Berlin Meeting 2.0
Karaoke! Llamas! The liberation of stationery supplies from a fancy office with panoramic views! Food! Karaoke! A TEA ROOM!
These were a few of the heady delights sampled by the Guerrilla Media Collective team in Berlin from the 15th to the 19th March 2023, when we convened for our biannual offline meetup. We had initially planned a big fantasy meetup in a large country house somewhere in Spain, but since three of our members currently live in Berlin convenience won over, meaning only two of us had to travel from Burgos and Valencia and the rest could stay put and sleep in their own beds. On the Wednesday those of us arriving from afar had the displeasure of very early flights, so the day was spent mainly eating, shuffling around bleary-eyed in the cold, and visiting museums and bookshops before meeting up for Vietnamese food in the evening and getting an early night so we could get to work the following day.
Historically, the venues for our business activities have been self-managed cultural centres (we are nothing if not self-proclaimed “down to earth” folks), but this time, thanks to some client connections, we were able to book meeting rooms at the bougiest spot in town: the WeWork at Potsdamer Platz. Together we filled our stomachs and backpacks with an indecent amount of free coffee, oat milk, sparkling water and office supplies, and it was both a jarring and entertaining experience to conduct our cooperative business in such a temple of capitalist hubris. However, at the end of the day what we needed was a quiet room with chairs, a big table, a whiteboard and other basic necessities, and WeWork had all of these in plentiful supply. The 10th-storey views of the Berlin skyline were cute, but ultimately little more than a welcome distraction.
The Big Thing on our list, and the first item on our agenda, was the production of an honest-to-God business plan. We did not do this for fun; we are planning at some future moment to seek funding from ethical banking organisations and so need a thorough, detailed account of the GMC’s ghosts of business past, present and future. On Thursday – our first working day – an outline plan was drawn up using a template from Economistas Sin Fronteras, and we have been in contact with the lovely folks from La Colmena, who are shepherding us through the process of seeking financial support. There are many steps still to be taken here, but this was perhaps one of the most important, as it will give us a clear idea of how close we are to our goal of financial self-sufficiency, and what we need to do to achieve it.
Thursday also marked our Big Night Out, which consisted of four hours in a private cabin at Monster Ronson’s Ichiban Karaoke with a few friends and family. We had a lot of fun serenading each other, with an especially memorable duet performance of Peaches’ Fuck the Pain Away, some outstanding ad libbed gospel singing, a valiant attempt at Plastic Bertrand’s Ça Plane Pour Moi, a thorough butchering of Mahmood’s Soldi, and a rousing rendition of Cascada’s Eurodance classic Every Time We Touch. Some bright spark had the idea of putting a disposable camera in the booth for everyone to use over the course of the evening, so memories of the night have a certain mid 2000s-era Vice patina to them. 
Unsurprisingly, Friday morning consisted of a slow start and a big brunch, followed by a meandering walk through the city via some llama and donkey viewing. We eventually made it to our office space where it was the honour and pleasure of Alex (writing here in first person) to deliver a brief workshop on basic social media graphic design using Canva. We then spent a while housecleaning our organisational tools before heading back out to the Tajikistan Tea Rooms for what our agenda described as “Tea/Visions”. Sitting cross legged on piles of cushions over vodka-laced hot chocolate, what actually took place was a discussion of how to celebrate GMC’s 10 year anniversary (!!!), which is a monumental milestone for us to hit and something we refuse to let anyone ignore. GMC (and Guerrilla Translation before it), started out as a labour of love and Lovework, only officially becoming a registered coop in the last 6 years, and we are all extremely proud to have collectively nurtured it, watching it grow to the point it is at now, participating in Solidarity Economy Association’s Conversations With Gamechangers conference, being the flagship to our DisCO family, and providing steady livelihood work for its members. At the risk of sounding like Oscar winners, we’d like to extend massive thanks to everyone involved in starting and maintaining the collective over the years, current and former members, cheerleaders and supporters, clients and collaborators, you know who you are. If you follow us on social media you will already have seen some of our Lovework retrospective, highlighting a few of the particularly important or resonant texts we have translated over the years, as well as some explorations of GMC’s history and governance model. Stay tuned for more, as there’s lots in the pipeline to mark this occasion and we will not shut up about it for a few months yet.
Saturday was another relatively leisurely affair, with another visit to the office to finalise some elements of our business plan followed by a long walk through Tiergarten to visit “Charlie and Freddie” (Marx and Engels). The remainder of our time was spent in a similarly recreational way, with various visits to people’s apartments for music making, long walks around the city to explore some choice courtyards (a feature sadly lacking in a lot of Iberian architecture) and innumerable monarch-size meals from every corner of the planet. I have to emphasise that the Berlin cohort did an amazing job of organising places for us to eat and drink, and though our bodies were in Northern Europe, our taste buds travelled the world.
As is always the case in GMC, joint meanderings through shared physical space are not just an add-on to a business trip, they are the business trip. As a member-owned coop, our business doesn’t thrive unless we get along well, and we continually renew our foundation of mutual trust, respect and interest by spending time together and having fun, though it also goes without saying that much more work gets done when we are together in person. In light of this it might be fair to call GMC a hybrid online/offline distributed cooperative: though we may be distributed geographically, without these regular meetups our collective’s health would have rapidly declined, and it would never have stood the slightest chance of reaching its 10th birthday. Here’s to 10 more, and the rest!
Produced by Guerrilla Translation under a Peer Production License.
– Article written by Alex Minshall
– Edited by Timothy McKeon