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Around Christmastime, 1914, German and British troops began to outwardly express a longing for home, normalcy, and comfort. They began to sing songs in the trenches of goodwill and yuletide cheer. Their voices floated above the pits they had dug for their protection and intermingled in no-man’s land, the space between the fighting.

In time, it seems, these carried voices accumulated. Piling up one by one, a free-bin of Celtic and Germanic syntax weaving in and out of one another to form an invisible coexistence, a new shared language of hopefulness and future possibilities. A dialectic of secession. A temporary culture of release.

On Christmas Day troops from either side of the fighting left the safety of their lives under the earth and ventured to the surface, where all experience is met head on, as equals, if not without force. They stopped fighting. The began to sing their songs in proximity. And then arm in arm. They played games. They buried their dead together. Ate what they could, their banquet gathered collectively between the meager rations available to them. They presented one another with gifts.

Experience is inevitably encountered through friction. We have all experienced moments wherein the friction of our lives, lived with one another, rubs our shared surfaces down to a smooth body, our divided publics recognized as separate bodies only through the recognition of the slight distance between us.

As Christmas moved towards the new year the opposing sides retreated to their trenches. But all was not the same. Fighting was listless. Death diminished. The troops often found themselves shooting off into the distance, their aim impeded by some opposing force other than the binary aggression they had encountered up until the holiday cease fire. A new party entered the battlefield, complicating the narrative.

Those outside of the immediate bodily effects of the war - those with no danger of being shot or gassed - grew agitated. Numbers were off. Life was winning out over death. After messages were relayed, new rules were put into place, discipline was inflicted. It seemed the only solution was to begin anew. The troops present were all switched out. A whole new series of regiments from the German and British forces were brought in to replace those that were, from the perspective from on high, ineffective.

For Starters is a space for beginnings. A space to build off the past - past materials, past ideas, histories experienced and learned, embodied with a desire for the present and future to be in consort. It’s pretty Hippie, we know. That’s not all bad. For Starters first incarnation manifest in the spring of 2014 as a neighborhood seed starting geodesic greenhouse and social space, a reinvention of the collaborative mobile structure known as The MetaShanty. In concept For Starters is an architectural and social construction for songs, stories, recipes, conversations, workshops, et al with a focus on starting, resurrecting, reconfiguring, and all that jazz? For Starters, in and of itself, is an action towards a state of infinite beginnings. The next incarnation will manifest during the spring thaw of 2015.

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