Athens Biennale 2015-17, OMONOIA, The Assembly. Synapse 1: Introducing a Laboratory for Production. Interior view of Bageion Hotel. Photo by Nysos Vasilopoulos.

Gene Ray: You are a founding member and past president of the Institute of Radical Imagination (IRI), a group of “curators, artists, activists, scholars with a shared interest in co-producing knowledge as artistic and political research – interventions aimed at implementing post-capitalist forms of life in the Mediterranean and the Global South.”[note]“Institute of Radical Imagination,” https://instituteofradicalimagination.org/2018/05/22/iri-general-assembly/[/note] Could you tell us about this group and its activities? What was the context of its founding, and how was it set up?

Massimiliano Mollona: I will describe IRI from my situated point of view, which is different from that of other people of the collective. As an anthropologist and filmmaker, I have been working on issues of class, labour and post-capitalist transformation for twenty years. Ethnography is central to my practice. I have done long term fieldworks in working-class communities in the north of England and from 2008 until now, in Brazil. My fieldwork is oriented towards supporting forms of local struggle through direct action as well as via the coproduction of narratives which escape bourgeois modes of making and telling. These strive to bring into alignment non-bourgeois and non-ethnocentric forms of pedagogy, aesthetics and activism which I call art/commons. All my experiments – from co-participated filmmaking in Sheffield and Brazil; to directing the Athens Biennale (OMONOIA, 2014-2016) in conversation with the Solidarity for All movement in Greece; to IRI – seek this alignment in the space of art/commons.

The Institute of Radical Imagination (IRI) is a group of intellectuals, scholars, lawyers, artists, curators, cultural producers and activists who aim to define and implement zones of post-capitalism in Europe’s South and the Mediterranean. It emerged from the planetary turn of mobilization of 2013 – that is, the interconnected struggles for the commons that came together outside the framework of nation-states and “in the squares” – and from the desire to identify a non-Eurocentric regional space, “the Mediterranean,” where there is a long legacy of grassroots politics and urban and rural commons.[note]For a Mediterranean theory of the commons, see Ibn Khaldûn, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, trans. Franz Rosenthal, ed. N. J. Dawood, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015.[/note] The current war waged against Iran by the U.S. and Israel, and the recurrent history of genocide and resistance in Palestine, shows that indeed the Mediterranean remains one of the last anti-imperialist stronghold in the world.

IRI also emerged from the experiments in radical museology, when important European museums and progressive municipalities formed coalitions with social centres and urban commons to counter the privatization of urban spaces and culture.  At its start, IRI had eight nodes – Milan, Venice, Naples, Madrid, Athens, Istanbul, St Petersburg and Cairo – and travelled nomadically across these nodes but also connected with other nodes in the global South, specifically Eastern Europe and Latin America. Many in the collective cut their teeth in the alter-globalisation movement of the early 2000s and in the later movements of the urban commons and of squares in Cairo and Istanbul. IRI sought to bring together these grassroots movements into a quasi-institutional framework.

Having a background in economics (I did a BA in economics in Milan in the 1990s before embarking in anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science) the focus on economic anthropology and non-ethnocentric political economy is central to the alignment of art/commons I mention above. So, I conceived IRI as a laboratory to develop real(ist) experiments[note]On the issue of realism see my conversation with James Clifford “(Im)possible Realism: a counterpoint” in the Visual Anthropology Review, vol.41, No. 2, Fall 2025, p. 1-15.[/note] of life beyond capitalism and bring forward a systemic shift towards post-capitalism by triggering different parallel processes of socialisation and life commoning. We experimented with cryptocurrencies to demonetise the economy; mapped the economies of toxic philanthropy; developed a campaign of Art for Universal Basic Income; de-commodified our labour through cooperativist and non-monetized accounting systems; researched ways of transitioning into Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs), with the aim of meshing our economic and organisational structure with other like-minded platforms and groups.

More broadly IRI, contributed to four movements of post-capitalist reorientation: First, epistemological reorientation. The transition beyond capitalism must rely on a radical epistemological shift that can only emerge from militant forms of knowledge production; that is, from theory collectively generated in moments of struggle. Indeed, the collaboration between scholars, activists and artists – and the blending of activism and research – is central to IRI.

Second, institutional reorganization. I imagined IRI as an “institutional threshold” – an intermediate zone between museums, urban commons and universities – with fluid forms and multi-scalar borders, marked, at least initially, not so much by economic and legal boundaries as by a common culture and imagination. I imagined IRI as a hybrid between a travelling research centre, a refuge for intellectuals and artists at risk (and who take risks), a group of militant researchers and a policy-making body that generates ideas and applied knowledge applicable to specific and urgent needs on the ground – an intellectual, logistical infrastructure operating across existing arts, academic and activist networks. More importantly IRI was a safe space for all those artists, activists and curators who were dissatisfied with the institutional politics of museums, universities and social centres.

Third, the politics of urban space. How can the relationship between space and capital be rethought from a non-ethnocentric and decolonised perspective? How can spatial justice be reformulated beyond the dichotomies of the public and the private; that is, in relation to the commons? Because IRI was deeply connected to the experience of urban commons (La Tabacalera and La Ingobernable in Madrid, Macao in Milan, Sale Docs in Venice, L’Ex-Asilo Filangieri in Naples), we focused on strengthening these urban occupations, developing legal frameworks that would allow them to gain operative and legal autonomy from municipalities. 

Fourth, political time/artistic time. The issue of socially engaged art, particularly that which aims at being politically timely (as per Tania Bruguera) or “contemporary,”[note]See Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art, London: Verso, 2014.[/note] begs the question: What is the relationship between political time and artistic time? And between political time and historical time? How can we account for the irruption of geological time onto the political scene? What is the temporal horizon of human emancipation in the form of revival of the communist project, transmission of ancestral knowledge or intervention against ecological collapse?

I have argued (Art/Commons, 2021) that art which addresses the urgencies of our time – the crises, the revolutions, the demonstrations, the occupations – happens “after the fact.”[note]Massimiliano Mollona, Art/Commons: Anthropology beyond Capitalism, London: Zed, 2021.[/note] I have also argued that the prefigurative potential of art exists in the mid-term – in-between the short-term unfolding of political actions and the longer temporality whereby these actions are institutionalised and crystallised. Many militant organisations have questioned the linear temporality of modernity – of nation-states and of certain “revolutionary” parties – whilst also avoiding the related and inverted primitivist desire to return to a natural state of communism. They have established themselves within temporal regimes of alter- or trans-modernity. For instance, the Zapatista communities see themselves as alter-modern and trans-modern, a term coined by Argentinian Mexican decolonial thinker Enrique Dussel.[note]Enrique Dussel, World-System and ‘Trans’-Modernity In Nepantla, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002, 221–24.[/note]

IRI sought to operate in this intermediate time not just with regards to militant interventions but also to the militant research that sustained it. Militant research escapes capitalist time, including the kind of commodified research that is now practiced in universities and museums. I conceived of the temporal politics of IRI as dilated, invisible, submerged, indivisible, unquantifiable and unique as opposed to the repetition and standardisation of the commodity form. Militant research is always in movement and open; it is outside both the short-term temporality of the market and the “long-durée” of finance and of national histories. With IRI I wanted to imagine a similar trans-temporality with regards to research and art.

In terms of funding, we have never managed to be self-sufficient as commons. IRI was set up with an initial grant, subsequently renewed, from the Foundation for the Arts Initiatives (FfAI), a progressive philanthropic organization which has contributed to set up the most interesting experiments in art/activism across the globe. In 2022 IRI become part of the L’ Internationale network of museums, and within the consortium, it received funding from the European Union for the Museum of the Commons (MoC) project (2023-2027), which is today its main source of funding.  This incorporation – not just institutional, but also economic – within L’ Internationale network, in my opinion, emptied IRI out of its militant and counterhegemonic potential. IRI is now the grassroot branch or “brand” for a group of museums which is unable to operate critically amid the new authoritarian turn of previously progressive municipalities and culture departments. The lack of a common line within the network on the genocide in Palestine made this painfully evident. For this reason, I recently left IRI.

G. R.: Why do you think IRI failed to take a common line against genocide in Gaza – could you make that more explicit? Is the vector of outside funding the main point at which the censoring and disciplining of commoning projects operates? In retrospect, were their alternative ways to handle this internal crisis?

M. M.: I didn’t explain myself well with that last sentence on Gaza. IRI was very vocal about the genocide in Palestine from the very beginning. But L’internationale as confederation was divided internally. Most museums of the network are public and belong to nation states which, except for Spain, never openly condemned Israel’s genocidal war in Palestine. Head curators of these museums wouldn’t agree to a joint statement because they were afraid of losing their jobs. One important German art organization left the network over this issue. The statement came out only in April 2024 more than six months after the invasion of October 7th. It was not good enough. IRI remained isolated on this front, but also to a certain extent internally fractured. But more importantly for me, the genocide in Gaza showed the uselessness of art and museums in countering colonial capitalism when this shows its real ugly and authoritarian face. Despite the massive economic resources, despite the exceptional collective intelligence and the political drive of some individuals, the art world is a self-reproducing system, unable to shift the material conditions of life of people outside its small middle-class entourage. I am not taking a Foucauldian approach but a very materialist one. Museums are capitalist colonial factories (pace Claire Bishop’s “radical museology”[note]Claire Bishop, Radical Museology, or, What’s “Contemporary” in Museums of Contemporary Art?, with drawings by Dan Perjovschi, Cologne and London: Koenig Books, 2013.[/note]). In 2024 I went to Ramallah with a delegation from IRI and the Internationale to develop links with the few Palestinian cultural institutions which were still standing. Some museums of l’Internationale commissioned Palestinian artists (living in Europe) and made roundtable and symposia. But all these initiatives only reproduced the hype and sense of self-importance of the art circuit. No museum was able to redistribute even a small portion of their immense intellectual and material resources and shift, even minimally, the conditions of art and life in Gaza or Palestine. In that context, I felt IRI was being pulled into the institutional/curatorial approach to art, of the L’internationale network, whereby we felt compelled to curate or authorially frame our presence in Palestine. A lot of money and resources were put into commissioning artists from the Palestinian diaspora, thus reinforcing the usual art circle.

G. R.: Our own project situates itself in the intersections between art-making practice and commoning. So, we are very interested in your work on these intersections in Art/Commons: Anthropology beyond Capitalism, the 2021 book you did for Massimio De Angelis’ In Common series. While there are numerous overlaps between art and commoning, there is also the difference, that the capitalist art system is organized as a competitive economy. As an anthropologist, how does this contradiction appear to you? What do you see as the potentials and promise of claiming or reclaiming art as a commons? What happens in this conjunction: “art/commons”?

M. M.: Yes, I was excited to know about your project Arts of Commoning. I guess we both found inspiration in Massimo’s wonderful work, which definitely is not about art, although it touches upon the importance of imagination and prefigurative labour as part of the anti-capitalist struggle.[note]See the interview with Massimo De Angelis in this dossier.[/note] In truth, my book is not rooted in art history at all. It is grounded in anthropology and political economy. I approach art very critically and as an historical racial/capitalist construct, which does not exist in most cultures in the Global South (beyond the inner circles of their cosmopolitan elites). In fact, in the book I discuss how western art, with its pretence of autonomy and exceptionalism, continues to reproduce capital’s interests, in changing historical contexts. The most striking contemporary example of this is how socially engaged artists, from Rick Lowe and Tania Bruguera to Theaster Gates, have turned into urban planners, real estate investors, or community developers, following capital’s latest movement of occupation of urban land and working-class expulsions (as studied by sociologists Saskia Sassen and David Harvey). But in the book, I also discuss practices of long-term, community-based, de-commodified, non-monetized and collective engagements which I call commons. Using anthropology’s framework, I define the commons as a thick texture of life, where aesthetics and political economy cannot be separated from the consciousness of living in a non-reified and complete world, which generates happiness and a sense of cosmological plenitude, which can also be called beauty – not the romantic and bourgeois aesthetics discussed by David Lloyd.[note]David Lloyd, Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics, New York: Fordham University Press, 2019.[/note] The book is also strongly ethnographic, that is, in it, theory is grounded in three experiments of ART/COMMONS that I initiated – the coproduction of a film together with a working-class community in Sheffield; the direction of the Athens Biennale; and the founding of IRI. In fact, these were anti-artistic experiments. Collectively edited with the steelworkers and using a working-class non-professional crew, my film Steel Lives (2005) is very unlike any other “professional artwork.” It circulated mainly in working-class clubs, trade union offices, and some underground art galleries. Likewise, under my direction the 2015-17 Athens Biennale, titled OMONOIA, became a permanent assembly made up of solidarity for all organizations, urban squats, rural organizations, coops, and radical art collectives whereby art production, was a by-product of collective conversations and decisions taking place in our permanently occupied space - Flash Art called it “the artless biennale”. Anthropology broadened my political and ontological horizons and my Marxist approach to commons. It shows that in many cultures, the commons is not just a space of survival, bare life and protestant ethic. It can be also a world of plenitude, excess and collective enjoyment. Of course, the commons always comes from struggles. Not just in our regime of racial capitalism, but also in non-capitalist contexts. In fact, in indigenous and non-capitalist cultures the struggle for the commons is part of everyday life, openly acknowledged, and socialised in often performative ways; whereas in capitalist regimes the struggle for the commons is either violently repressed or neutralised through some hidden legal and economic structures which reproduce the interest of the bourgeoisie. For the working-class the struggle for the common is always uphill. I always found Massimo’s work inspiring in the way it acknowledges both the material struggles required in sustaining and protecting living commons, and the role of counter-imagination, in expanding the commons’ relational spaces against capital’s occupation. This resonates very much with an anthropological understanding of the struggle for the commons as being both material and cosmological. Your work too goes in this direction.

G. R.: I like your description of the commons as “a thick texture of life,” in which political consciousness and aesthetics cannot be separated. Indeed, commoning is both a feeling-structure and a kind of counter-habitus. How did it work with your Athens Biennale, if it indeed was “artless”? What kind of aesthetics and feeling-structure were generated by your critical approach to the biennial model? Would you do it again, like this?

M. M.: The Athens Biennale was in my opinion very successful in prefiguring, even if for a short time, the future of a post-art militant institution and that thick post-capitalist space where pleasure, including aesthetic pleasure, and politics converge, which I describe as commons. In our opening event we invited international curators to reflect on whether Athens, in that specific historical moment of austerity and generalised poverty, needed yet another biennale. Viktor Misiano, who had just come out of the failure of the First Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art argued that the collective intelligence, and the variety of extra-institutional political and artistic subjectivities emerging after the occupations of Syntagma Square in central Athens were best left unbridled and without institutional framing. The French critic Nicolas Bourriaud took a different, decolonial approach. He argued that the biennale was catalyzing strong desires and affects around solidarity, comradeship and gift economies, and proposing an institutional framework that best embodied the contemporary condition of a global periphery pushed to the brink of bankruptcy by the European Troika. He talked about the artless and dispersed format of OMONOIA as a device to turn the public into an ethnographer, subverting the paradigm of “the artist as ethnographer” (in the phrase of Hal Foster[note]Hal Foster, “The Artist as Ethnographer?” in The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology, eds. George E. Marcus and Fred R. Myers, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995, pp. 302-308.[/note]) which much socially engaged art is premised upon. Both were to a certain extent right. The biennale did catalyse a lot of grassroot energies, contributions and intelligence; it did create gift economies and non-commodified events and conversations and a public willing not just to follow but to actively contribute to the Biennale process. More importantly, OMONOIA turned the commercial structure of traditional art institutions upside down. Usually the process starts with an abstract curatorial proposal – authorial even when made by small collectives. The funding, commissioning, production, and the public programme then follow. At the end, the problem of how to involve the public emerges. The Athens Biennale started from this very end. First, it mapped out its public – or commons – made of autonomous political and cultural organizations, mainly from the Solidarity for All movement, but also autonomous squats, collectives, and cooperatives. It then involved such commons in the co-programming of the main strands of AB’s future conversations and production. Third, it created a network of circular economies (Theaster Gates and Suzanne Lacy came on board for ridiculously small fees) and finally it sought funding on the ground of the emerging collective vision. We spent the first year of the Athens Biennale in the beautiful former Bageion Hotel, a neoclassical building in Omonia square, which we entirely refurnished and fitted with solar panels and toilets. In the building there was an ongoing process of collective planning, small events and performances, environmental and LGBTQ projects and productions. There was a constant flow of people, both local and international. The biennale was successfull in that it did catalyze the collective imagination and the horizontal political and artistic practices which had emerged in post-Syntagma Athens, gathering this intelligence within a horizontal and porous (and yet solid and real enough) alter-institutional space.

But there were several complications. First there was the early breakdown of the negotiations between the directors of the Athens Biennale and Adam Szymczyk, the artistic director of documenta 14, which went against my wishes. In fact, I believed documenta and AB could have created a structural coupling, whereby AB continued to operate underground and in a non-institutional setting and documenta followed more institutionalised patterns, with the core activities emerging in the space in between. Secondly, the presence in Athens of documenta 14 generated a toxic hype and strong speculative pressures – this is the toxic legacy of art under neoliberalism.  This hype was increased by the fact that Athens had become the symbol of a broader convergence between art and activism and of all the bourgeois desires, fears and projections which came with it. Yates McKee’s Strike Art, an essentially American export, had just been released within the European art world.[note]Yates McKee, Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition, London: Verso, 2016.[/note] Claire Bishop’s Radical Museology – the alliance between museums, social centres and progressive municipalities in Europe that followed Occupy – had consolidated the curatorial clique behind L’Internationale confederation. We invited authors Nato Thompson, Gregory Sholette and DTP to OMONOIA. I was put off by their Beuysian approach to activism as an artform - not just Nato’s neoliberal approach to community activism, and its museumification, typified by his famous Creative Time exhibition Living as Form (2011) but also the Marinettian aesthetics of the direct action which Gulf Labour Coalition and some Venetian collectives had organised against Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice in the previous year. This was not just aestheticization of politics. It was its occupation by the artworld running parallel to the Occupy movement itself. In 2012 Zmijewski and Warsza’s Forget Fear! Programme for the 7th Berlin Biennale had performatively appropriated the Occupy movement, and even physically hosted it at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, the major exhibition venue.

In fact, soon enough in Europe, Post-Occupy Art mutated into that weird strand of socially engaged art known as “the art of assembly,” initiated by Florian Malzacher at Gratz, and then practiced by the likes of Jonas Staal, Tania Bruguera, and a plethora of art/activist groups. Artists acted as political organisers and prefigurators, based on the same arrogant assumption of their privileged access to alterity which according to Hal Foster, characterised the artists as ethnographers. This occupation of the commons by artists and curators was detrimental for us, to say the least. There was an expectation, at least by the international hipster community, that AB would re-enact assembly-ism and that ours was to be just a performative stunt. But assembly-ism had nothing to do with our attempt to turn the biennale into a commons. I had other models in mind, such as the ZAD and no TAV movements. But in fact, an unlikely cross-sectional alliance stood beyond our artless biennale. Not just the radical anti-bourgeois collectives, but also Greek collectors and commercial galleries, and even the Syriza municipality. This broader local constituency seemed to identify with our deflationary, socialised and sustainable approach to cultural production and our attempt to counter the speculative economy of art as usual, with a political economy framework fit to the material conditions of Greece at that time. These cross-sectional constituencies agreed with our view that the last thing Athens needed was yet another inflated, short-termist and alienating bourgeois art event, which glamorized activism or even decoloniality – which indeed, documenta 14 ended up doing. As radical museums and progressive municipalities are being shut down or silenced, urban life gets more militarized and privatized, and art both progressively underfunded and commodified, the OMONOIA model in my opinion, is even more relevant.

G. R.: The current political conjuncture is a very bleak one. Wars are now killing people in Ukraine, Iran and Lebanon, pushing other aspects of systemic and biospheric polycrisis off the agenda for public attention. Genocide continues in Gaza and increasingly in the West Bank as well, while ecocide is modernity’s business-as-usual. In such a situation, what can commoning bring to these planetary problems? Can the commons be a concept that reorients a politics based on geopolitics and the national security state? Is it more than a placeholder for a communist politics that has been largely evacuated? How does commoning confront the states that are the perpetrators of eco-genocide and how does it relate to the remnants of liberal-pluralistic democracy? Do we need to defend international law and liberal democracy even as we try to push beyond these institutions through a focus on commoning?

M. M.: These are big and important questions. In my opinion our political imagination is still stuck in the superstructures of western colonial modernity: the linear spatio-temporal coordinates; the impoverished horizon of action, dictated by profit and self-interest; and the reified ontology of containment – persons, inside households and offices; offices and families inside nation states, with the environment enfolding everything from outside. We need imaginative and practical tools to build a new kind of internationalism from below – the early Marx speaks of an internationalism of the commons instead of the internationalism of nation states.  In my opinion Palestine is the political laboratory, to look at to answer to your questions. Today the Palestinian people are showing to the Imperialist axis in the Global North not just the stupidity of the genocidal violence of the Israeli state, but also the sophistication, intelligence and strength of Palestinian sumud (“steadfastness”):  the grassroot and transindividual political texture, the sustainability of its rural economies (despite the heavy proletarianization of Palestinian labour), the cosmological and ecological entanglements – the thick texture of the commons I discussed earlier. Palestine points to a clear alternative to the violent infrastructure of nation states; the short termism of colonial extractivism; and the solipsism of western possessive individualism. The only remedy against polycrises is the thick intelligence of the commons.

The Global South has been an ongoing inspiration for me in terms of reorienting communism within the political framework of the commons, which I believe was Marx’s own vision. In the 1970s and 1980s, liberation movements from the Global South (I have been particularly inspired by the anti-dictatorship movement in Brazil) developed forms of direct democracy, cross-sectional activism and post-capitalist prefiguration, which rendered obsolete the parliamentary/extra parliamentary dichotomy at the heart of Europe’s representative democracy. Later on, some new ‘left-wing populists’ European parties like Podemos and Syriza, took up some of the horizontal practices and cross-sectional language of these earlier struggles in the global south. But by erasing the class component of the struggle, they failed and were overtaken by the populism of the right. But the way forward remains the same: to develop multi-scalar, participatory, direct, decommodified, de-monetized, and durational practices and imaginaries of life in common. The anthropologist Marcel Mauss, who was a member of the Socialist Party in Paris in the early 20th century, pointed to the institution of the gift (which is not just a form of economic exchange but also a mode of sociability and a relational cosmology) as alternative to the bourgeois nation state.[note]Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies [1925], trans. Ian Cunnison, New York: Norton, 1967.[/note] His vision of multi-scalar circuits of gift-giving – commons of commons – characterises for instance the nested autonomous assemblies, of the Zapatista community. I think that law and economics are fundamental tools of struggle. The movement of the urban commons in Italy emerged after the referendum against the privatization of the water, when a group of militant lawyers such as Ugo Mattei, went against the bourgeois use of the law and developed frameworks which de facto legalised urban commons and occupations. There is enough awareness that bourgeois law is corrupted and inefficient. There is a growing awareness of new indigenous legal frameworks emerging for instance against ecocide, or extractivism, which reflect the thick political economy of the commons I have referred to. 

G. R.: How do you see artificial intelligence (AI) and other so-called disruptive technologies that are accelerating all aspects of life (including war) in late modernity? Do you see a place for these capitalist technologies in a present or future politics of commoning? Do you accept the project of a digital commons, given the implicatedness of its infrastructures in the socio-ecological polycrisis?

M. M.: For sure technology is very important to carve out spaces of autonomy from a progressively militarized and automatized capital. Already militarized, the economy will soon be totally subsumed to the military industry. We are not talking just about dual use. It’s about wholesale industrial reconversions, such as those happening in the automotive, machine and chemical sectors. On the one hand you have the heavy militarization of policing of the surplus population; on the other hand, the militarization of industrial relations. Many industrial and logistical infrastructures, especially those deemed strategic, are controlled by the military. Their industrial relations have been militarised; labour rights totally erased. We need more hackers, more programmers, more digital designers and engineers, and more collaborations with industrial trade unions which are getting militant. We need to continue to raise consciousness on the military industrial complex; organise boycotts; intensify direct actions and disruption such as those of Action for Palestine in the UK.

Artists have led important experiments on blockchains (the volume curated by Ruth Catlow presents several of such experiments[note]See David Serra Navarro, “On Blockchain and Art: an Interview with Ruth Catlow,” Arte, Individuo y Sociedad, vol. 31, No. 4 (September 2019), pp. 969-976.[/note]) and more recently on Decentralised Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). Take the DAO Holly+ created by sound artist Holly Herndon to counter the appropriation of sound and voices by AI platforms. The ‘public’ who purchase Herndon’s voice on Holly +, become co-owner and co-manager together with the artists of such immaterial commons. Likewise, the DAO prototype Ensemble which I conceived with sound artist Samson Young aimed at demonetizing collaborations amongst experimental musicians and democratising their economies. Through the digital platform they decided collectively how to remunerate individual skills, set prices for their outputs, cost activities, using post-capitalist – qualitative and collective – criteria and languages. The aim of Ensemble was to create a collaborative and safe space in the world of experimental music, dominated by star performers and commercial production companies.[note]Massimiliano Mollona, "Ensemble: A Decentralised Autonomous Organization between art and political economic prefiguration," Talk with sound artist Samson Young at the Conference Radical Friends, Haus der Kunst, Munich, January 2022.[/note] Unsurprisingly many of these artists’ experiments were supported by the Goethe Institute in Berlin and Serpentine in London, and hence they lacked grounding in the real economy or enduring links with activist networks.