you responsible for its cruelty. This cognitive dissonance of objectification is commonplace for any group or person living in some way in a state of permanent resistance, whether due to who they are, where they were born, or how they choose to experience the world. And it is exhausting. It is exhausting to have to defend your existence, in part because it is absurd. Your presence is sufficient justification, and the trap of authoritarian systems is to constantly create spaces where the value of life has to be justified (unless you are a group of fertilized cells, without entity, history, opinions, or personality, then yes, you are granted automatic entity).

They hate rights because they think not everyone has the same level of humanity and that not everyone deserves a future. Therefore, conversations about the value, the usefulness of rights, are a trap. Beware of those who tell you that there is no time, money, resources, or means to respect the humanity of people. What they are actually telling you is that not all people have the same level of humanity, and by telling you this in a believable way, they ensure the power to decide who deserves to be human and at the expense of whom.

To that, we say no. For everyone, everything.

To austerity policies, the fervent manifesto opposes a politics of abundance.

I am not a politician. I am a writer. And as a writer, I believe in the value of words, I believe that we live in a world where value is not given by capital. I believe that capital is a manifestation of where and how we pay attention. This manifesto is not a text to read for answers, but to feel less alone. When I wrote it, at the end of 2016, I wanted to scream, out of fear, anger but also to see who would respond, what echoes would bounce back. Instead of screaming, I wrote this text. It was published in a plant-themed magazine called The Plant, thanks to the editor Cristina who wanted to publish it even though it wasn't what I was originally going to write. The following year, Eva, the editor of Calipso Press ran into it, I think in a cafe, and decided to publish it as a little book. I say little because the edition they made with the design studio Taller Agosto, in Colombia, is very small. The designer was inspired by a quote from Montaigne that says something like that the texts to be wary of are not those of many volumes but those that fit in a pocket. They made a beautiful edition, which fits perfectly in one hand, and it can be read in two languages, the English in which I wrote it and in Spanish, which is my mother tongue. It was also picked up by the girls from another small publisher, No Libros, in Portugal, and they translated it into Portuguese, and so it circulated, hand to hand, mouth to mouth, until it reached the hands of Sandor Katz, to whom I had dedicated the book along with my friend Natsuko because they are the two people from whom I learned the most about fermentation and its power. Alba and the girls from La Escocesa, in Barcelona, translated it into Catalan last year and printed it with great care in a shade of pink that reminds me of begonia flowers. It keeps moving and proliferating editions and versions. Now it’s being translated into Kichwa, for which I am very thankful, and made into an illustrated edition by one of my favorite artists. It was printed a lot in risograph, a printing technique that comes out of office photocopiers and is frequently used to print pamphlets and bulletins because it is cheap, accessible, and colourful. I tell you this because the Manifesto exists thanks to the work of many people, almost all women, working in small publishers with a handful of people making books they consider valuable, like Bruna, the editor of this magazine who decided to give it another life. The fact that you are reading this text right now is the result of the abundance of human relationships, of the intrinsic value of listening and resonating and doing and paying attention and caring and nurturing, sometimes against all odds.

1. enough

These are times of resistance. Maybe all times are times of resistance, but this, right now, feels pressing; the killing and the taking ticking in our ears, deafening. Feels like we should be outside hunting for snakes, biting on knives, kicking on doors. There are times when what has been taken pains us more, when the dead don’t sit still. This is one of those times.

A time of shaking grounds.

2. rubbing dirt in our eyes

In opaque grounds is exactly where the roaming happens. What is not sitting still is not just the dead, but the dirt around them, the rock and the minerals and the thousand nooks in which the ground has hidden their remains. The inert: that which by careful training of our attention was classified as the negation of life. What doesn’t sit still is the blasted landscape that by being ignored as barren, was set up only for extraction. This is what is teaching us to see.

3. rise in fervor

It is in times like this when joy becomes a political matter. We demand the right to survive in our happiness. To thrive in our joy without that getting us killed. So it becomes a matter of care to sustain and nourish that joy whenever it’s found. It is not amoral to be happy in times of death. We have the right to be, to defend our life, to make an ethical stand of its resilience. It is key to defend our joy, and for that we might be forced to craft bubbles. Pockets of air and spaces of exception, even isolated, hidden spaces where to go for nourishment or rest. We should make many such spaces, even if they are temporary. We can craft the weirdest most creative of exceptions inside these pockets, imagine new stories, write new rules. In times like this, we are fighting for our right to the future.

The key is to make these bubbles ferment, rising up in fervor.

4. attention

Fermentation trains us in seeing the ground as inherently shaky. It makes visible the invisible potential of those things that seem still. The surface of a cabbage leaf, the smooth quarrel of clay, both brimming with life and time. It also teaches us to feel time as this powerful thing to be unlocked: a softness, an exciting tanginess. The perversity of late liberalism knows no boundaries when it comes to training the consumer’s attention to these textures as signs of decay and disease. Which better signal that they are something revolutionary? What fermentation shows us is the invisible connections of everything. Bubbling life unlocked in things that are hidden from us by the opacity of matter. Fermentation is an option to the microscope, it is not about relating to these phenomena by images but rather by their character. What they like to do, how they thrive. You attune yourself not to distinguish strains of life but to recognize its presence and consequences. So when something ferments you can feel it, you resonate with it. You can anticipate its needs. That’s how you feed ferments. You give them nourishment, which means you give them options to expand their life.

You learn to cultivate the future.

5. polikicks

What are the politics of fermentation? They enable bodily and cognitive redistributions of power. Fermentation teaches us that bubbles are not static, that fervor is exciting and possible and that change is always there. In times of darkness and despair, where the most terrifying subjectivity seems to be the one in power, we cry for our call to be expansive. Learn from those who ferment Mountain Dew, listen to the voices that challenge the limits of your body. Make them kin.

We will make ourselves into rocks, attune ourselves with the minerals that make our nails, with the bug skin that shapes our hair, the old plantness of our ears, the mollusc of our sinus.

We will crawl and stay still for as long as we wish, expanding our presence.

The more you tighten that lock, the more you police the border, the more force we’ll accumulate. We don’t mind spilling, for spilling is expanding. We are many. We are powerful in our multitude. Leave us unattended and we will change the fabric of matter.

6. gardens

Attunement to the microscopical networks of bacteria, fungi, lichens and roots that make matter opaque gives you control over technologies of recuperation. It teaches the power to recover blasted landscapes. The best kind of co-option. If you want to train us into subjectivities that thrive in coloniality, we will turn that into bacterial invasion. Into spore expansion. We will colonise. But not to sustain your hierarchies of inequality. Not to feed your machinery of fear. We will not build machines, we will grow them like characters in an Octavia Butler novel. The future is ours and it’s everywhere, on every level of matter.

Go ahead and throw inertia at us, we will grow rock gardens. 🐟