Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Choi has brought the ethic and practices of commoning to the creation of art and its exhibition. She and her colleagues have embraced commoning as an organizing principle for how a diverse team of artists can make art and work together.
As we embark upon this great transition that is already taking place, all efforts need to be focused on retiring the dying fossil fuel assets, what Vinay Gupta calls the ‘heroin of the economy’, while commoning the renewable and healthier assets being created in their stead.
We transform the very meaning of public and private by daring to proclaim the communal sphere as existing, real, and growing, evolving, and necessary.
This 15th edition of documenta (“documenta 15”) confirms that commoning is surging as a way to re-imagine the political economy of art-making.
You can consider Open Collective an infrastructure for commoning — a backend system that makes it easier and more normal for people to manage money fairly, collectively, and with open accountability.
When the inhabitants of a certain neighborhood or complex of buildings manage to institute a radically different mode of collective co-existance, then the self-managed units, of which Castoriadis speaks, begin to emerge.
While capitalism has taught us to identify the first with money-making and the second with life-making – a necessary but nevertheless subordinated, dependent and qualitatively inferior activity – climate justice movements are claiming the progressive, i.e. egalitarian, emancipatory, and wealth-producing agency of reproductive forces.
Through the organization Fashion Act Now, a growing band of dissident fashionistas want to make the clothing industry more ecologically responsible, relocalized, and culturally in sync with this moment in history, especially with respect to climate change, economic justice, and decolonialization.
In caring commons, autonomy and self-reliance are approached collectively. Human health is understood holistically, with a focus on promoting community solidarity in caring endeavors.
Please accept the invitation made by The Commoner’s Catalog and apply your talents and imagination to the challenges of commoning. We have much to learn from each other and a new world to build!
I believe the key aspect of commoning as doing good things together in the fact that both take their place within a larger collective politics of creating resilient and renewable local societies where people are autonomous and self-possessed actors within larger cooperative networks.
Shaun Chamberlin, a British author and activist, has long been involved with the Transition movement; with climate change activism; and with a titanic effort to popularize the work of his former mentor, David Fleming.
