"The Future is a Zone to Defend." Demonstrator in Toulouse, France, November 2021. Photo: Alain Pitton. License: Alamy

Commoning and the Commons

The object of intense theoretical reflection over the last several decades, the concept of the commons and the political principle of the common have mapped out a zone of social construction that operates complexly between public and private, and between states and globalized market economies. More than simply the pools of resources held in common, as analyzed and defended by Elinor Ostrom,[note]Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons : The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1990[/note] commons are mutualist associations of direct producers; commoning entails activity. Commoners and commoning contribute directly to the co-production of life and social reproduction through self-organized collaborative making, growing and doing. Among those contributing key reflections on the commons must be counted Silvia Federici, Peter Linebaugh, Iain Boal, J.M. Neeson, Vandana Shiva, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Massimo De Angelis, Stavros Stavrides, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, and Ian Angus.

Artists, practitioners and social scientists have conceived commoning in various ways and with differing emphases. Mutuality, democratic forms of self-organization, conviviality and de-commodified forms of social enjoyment are underlined in many accounts. Contemporary thinking on the commons and commoning often explicitly aligns these markers with notions of degrowth or “postgrowth”; social, ecological and climate justice and planetary habitability; and the labor of care and social reproduction. In this way, the concept of the commons and the principle of the common have entered political discourse as expressions of the stakes and practical orientations of many social movements.

There would seem to be two main reasons why there has been a revival of interest in commoning in the 21^st century. First, over the last four decades most states have substantially weakened public welfare provisions and infrastructures and largely evacuated commitments to social solidarity established in the post-1945 decades. The current rapid adjustments to momentous shifts in US foreign policy – namely a general rearmament – only reinforce and accelerate this trend toward austerity. From this perspective, commoning is simply what people will do together to meet basic needs and get by when states have abandoned them. Not all social groups and classes have been equally exposed to the effects of this withdrawal of the state and reassertion of market logics; Black and Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC) have been especially impacted, continuing legacies of racism and coloniality that have deep roots in the formation and rise of modernity. Indeed, Marx’s famous account of “so-called primitive accumulation” identifies the systematic destruction of the commons as a condition for the establishment of capitalist modernity. Resistance to enclosures of the commons has flared continuously from the early 13^th century, when the customary rights of commoners were inscribed in the English Magna Carta and The Great Charter of the Forest, through to today’s ongoing struggles against privatization, eco-genocide and corporate land grabbing. The adoption of the slogan “Reclaim the Commons” by contemporary social movements can therefore be understood as a call for a reparative and decolonizing justice.

Second, the current conjuncture is a planetary one. Following Dipesh Chakrabarty’s important distinction between globe and planet,[note]Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021[/note] “the planetary” is an emerging perspective that differs substantially from the logic of global modernization. In its drive for sustainable growth, expansion and accumulation, globalization is said to be reaching the limits of its energetics in planetary heating, climate chaos and the crisis of declining biodiversity. The planetary, by contrast, centers the habitability required by complex webs of life – and therefore poses a biospheric realism in place of “capitalist realism” and geopolitics. It also points to a mutualist and more-than-human transformation of modernity’s extractivist anthropocentrism. In the socio-ecological polycrisis that results from planetary feedback to extractive modernity, commoning appears as a possible transitional social practice mediating between established and emergent social forms and patterns. Commoning attracts to itself elements of a new planetary common sense (mutuality; degrowth; the more-than-human critique of “progress” and modernization).

These two streams of thinking on the commons converge on the ground of socio-ecological, environmental and climate justice, where it is recognized that longstanding biases and dispositions have externalized the burdens, harms and “slow violence” of extractive economies onto certain communities – namely, BIPOC and the Global South, and more generally, the living webs of the more-than-human biosphere. In this light, invocations and practices of commons and commoning may be signaling a paradigm shift and social “tipping point” within the current polycrisis, as well as articulating a pathway for reparative justice and transformation.

In the well-elaborated account of Massimo De Angelis, commons are social systems constituted by three elements: common goods (“use values produced for a plurality”), the commoners who come together to produce those common goods, and the practices (“doing in common”) by which they do so.[note]Massimo De Angelis, Omnia Sunt Communia: On the Commons and the Transformation to Postcapitalism, London : ZED Books, 2017[/note] Commons systems can link together to form larger scale “commons ecologies” that exceed the sum of their parts. Commons and commons ecologies consciously diverge from profit-driven “business as usual” and are built collectively as an alternative to competitive economic logics; commoning is motivated to various degrees by transformative social values and is charged with the affect and feeling-structures of those values, as practitioners live and experience them.

The mutualism of commoning, as recently theorized, stresses the importance of good relations, conviviality, care, social justice, ecological balance and planetary habitability. But it is important to remember that the idea of the commons is pluriversal: theories of the commons diverge, and in practice commoning may look quite different in different local contexts and histories. In particular, questions of localism and digital technologies have produced sharp disagreements. For example, while Hardt and Negri advocated for a “digital commons,”[note]Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009[/note] Jonathan Crary, citing the implicatedness of the Internet and its infrastructures in planetary crises, unequivocally rejects the possibility of a liberatory digital commons.[note]Jonathan Crary, Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World, London/New York: Verso, 2022[/note] Commoning, then, is not a vehicle for unification or the elimination of difference and dissensus. In this regard, commons do not follow the logic of a political party or hierarchical business model. Nevertheless, commoning is about doing, making, growing and caring together – and coordinating difference without erasing it. It is on this basis that the potentials of commoning are generating consideration as a possible pathway to future “survivance” (to inflect the important concept of Gerald Vizenor[note]Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance, Lincoln / London: University of Nebraska Press, 1999[/note]).

Art and Commoning

Contemporary artists have long been engaged with and inspired by notions of the commons and commoning. Indicative experiments in joining art practices with commoning include the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination’s deliberate return to art’s older ritual and collective memorial functions, in the activist context of the ZAD (Zone à Défendre/Zone to Defend) in Notre-Dame-des-Landes, in Brittany, through the 2010s; as well as a 2018 gathering of the Arts, Culture and Commoning working group, hosted by the HowlRound Theater Commons in Boston. In 2016, the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna published the edited anthology Spaces of Commoning: Artistic Research and the Utopia of the Everyday.[note]Anette Baldauf, Stefan Gruber, Moira Hille, Annette Krauss, Vladimir Miller, Mara Verlič, Hong-Kai Wang and Julia Wieger (eds.), Spaces of Commoning: Artistic Research and the Utopia of the Everyday, Berlin: Sternberg Press / Publication Series of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, 2016[/note] The Swamp Pavillion, Lithuania’s contribution to the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, resulted in the edited volume Commonism: New Aesthetic of the Real.[note]Nico Dockx and Pascal Gielen (eds.), Commonism: A New Aesthetics of the Real, Antwerp: Valiz and Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts, University of Antwerp, 2018 [/note] In 2021, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin opened “Investigative Commons,” an exhibition based on the theory and practices of Forensic Architecture, which proposed the commons as central for a new model of collaborative truth production. In 2022, documenta 15, directed by the curatorial collective ruangrupa, organized an experimental alignment of a large-scale international exhibition with the values of the commons; the results have generated much discussion about the possibilities for linking practices of commoning to art making and art curating.

Moreover, it becomes clearer that much recent artistic engagement with ecofeminism, agroecology, practices of decolonization and specific Indigenous land and water struggles (from Chiapas and Rojava to Amazonia and Standing Rock) can be reconsidered as engagements with commoning by other names. Examples would include Gaye Chan and Nandita Sharma’s Eating in Public (2003-2022), Maria Theresa Alves’ The Return of a Lake (2012), Bouchra Khalili’s Garden Conversations (2014), and Marwa Arsanios’ Who Is Afraid of Ideology? (2017-2019). The relevance of new artistic research and critical reflection on the intersections of art and commoning is therefore well established.

Commoning Now

The US White House under Joe Biden had unequivocally named “climate change” as the “existential crisis of our time.” Denying this, the Trump administration has doubled down on fossil fuel extraction and has sought to block and sabotage the transition to renewable energy. However, the socio-ecological polycrisis is not just about climate chaos and planetary heating: it also includes growing inequality and the weakening of democracy; the rampant proliferation of disruptive technologies and weapons of mass destruction; resource wars and critical mineral supply-chain conflicts; multiple forms of pollution and toxification; the loss of biodiversity, or the human and more-than-human co-produced worlds that make up earthly life; and the existential and nonlinear horizon of extinction. Under these pressures, both planet and society are changing with dizzying speed; Arts of Commoning tries to take the measure of these changes, as far as possible today (January 2026).

Against the urgent appeals of climate scientists, nations today are again going all-in on fossil energy. Weakened social solidarity programs are being further slashed in order to rearm and prepare for war. The race to weaponize artificial intelligence (AI) must be considered part of this tendency. Meanwhile access to critical minerals is motivating gangster-like moves and territorial expansionist rhetoric from the former global hegemon. While the morbid symptoms of these processes are watched with stunned fascination, the social forces and tendencies that cause them are getting far less attention. Capitalist modernity, accelerated by disruptive technologies and algorithmic finance, has an unsolved energy problem. Growth and techno-acceleration are unsustainable except, it seems evident, as processes of war and ruination. Even as AI proliferates, soon to be joined by remote gene editing, the progress stories of modernity are severely in doubt.

The polycrisis calls into question and drives a deepening critique of modernist business-as-usual, extractive anthropocentrism, and the ongoing violent legacies of racialized colonialism. Reflection on commoning and its intersections with artistic research and practice takes place within, and cannot be separated from, this planetary context. Arts of Commoning seeks to wrestle with the challenging multiple scales and urgencies of this problematic and context, and thereby produce new artistic reflections and research that go beyond partial and fragmented approaches to commoning by means of art. The specific contribution of Arts of Commoning will be to focus research and reflection through a more precise and comprehensive articulation of current socio-ecological challenges and their drivers.