"to render (the abstract) concrete," 1826, from concrete (adj.), late 14c., "actual, solid; particular, individual; denoting a substance," from Latin concretus "condensed, hardened, stiff, curdled, congealed, clotted," figuratively "thick; dim," literally "grown together;" past participle of concrescere "to grow together," from assimilated form of com "together" (see con-) + crescere "to grow" (from PIE root *ker- , "to grow").
Commonist Organizations,
Alternative Forums,
Temporal Zones,
& Laboratories
While a large part of this site is concerned with crafting speculative, imaginary, and thus temporary worlds as laboratories for thoughts, the aim of these endeavors is in most cases motivated by the urgency and desire to prefigure actual transformations taking form beyond the realm of fiction. Therefore this subthread is dedicated to material manifestations. It lists collectives and spaces that have carved out temporal, spatial, or contractual architectures in which alternative modes of cohabitation and collaboration are explored. In these experimental zones, play is employed as a method of maintaining an ongoing open organizational structure. This thread also offers a place for critical reflection around autonomy and access, scale and sustenance, as well as strategies that may grow sharper teeth to the theory.
au JUS - Game Space
A → project space collectively run via an extended LARP. The project establishes a zone for prefigurative play and (re)enactment as research. The three story building consisting of a residency apartment, a white cube gallery and a black cube basement offers a site to explore LARP over extended periods and in communication with its local context and public. The group explores its own narration and organization through role play and offers other practitioners and residents to explore their questions within a speculative (re)framing.Alternative Education
Critical Theory Workshop
is a non-profit educational institution that seeks to bring affordable education with real use-value to a broad public.
Glossary of Common Knowledge (GCK) seeks to find common knowledge to speak about less visible stories in contemporary art and address systems that govern our ways of thinking in art and beyond.
Monoskop is an independent web-based educational resource and research platform for arts, culture and humanities. It features wiki pages with multilingual genealogical bibliographies of contemporary topics and movements in art, culture, and society linked to electronic versions of publications or other freely accessible digital libraries.
Overview of alternative art schools, free schools, projects, support networks and vanguards of the alternative education movement initiated as part of a collaborative research project by ART&CRITIQUE
Commonist Organizations
Remix the Commons is a collective acting as a platform working for the commons movement. It enables commoners to carry out research and mediation projects on the commons, and to disseminate and advocate for the recognition of practices of sharing and common self-organisation. Remix enables to preserve the knowledge produced by the commoners as structured information, in particular through semantic web tools, for making visible a grammar of collective action for solidarity.
Decentralized
Autonomous
Organization
Radical Friends. Online DAO Summit for Decentralisation of Power and Resources in the Artworld discusses the value of and presents pathways to peer-produced decentralised digital infrastructures for art, culture and society – in particular through Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) for the cultural sector. The symposium takes as its inspiration the defining principles of friendship – sustained intimacy, fellowship and camaraderie – which, when applied to complex difficulties (particularly those that might otherwise be invisible to us), offers excellent design patterns for social infrastructure.
Decentralized Autonomous Kunstverein (DAK) is an art association inspired by developments in blockchain technology and the unique tradition of non-profit art associations in Europe. The organization’s mission is to promote experimental approaches to creating and curating contemporary art, exploring the potential of decentralized collective work within the context of contemporary art and technology. To fulfill this purpose, the members of the DAK will collectively work to finance and curate exhibitions, screenings, performances and related programming.
Open Residencies
Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre (B.O.A.R.C.) is a not-for-profit study site in Prenton (UK) that focuses on providing individual users and groups with a low cost, temporary place for research and experimentation, which is primarily directed towards cultural and artistic practice, and supporting the development of communities.
Kerminy is a meeting place for artistic, research, theoretical and cultural production residencies, situated in Rosporden (France). Kerminy works autonomous and explores new possibilities for working practices. An agricultural activity at the heart of the place is developed to the commitment of both permanent and temporary residents.
MASSIA is a user-created informal residency space for individuals or groups from any field – who can motorize their own artistic and knowledge production, not only responding to the opportunities given by the institutional market. Initiated and run by artists, theoreticians and practitioners themselves, MASSIA is busy with notions of self-organisation and making alternatives possible.
PAF(PerformingArtsForum) is a place in St Erme (France) for professional and not-yet professional practitioners and activists in the field of performing arts, visual art, literature, music, new media and internet, theory and cultural production, and scientists who seek to research and determine their own conditions of work.
FEDERATED WEB
A collection of networks, tools and devices aiming at decentralisation of the internet:
- Distributed Web of Care an art project by Taeyoon Choi.
-
Homebrewserver.club a monthly gathering in Rotterdam for self-hosted services.
- Lurk provides a few community services composed of mailing lists, chat and access to the Fediverse.
READING:
Temporary Autonomous Zone is a term coined in 1990 by poet, anarcho-immediatist and Sufi scholar Hakim Bey, as a liberated area “of land, time or imagination” where one can be for something, not just against, and where new ways of being human together can be explored and experimented with.
Commonism (edited by Nico Dockx & Pascal Gielen)
Is a book of ‘commonist’ practice, drawing an image of a political belief system through theoretical analysis, wild artistic speculation, inspiring examples from the arts, near-empirical observations and critical reflection.
Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (by Bell Hooks) discusses education as a potentially profound and transformative experience that can tax the mind, body, and spirit due to opposition and oppression that is very evidently still in place in our educational systems.
The Tyranny of Structurelessness is an essay by American feminist Jo Freeman that concerns power relations within radical feminist collectives. The essay, inspired by Freeman's experiences in a 1960s women's liberation group, reflected on the feminist movement's experiments in resisting leadership hierarchy and structured division of labor.