Words by Sam Romero for Regional Assembly.

Just as a slave almost always enslaves others the one who is free frees. In the last session of Regional Assembly, we spent a significant amount of time talking about friendship and politics and freedom, and after meeting every month for almost a year it seemed the right place to end, and to begin.

Friendships often form in resistances. They grow as young people refuse paved highways and instead walk, swim, and breeze along paths they forge through dreams into being. Amid this slow togetherness are often born songs, poems, novels, and works of art. In many ways friendship makes possible what otherwise might not be, bringing to mind the lines of the poet Ahmad Faraz, who writes of the passion of friendship where the one who isn’t mad simply wears madness, the madness often an act of hope. Sometimes it seems that friendship might in itself be the political space that it strives and longs to create; an alternative to the politics it resists against.

But, eventually, in dictatorships and military occupations, democratically elected fascist regimes and in the torture chambers of everyday living, friendships, like everything else, are put to test. Do they make it through? Sometimes. More often than not, they don’t.

What happens to the love, though, the trust, the comfort of friendship when it ends? What happens to the warmth of these pockets that one has inhabited for so long? Do they go cold amid the fear and the violence, and the petty greed, the struggle for surviving, the despair? When hope of any kind of freedom is wiped from the eyes, are friendships wiped away as well? Does a possibility of freedom end with the ending of a friendship?

Zoe Butt is a curator and arts writer who was our guest to the last session of Regional Assembly. From the moment she spoke, she appeared to be someone whose primary mode of being is going. If it were possible, she might even be in two places at one time. It seemed, listening to her, that she is the kind of person who, if put in a prison, would find something to paint the walls with. A little line here; a little arc there. The act of this drawing inviting others, beckoning them; and soon a few people walk over and hang near the wall, looking. And in the black of the charcoal lines lie all the colours. Someone else draws another line, a crooked one. There is laughter. Someone starts to hum a tune. Another joins. Four lines suddenly make a box that also appears like a strange window. For a moment the wall is no longer the wall of the prison; it is a wall on which charcoal scribbles traces of other possible worlds.

In Regional Assembly too, the windows of zoom allow us to glimpse other people and their places. Working across institutions and artist led collectivities in Brisbane, Beijing, Ho Chi Minh City, and now in Chiang Mai where she has founded the in-tangible institute — a defining feature of Zoe’s career seems to be the conscious creation of spaces for friendships and art to be possible and emerge, often in places of pervasive violence where the rulers of either government or artistic institutions are suspicious of art and friendship. As we hear Zoe speak of her work and of friendships and the grief of losing friends with which so much has been possible, it stares at us gently and quietly that we listen to a free person.

For this specific piece of writing that could really go anywhere, it is friendship and freedom that the words insist upon. And it makes sense that at the end of Regional Assembly, after a year of meeting every month with artists and writers situated in various corners of Australia and Asia, working with various mediums and varying realities, after conversations about the violence of the present and the past, and violence that looms above us and lurks within us, and conversations about the power of coming together as a community and at the same time the stifling any community, even friendship, can impose on the individual and the artist, it makes sense that we end with freedom and friendship.

Among all forms of relations friendship is special. We share neither blood, nor children, nor property; it is a place of openness where we can finally be ourselves with one another. So much is possible within the utopian bliss of friendship, an act of resistance against the ways of the world, and yet this friendship almost always teeters along an undefined edge. Friends can always become ‘strangers’ in a way that family cannot. The possibility of a cleaving lurking in-between. Zoe spoke of this cleaving and of the loss and grief, and a silence that words really cannot fill. Silence and grief, instead, rising out of the chasm.

It might perhaps be that like everything else friendships too come with their dates of expiration, that the ones we were drawn toward for years, we no longer want to see. And yet they go on living in us. Another sad realization about the world, that the friendships that are alive and throbbing at this moment, carry within them the shadows of dying.

Friendship, inevitability, brings us to the question of forgiving. Often, forgiving betrayals, real and imagined. To be a human being is to betray others and oneself. But can betrayals be forgiven in friendship?

In his essay On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, Derrida asks if it is enough to forgive the forgivable, or is it the unforgivable that we need to forgive. The same questions holds true for friendships, especially in times and places where friendships are often the last remaining spaces of freedom and possibility.

Scribbling on the walls of a country turned into a prison the shape of a labyrinth, friendship remains one of the few possibilities of freedom. And again, like all possibilities of freedom, possible only with an act of freedom. In this case, perhaps forgiving the unforgivable.

Sam Romero is a writer, raised in regional Queensland. He travels often without a map.