In March 2019, we sat in the audience of a conversation with filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger at the Berkeley Pacific Film Archive. During the Q&A, Ottinger described a long table in a warehouse in 1970s Berlin, where artists, freaks and misfits sat to stage plays, sew marvelous outfits, share food, conversation, worries, and love. Since then, S. wondered if such a table could ever be possible while living in a present characterized by unaffordable property prices and income inequality, and anyways--always too little time and space too spread out. 

Now, as time expands and contracts, space disintegrates into split-screens and text bubbles, and many of us sit isolated at tiny desks strewn across the planet, the idea of the long table as a place to gather returned to us. Unable to construct (or ever afford) a table long enough, J. suggested that we create a virtual one. And thus, this site. And here’s your invitation.