‘Art Living Lab for Sustainability’ focuses on three types of commons in Europe, Land Commons in Galicia, Clay Commons in Belgium and Water Commons in France.
Community is and has been a constant longing in society, a mixture of ‘nostalgia’ surrounds the meaning of this way of being together. ‘Documenta fifteen’ itself, one of the most important artistic exhibition in the world, has had as its object of study the community and all its aspects, from the lumbung in Indonesia, or Asturian andecha, are diverse expressions where the community manages in a sustainable way a resource and is provided with governance for the proper management of this resource. In other words, we are dealing with common examples. Against those who believe that the commons have disappeared and that they are residual, we see how in wide latitudes of the world there are today commons that show us the capacity of the community to self-manage its own resources.
They are processes that break the public vs. private dichotomy and where community gets agency. Autonomy versus dependence, one example of the ability of citizens to self-institute and self-generate participation devices for the common good. However, these processes are fragile, they suffer privatisation attacks and the communities are experiencing, from the intensification of capitalism, enclosure processes, from the traditional seeds that are patented by large corporations, or the convenience of the state with large corporations that obviates all these micro constituent processes of the community. There is also a series of knowledge in them, there is a whole know-how of ways of doing things, a governance, they are smaller laboratories of democracy, but multiple and alive, with all an accumulated historical knowledge that can be useful for us in order to think about new ways to broaden our democracies.
‘Art Living Lab for Sustainability’ focuses on three types of commons in Europe, Land Commons in Galicia, Clay Commons in Belgium and Water Commons in France. They are diverse processes in which, in some cases, the validity continues and there is an aspiration to think from their genealogies. At a time like the current climate crisis and in the face of the necessary ecosocial transition, it is necessary to trace all that knowledge associated with the commons, which still survives in the world of view of the elderly and see how we can learn and update these ways of being on the world planet. The objective is to promote more resilient communities that continue to bet on the common as a way of doing things together.