What do we say when we repeat the phrase 'let's dream together'? What are the implications of calling for collective dreaming in the face of the world's brutalization? Curator and researcher Ana Longoni invites us to rethink the foundations that sustain our sociability. A meeting with protest, with the signs that persist, and with the anonymous writings that call us to a future gathering

 

[Cover photo by Jose Nicolini courtesy of the author]

 

1.

“Dreaming together”, Terremoto’s editorial letter proposes, while encouraging us to engage in an exercise in self-archaeology. “If you don't let us dream, we won't let you live,” someone declared before the massive anti-fascist LGTBIQ+ assembly that spontaneously and urgently convened itself on Saturday, January 25, 2025. More than five thousand people gathered in Lezama Park, in the southern part of the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina. The same park that Pancho Casas —one of the members, along with Pedro Lemebel, of the legendary Chilean duo “Yeguas del Apocalipsis”, which emerged in the 1980s— proposed to the assembly to rename after Nestor Perlongher, author of the poetry collection Parque Lezama (1990), in order to invoke the anthropologist, poet, and militant queer founder of the Homosexual Liberation Front in the 1970s.

 

 

Places have memories, and it was in that same Parque Lezama/Perlongher that my mother learned to skate as a child; that I heard the musician Luis Alberto Spinetta live for the first time in 1984 —having just returned to the country after eight years of exile from my family; that I learned, along with many others crowded around the TV at the Britanico bar, that the social uprising had begun on December 19, 2001, on the very corner of Defensa and Brasil streets chosen by the Argentine Brigade for Dilma —a collective initiative, launched in 2011 by the artist Roberto Jacoby, supporting Brazil's then-presidential candidate, Dilma Rousseff— to paper the walls with a lot of paste and posters that read "AMERICA DILMAMERICA. Let's support Dilma. If she loses, we lose.” 

 

 

It was right there, on June 30, 1985, that the Gay Action Group, together with the newly formed Argentine Homosexual Community, just after the end of the military dictatorship, organized the first meeting of homosexual visibility, demanding the right to free sexuality. In one of the few existing photos of that historic day, under the very same trees where the assembly met a few days ago, a banner can be seen carried by just a handful of gay and lesbian activists that reads "Sex to government; pleasure to power". The vindication of sex as politics, as disobedient irruption, as insolent waste.

 

 

2.

Places have memory. And words too: they hold layers and folds, grids of meaning that connect, overlap, and contaminate each other. Thus, the word solidarity inexorably leads me to the name of the Polish trade union Solidarność,

led by Lech Walesa, who confronted the communist regime in Poland in the 1980s —through a strong alliance with the Catholic Church. Its logo of a waving red and white flag over a crowd was taken up in the Argentine Trotskyist newspaper Solidaridad Socialista, where I became a columnist around 1990 (under a pseudonym I will not reveal). Week after week, I wrote notes that reiterated the same formula, no matter what they discussed: they began by blaming capitalism and ended by pointing out that socialism is the only and inevitable way out. Although, of course, there is a vast left-wing tradition of appealing to the idea of solidarity. Banners, slogans, movements, and newspapers calling for internationalist solidarity and worker and farmer fraternity. 

 

 

One Saturday morning, while walking through the Buenos Aires neighborhood of La Boca, I had entered an old FORA (Argentine Regional Workers Federation, for its initials in Spanish) building, the anarchist labor union founded in 1901. Inside I came across the remains (material but also discursive) of a poster calling for a food drive for the hungry in Russia. It must have been 1918 or 1919, shortly after the triumph of the Soviet Revolution and in the midst of the hardships of World War I. That relic of a once white cloth, now covered in dust and cobwebs, hung next to another faded black and red banner, equally threadbare, calling for the integration of the international brigades that joined the Spanish Civil War. The word solidarity was not explicitly written on either of these two posters, but it beat strongly in the heart of their survival. 

 

A presence stirs vividly within me as I invoke that encounter between times; that meeting between generations: in that empty room, sitting on a rickety chair, silent but attentive, an elderly anarchist militant spied on us, like the living flesh of those stories, surprised by that youthful irruption and, at the same time, withdrawn into his silence.

 

The overwhelming resonance that the Palestinian people's struggle and the denunciation of the genocide in Gaza have had in the last year in every corner of the world can be read, in a way, as the contemporary life of those old, worn-out posters. There, we learned the concept of solidarity that nurtured internationalism: it's not just about empathy and support for other people, their hardships and their revolts, but about realizing that what happens in another part of the world has an indisputable impact on our own lives, determining a common fate.

 

3.

But memory also holds, within its folds, the future. What does the word solidarity tell us in present times? How can we stir these waters amidst the rise of extreme individualism, distrust and fear of others, bellicosity and the lynching mood that shakes all communities these days? I cannot help but associate the political power of solidarity with the idea of community. Building with others, for others, understanding lives in interdependence and in the warp and weft. Adhering to the common as a political project and vital necessity. Not only do I know I can't live without others, but I don't want to either.

 

Solidarity practiced as a spell against “every man for himself”.

 

At the same time, I do not want to deny or minimize the devastating effects that the logic of contemporary capitalism has had on these projects, regardless of their scale. These days, being attentive during this writing exercise, I took note of three situations around us that can help us approach the contradictory knot of solidarity, the limits or tensions that run through community building.

 

The first case I will mention is that of the Biblioteca Popular Mutual y Social Constancio C. Vigil, colloquially known as “La Vigil,” located in the southern neighborhood of Rosario. This is a very poor, working-class neighborhood that, in the 1960s, was the birthplace of a community initiative that launched a publishing house with hundreds of titles distributed monthly to members, aiming to establish a public library in every home. It also housed a music school for the neighborhood's kids, an astronomical observatory with the best telescope in the region, and even the educational experience of an island on the Parana River, populated by otters and other native species. La Vigil, which, incidentally, financed part of the expenses required for the well-known collective artistic-political action Tucumán Arde in 1968, was fiercely persecuted: its staff were kidnapped, its facilities looted, its telescope stolen, and finally closed during the last military dictatorship. Only recently, now under democracy and through a long trial, did the neighborhood community manage to recover what remained of that building, at least its hollowed-out skeleton. There was no longer a collective that could sustain it: they had been either imprisoned or exiled, they had abandoned their neighborhood militancy, they had died or were no longer there. The legendary Vigil reopened its doors as a pale shadow of what it had once been, and was occupied by successive partisan or municipal-managed projects. But there's one gesture I want to revive; another meeting between generations: the grandson of the astronomer who set up the observatory in the 1960s managed to replace the looted lens, and now, from the southern neighborhood of Rosario at nighttime, the sky can once again be seen much closer.

 

 

The second case is about a couple of friends who are (although perhaps wish they weren't) part of a small community of friends, intellectual and political accomplices, who decided to bet on a collective project: they bought a common piece of land on a beautiful beach, a dune in the middle of a small pine forest from where you can see and hear the sea. They built their little houses to spend the summer together (even dreaming of moving permanently, inventing another life, growing old there, writing and swimming). But friendship, like other forms of love, doesn't last forever and can fall apart. And so, that bet on common ownership became a dilemma about how to manage everyday life and future decisions, and even dealing with the desire or preference to not even cross paths. This place still exists and is very beautiful, but what was once a collective impulse sometimes becomes a practical obstacle and a legal impediment to giving it some form that emotionally accommodates what the current state of political-emotional relations allows.

 

Finally, the third case has to do with the ways in which fascism impacts the affective political community in which I recognize myself. In 2022, shortly after returning to Buenos Aires, I began closely following the experience of Casa Cultural Pringles ATR (Reparative Territorial Autonomy, for its initials in Spanish), a squatted dwelling inhabited by women and sexual dissidents who had been in prison or faced various situations of violence. This space was sustained through a series of unexpected alliances —with the neighborhood and with artists and intellectuals— by launching a café, tutoring classes, zine-writing workshops, self-defense workshops, and a collective exhibition of contemporary art about what it means to inhabit a house. 

 

 

There began —well before Milei won the elections— the call to form an anti-fascist front, a term that until recently sounded somewhat anachronistic and now seems to have taken on new life, due to its ability to shield us even in our differences. In mid-2023, on a cold winter morning, the nine residents of Casa Pringles and their children were evicted with their belongings by a massive operation of 200 police officers and city government officials. With this violence, a possibility of collective life was interrupted, which aimed to provoke a detour and twist a predetermined fate ("We will never return to the streets and to prison," sing the comrades of YoNoFui, the anti-prison collective that promoted Casa Pringles, and which has been campaigning for more than twenty years with people who are prisoners or who have gone through the prison experience). A year later, in December 2024, Casa Andrea was founded, a new collective housing project promoted by YoNoFui, together with No Tan Distintes, other collectives in solidarity to women and transvestites living on the streets. Among its residents is Sofia, the sole survivor of the triple lesbicide in Barracas, which occurred when a neighbor set fire to the hostel room where two lesbian couples were sleeping, less than a year ago. A house to counter the incitement of hatred and cruelty, the desire for extermination, the difficult collective construction of a life together among the broken, the damaged, and the worn out lives of this world.

 

Between the end of Casa Pringles and the beginning of Casa Andrea, we founded CRI (Imaginary Revolution Committee, for its initials in Spanish), a transfeminist collective that promoted a series of self-convened assemblies that we called REA (Listen and Rile Up Rounds, for its initials in Spanish) during the last electoral campaign, in the face of the increasingly certain possibility that Milei would win, and later, throughout 2024, riling people up for the occupation of the streets alongside Columna Mostri, which brings together many groups and individuals from transfeminism and sexual dissidence, brazenly proposing ourselves as “party poopers for neo-fascisms” and calling for conversations to reflect on pressing questions of the present.

 

 

This past New Year's Eve, the members of CRI gathered at my house to celebrate. I lit the fire to grill something to eat and, knowing that there were some vegetarians, I filled the grill with vegetables —corn, eggplant, bell peppers, potatoes, sweet potatoes— and suggested adding a salmon stalk for the non-vegetarians. In that group —where affection and trust are enormous—, a very long and bogged-down discussion arose about whether it was appropriate to show solidarity with vegetarians and dispense with anything of animal origin. Suddenly, our own celebration was at risk of exploding into thin air, calling for solidarity but failing to deliver it. For a moment, it became clear to what extent the punitive logic, instilled within our movements and groups, was undermining our micropolitical relationships.

 

4.

I finish writing these lines on the eve of what we perceive as a threshold: on Saturday, February 1, throughout Argentina (and other parts of the world) an anti-fascist and anti-racist LGTBINBQ+ pride march is being self-convened, a response that is expected to be massive, widespread and transversal to the declaration of war on sexual dissidence, feminism, environmental activism and any hint of what is contemptuously called "wokism." 

 

Among the countless posters, graffiti, and flyers circulating to call for this great movement of response, I find this small announcement: a downtown gallery is opening its doors in solidarity and lending its bathroom and refrigerator to protesters, to make their day easier.

 

 

Fearing the magnitude of this unprecedented and urgent articulation, the unstoppable force of our fury (transvestite fury!) and our celebration in the streets, Milei came out to retract and minimize his statements: that "homosexuals are pedophiles” and that he would "persecute leftists to the last corner", etc. But we all heard him loud and clear and we know very well how his threats of extermination produce hatred, spread violence and generate fear. In a world that seems built on fake news, we know —in bodies, in lives, and in deaths— that words produce very concrete, resounding, real effects. That's why we're in the streets, continuing a struggle that has spanned many generations and experiences, when just a handful of brave individuals, for decades, challenged authoritarian power and a largely prejudiced society. 

 

Today we are a multitude. And we will never go back to the closet.