ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 inaugurates the media and communicative practices exerted by the Chilean movement during 2011. It focuses on what I refer to as ‘walled intimacy practices’. Composed of conversations at home with family and friends, with classmates in occupied buildings, and between students and student representatives in local and national assemblies, practices of walled intimacy mark a process of emergence of the commons based on webs of trust. In this emergence I highlight three key elements: the relevance of closeness and confidence to beat fear and individualism in order to mobilise; the redefinition of time and space in order to have conditions to discuss at their own pace; and finally, the importance of participatory ways to arrive at collective agreements. In the end, the chapter underlines that for the students there was no opportunity to establish dialogue and discussion without breaking and subverting neoliberal logics of time and space as necessary means to share and debate common concerns; and there was no way to move on as a collective without considering what every person involved had to say.
