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Raumlabor - Spacebuster. New York 2017

CREATIVE PRACTICES OF COMMONING; ENVIRONS OF INCLUSIVITY

By Olivia Hamilton


Commoning is a relatively recent term that describes the relational process of maintaining or reproducing a shared life. It occurs in many modalities and contexts but the aim, in terms of individual and collective benefit, is the emergence of a profound sense of connectedness and meaning that comes from contributing to a shared life. This writing examines how commoning processes negotiate difference, and privilege an attitude of care and inclusivity, in immediate communities and the territory they occupy, as well as further afield. Bringing commoning and participatory, spatial creative practice into correspondence enriches and expands the territory of each, ultimately contributing to furthering the emerging paradigm of commoning and the ability of creative practice to contribute to making an ethical and socially just world. These propositions are developed through reference to historical conceptions of the commons and discussion of ideas presented by key theorists and activists involved in developing how a paradigm of commoning can reshape the values and systems of the contemporary society. 

As creative practice drifts into ever more pervasive and subtle inter-relationship with processes of commodification it becomes more difficult to make distinctions commercial or alternate outlooks. Resistance to the wholesale commodification of culture appears irrelevant or useless, abetting attitudes of acceptance or acquiescence. Commoning can provide guides for creative practice negotiating increasingly complex ethical and political terrains and in return participatory spatial and creative practices can bring innovative perspectives and capacities to commoning. Lived experience of commoning processes distributed through creative participatory practice, are able to engender and prioritises relations and environments of inclusivity, care, emergence and exchange. These attitudes and activities undermine neoliberal understandings, and also preferences for a society based on individualistic self-interest and extraction for personal gain.

This writing uses specific examples of two practices; Raumlabor and Theaster Gates, that share similar social concerns but use very different creative commoning approaches. These practices propose how contact with open and inclusive spatial and social environs can provide more than the distraction or entertainment often afforded by temporary, or even a more sustained, creative events. Both projects propose that beyond the physical or temporal extent offered by the event, that these methods are a way in which communities are able to envision futures informed by different values to those of the dominant economic, political and social regimes. Through a combined and lived social and spatial experience, dreams of a more inclusive and shared future are brought into view, encouraging new social dispositions that ultimately proliferate beyond the immediate spatial or temporal boundaries of the work. In this way the projects function as dreaming devices or prompts that bring about new thinking and relations. A commoning creative practice can alter how those involved with the work conceive the limits of privatised life, prompting them to continue to seek and create alternatives to the social alienation that is proliferated by neoliberal systems and capitalist culture.



Please note accompanying images of the projects are indicative only and require copyright approval.





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Theaster Gates - Dorchester Projects. Chicago 2006

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