The Convivial Labour Force Project fits somewhere between the nomadic fablab and the anti-business. Flirting with the limits of a free maker space and applied conviviality, the project is inspired by a desire of reappropriating social economy and questioning the meaning of transaction within mutual aid.
The goal is simple: to offer one’s free collaboration in a diversity of projects - through cabinetmaking to sewing including cooking and horticulture – all while aligning the co-performed tasks with the principles of economic degrowth, conviviality and horizontality.
The role of the convivial labour force is to help, to offer oneself to others; but also to create, through the distribution of tasks and thus the dilation of time, a necessary space for thinking about how to make a given project more ecological, horizontal and convivial.
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Conviviality, according to Illich, consists of "autonomous and creative relationships between people and between people and their environment; and this in contrast to the conditioned response of people to demands imposed on them by others and by a man-made environment "," contrary to industrial productivity ".
Illich, I. (1973). Tools for conviviality. Fontana, London.