P-Prompt: It's not a thing

This prompt is based on a conversation with Peggy Pierrot, just after her return from an intense working period in Martinique. Peggy makes a living as intellectual worker, teacher, writer, radio host and independent researcher and is based in Brussels. We have been crossing paths for many years in the context of activities related to Free Culture and software freedom, but never frontally discussed possible tensions between decolonial feminist practices of reuse and those frameworks that we both committed to. At the end of this long conversation, Peggy reflects on translating her ideas and convictions about Free Culture to the context of the Caribbean, confronting a radically different economic reality.

Does the framework of Free Culture or Open Access make sense in a non-European context, and if not how would it need to change, to become "a thing"? Is this a matter of translation, or of transformation?

→ See: Prompt: Spaces for discomfort - Who will be paying the price

It's not a thing, a conversation

Peggy Pierrot: I was in this art school [in Martinique], where they never heard about Free Software and they were like, what the hell are you talking about? Uh you mean that we don't pay for the license, right? And the way they were seeing authorship and the relation to the tools and everything was so different. I was like, okay, how do I do this? Because the context is so different. In terms of class, possibility of work, you know, all these things.

For example, something I didn't know before going there. All the students are obsessed with 3D, because actually in the Caribbean there are studios that are sub-contractors for Pixar studios and others. So I needed to consider the level of unemployment in that context. They all use Blender, but they also use other tools. And it doesn't make any difference to them whether you can can contribute, or change or adapt the software. It's not a thing.

And then the question of economy came back in my face. I did actually talk about Free Software and the question of copyright. And no, you cannot use these images because you see, there is a copyright. But it was so far from their context that I had to kind of adapt my discourse. Because everything was different. This art school is set in a completely other context, both colonial and the Caribbean, and of course there's a need to adjust to the context. For example, all these thing we do with HTML to print or when we were talking about scripts, that doesn't make any sense: no one cares.

There's no publishing industry in Martinique because there are only two companies making books and they're making their books in Microsoft Word, or whatever, because the market of people buying the books produced by people from Martinique or Guadeloupe in French or Kreyol, is so narrow. One or two libraries in Paris are buying everything because they know they have the diaspora that will look for those books. One local publisher said, "sometimes I sell books in Brussels because there are these two libraries that ask for books from me". This small artist, small publisher scene is non existing. So is the free software or independent media scene like the one we do know. But there are other things, of course.

So this thing with the context, I think part of what lacks in Free Culture is trying to be in connection with people. All the things that I talk about comes from where I grew up. My relation to the world has been shaped in a specific context. Which is being a European, even though I have ties with the West Indies. I am a European and I have a way of seeing the world that is linked with this context. And I cannot just export it like this. I have to rethink my position in the discussion.

Now it's not that I don't want to do this, but it needs some adjustments, and negotiations. Change of expectations, this kind of stuff. And I think it's related to what we were talking about. When you think about remodeling the Free Art License to make it able to take into account the power relations, the different conditions and ethical questions. This is exactly what I mean.

Brussels, April 2023