Sprint4_Week8#The Common: Pre-reading and exploring reflection

Assigned reading part:

From reading What is Commoning, Anyway?:

This reflects a broader shift in thinking from the prevailing YO-YO ethic (“you’re on your own”) to WITT (“we’re in this together”).

By reading this online passage, I learnt that a majority of English people, known as “commoners,” derived at least part of their livelihoods from the commons before the brutal onset of enclosures by wealthy landowners. Hence the word “commoning” describes people living in close connection to the commons. In the passage, the writer also mentioned, Linebaugh used the word because I wanted a verb for the commons, to portray it as an activity, not just an idea or material resource.

The act of commoning, I guess, draws on a web of connections established in the hopes that we will all look out for one another and with the awareness that some things belong to all of us, which is the very essence of the commons. The practise of commoning shows a shift in mindset from the prevalent ethic of “you’re on your own” to “we’re in this together,” which again supports the statement I made at the top.

Commoning represents a new way for everyday citizens to make decisions and take action to shape the future of their communities without being locked into the profit-driven mechanics of the market or being solely dependent on government agencies for funding.

So it is true that we are creating the commons as much as discovering them.

From exploring Casco Art Institute:

1/ Common Grounds

A process of commoning the main site and building in Utrecht’s Museum Quarters through different modes of sharing the space, its use values & stories.

Since 2014, Casco has shared with its neighbours a courtyard full with mature trees and vegetation. This is a resource they both share. The location stands for mixed ownership and methods of space maintenance. The courtyard is city property and welcomes people to take in the beauty of this tranquil setting in the hectic city centre. The neighbours are a mixture of property owners, renters, and subtenants.

As long as Casco is at this location, Common Grounds will continue. In the future, they plan to reconfigure and consolidate their home to serve a variety of purposes, including continuing to use it as an exhibition space for various projects, serving as a hub for local artists, particularly BIPOC artists with multidisciplinary practises and international backgrounds who co-organize or participate in various projects, and hosting musical and gardening events in the courtyard with our neighbours during the warm and sunny months.

2/ Assembly for commoning art institutions

An annual get-together for commoning art institutions through collective (un)learning, workshops and action plans.

Using the hierarchy of unending productivity, planning, decision-making, and our work in connection to multiple gender identities, ethnicities, cultures, ages, and skills, this initiative aims to unlearn institutional behaviours that are antithetical to the commons. They deal with the complicated problems they run into, and together with other artists and groups working in and around the art world, they search for potential answers using a commons approach.
The Assembly operates in accordance with the cooperative commons principles, which ensure that each participant has a legitimate voice and can be heard in a variety of ways. Participants engage in active learning about the various ways that a commons-based working technique might be incorporated into their own work practises and organisational structures.

From exploring Commons Network:

Commons Network is a collaboratory for the social and ecological transition.

They facilitate the exchange of ideas and people while giving governments, civic society, and social movements access to tools and knowledge. In an effort to collaboratively change the system and create a compassionate and just future, they investigate fresh economic and social paradigms.

I really like the design of their website, they have inserted their actions and explorations in each panel. It fully showcases their sustainability, public lifestyle and more.
They suggest that this is certainly not the time for ‘business as usual’ and that the European Union (EU) needs to make fundamental changes to address these challenges such as climate change, food security, antimicrobial resistance, decent work for all and rising inequality.
As civil society organisations, they urge a reaffirmation of the Group’s core values of peace, democracy, participation, equality, social justice, solidarity and sustainability, which are at the heart of this website’s European project.

From reading Aesthetics of the Commons:

Global capitalism—with all its contradictions—traverses us. It has colonized not only almost all aspects of our lives and relationships that make up our human and more-than-human environment, but also our imagination, the way we think of ourselves, of our possibilities of being in the world. How to rethink the world and ourselves as collectively shared, rather than individually owned?

By using the commons framework as a heuristic tool, we can make visible. Imaginaries don’t appear from afar, from the enviable position of “total individual autonomy” and “freedom of purpose,” but rather via immersion in precarious situations and group interventions into chaotic realities.

The economy

After its early history as a form of common land use, the commons re-emerged, in the English-speaking world, as a major theoretical, political and cultural horizon during the 1990s. By economists, competing individuals would necessarily destroy the physical commons and that only private (or state) property regimes could prevent that. For economists, the resources are at the center of the commons, and the social institutions and cultural forms developed through them have the purpose of (re-)producing these resources.

The digital

The most significant difference between physical and digital commons is that digital data is “non-rivalrous” in use. While meadows can be overgrazed, digital information cannot be overused. Use does not subtract from the resource; on the contrary, it adds to it.

Technically such practices may be seen as piracy, while in fact they embody elements of a commons, in that they create and maintain “shared resources” avail- able for reuse.

The legal

Commons are a particular kind of property arrangement that have always been subject to legal restrictions. According to hacker culture, the term “free” refers to four fundamental “freedoms” that users of software should enjoy: the right to use, the right to study and modify, the right to redistribute identical copies, and the right to distribute transformed copies. A first attempt, called Free Art License, was initiated by the French artist Antoine Moreau in early 2000. it was the Creative Commons project, launched a year later, that brought such licenses to the cultural mainstream.

Community was an afterthought and the commons were imagined primarily as an aggregation of individual works, donated by enlightened authors.

The political

The fourth perspective on the commons, which sometimes takes both physical and digital resources into view, draws on political science that conceptualizes commons as a holistic social system. Here, commons are viewed as operating simply “beyond market and state,” with a tendency to idealize commons as self-sufficient islands of shared values and consensual decision-making.

The feminist

According to Maria Mies, there cannot be a commons without community. Feminist viewpoints also regard the commons as a vast area of the social. According to these (eco-) feminist viewpoints, commons are self-governing and frequently self-sufficient local economic entities where “production” and “reproduction” coexist as an organic whole.

The transversal

The purpose of this is to set the transversal dimension of our conception of the commons as a “thinking tool” in context. They begin with the premise that commons are constructed around affects as well as resources. Instead of being organised by ownership, commons are by relationships of caring.

The pool of resources and the set of communities—the third and most important element in terms of conceptualizing the commons is the verb “to common”—the social process that creates and reproduces the commons. It matters what stories tell stories.” And to tell different stories, we need different aesthetics.