What enables a community to operate with minimal reliance on money? The Rojava Film Commune works for the production, distribution, and reception of films depicting and documenting the stateless society of Rojava, Kurdish and Arab culture, and the region’s continuing military and ideological struggles.

The Rojava Film Commune is a collective of filmmakers founded in Rojava in 2015, it was created with the purpose of bringing cinema to the people of Rojava and further developing its democratic revolution.

Rojava is more than a region located in the Northern and Eastern Syria. It is an autonomous government established in 2014 while surviving what’s often referred as the Syrian war ridden with geopolitical complication. It’s based on the radical democratic principle whereby key values such as cooperativism, diversity, women, ecology rule. The film commune is one of many communes that form the basis of Rojava governance.

Sources:

Roza The Country Of Two Rivers, a Documentary of Rojava Revolution by Rojava Film Commune:

Rojava Film Festival

Channels

You can watch a selection of the collective's works on their youtube channel here.

You can follow Rojava Film Commune's communication channels here and here.

Collective Pot? Art of practicing the commons-based economy of resilience

Online course

Saturday 18 September 2021, 14:00-17:00 (CET)

To get involved, please register here!

Over the last decades, economic inequality and insecurity have only increased. There’s the financial capitalist economy as the key operator for this phenomenon. It abstracts value away from material worlds, use and sustainability, while simultaneously watering down the collective spirit. The field of art is not free from this systemic condition. One might say it has been functioning rather as an exemplary model of the capitalist economy through its emphasis on individual autonomy and its unregulated, fluctuating market values, disregarding materiality and labor in the process. However, there are also those who wish to change these cogs of the art world, taking back the economy with art at heart. These economic transformations are based on values relating to the commons, such as diversity, equity, pluralism, and sustainability, thus creating the conditions for a culture of resilience – one that resists, repairs and regenerates.

Collective Pot? Art of practicing the commons-based economy of resilience is an online pilot course organized by Casco Art Institute within the framework of C4R. This course features artists, artistic collectives and other practitioners who will offer guidance to use and adapt relevant tools for a resilient economy. Currently we have assembled four tools for close workshops. We recommend this course to those who seek to liberate themselves from individual survivalism and sole dependency on money and its accumulation. Not only does this course focus on the use of the tools – it is also a forum to discuss and co-develop them together. Via Collective Pot?, we aim to support the participants, equip them with necessary skills as well as embody the culture of the commons in “concrete engagement” (Friction. A. Tsing, p. 267) with their lived cases.

Please find more information on the course with the introduction to the tools and workshops, and how to get involved below.

The working language of the course will be English and features captioning throughout.

List of four tools and workshops

The course consists of four workshops each of which focuses on a specific tool for the commons based economy of resilience with art at heart. The following are the teasers for each tool.

More information on the tools, being updated over time, are available on the OpenTools section on the C4R digital platform. The platform is built on the resilient technological methods and takes on such mode of operation as set up and managed by one of the C4R partners, NetHood (Zurich).

Rojava Film Commune by Rojava Film Commune, channeled by Sevinaz Evdike

Rojava is more than a region located in the Northern and Eastern Syria. It is an autonomous government established in 2014 while surviving what’s often referred as the Syrian war ridden with geopolitical complication. It’s based on the radical democratic principle whereby key values such as cooperativism, diversity, women, ecology rule. The film commune is one of many communes that...

What shape can the infrastructure for the solidarity economy take? The Open Collective is working to build legal, financial, and technical tools which are open source and transparent – enabling connections between financial institutions, cooperatives, mutual aid groups and non-profit organizations.

Open Collective Foundation (OCF) is creating a legal, financial, and technical commons for the solidarity economy. Community is about trust and sharing. Open Collective lets you manage your finances so everyone can see where money comes from and where it goes. Collect and spend money transparently.

OCF has a unique role to play as steward of a legal, financial, and technical commons—a piece of shared infrastructure—that is resonating deeply with the solidarity economy movement. We can build bridges between 501(c)(3) fiscal sponsorship, the open source community (where we have deep roots), mutual aid groups (100+ are hosted by OCF today), and the movement at large.

A new clarity has emerged for Open Collective Foundation: Solidarity will be our guiding principle.

Source: https://blog.opencollective.com/solidarity-as-our-guiding-principle/

Resources

You can find the Solidarity as Guiding Principle tool by the Open Collective Foundation here.

Watch a brief presentation of the OCF:

How can artists organize against the increasing inequality amplified by the pandemic conditions globally? Art for Universal Basic Income – a campaign initiated by artists – is converging energies with movements across the world challenging the market’s current modes of exploitation.

Art for Universal Basic Income by the Institute of Radical Imagination (IRI).

While the art market confirms his status as a safe-haven assets provider for the financial elite, the current pandemic has highlighted the fragility and precarity of art workers around the world, a condition common to a growing portion of humanity. In this situation a UBI (Universal Basic Income) would then represent a solution and indeed an urgent measure to implement. But UBI is not “only” a response to poverty, it is a necessary condition in order to rethink our extractivist ecological model, to correct many race and gender asymmetries and, last but not least, to change the art world’s present neoliberal structure. UBI must be seen as a tool to open up new subjective spaces, alternative to the dominating entrepreneurial individualism and focused instead on commons and care.

If artists are already creating new collective economy models and alter-institutions, these small scale experiments will be much more valuable when connected with those growing social movements around the world fighting for a Universal Basic Income.

The Institute of Radical Imagination (IRI) is a think-tank consisting of curators, artists, and scholars, whose aim is to develop various forms of research intervention for the transition into post-capitalism. Together we want to explore and develop new practices and knowledge that contribute to the formation of new forms of life and its meanings as the practices of struggle for the commons. IRI is located at the threshold between Europe and the Mediterranean.

The School of Mutation is IRI's pedagogical outlet, focused on the need to learn anew and re-make the world of culture in the unfolding of the biopolitical emergency brought on by Covid-19. Art For UBI is a campaign initiated in the framework of the School of Mutation.

ART FOR UBI (Manifesto)

1/ Universal and Unconditional Basic Income is the best measure for the arts and cultural sector. Art workers claim a basic income, not for themselves, but for everyone.

2/ Do not call UBI any measures that do not equal a living wage: UBI has to be above the poverty threshold. To eliminate poverty, UBI must correspond to a region’s minimum wage.

3/ UBI frees up time, liberating us from the blackmail of precarious labor and from exploitative working conditions.

4/ UBI is given unconditionally and without caveats, regardless of social status, job performance, or ability. It goes against the meritocratic falsehoods that cover for class privilege.

5/ UBI is not a social safety net, nor is it welfare unemployment reform. It is the minimal recognition of the invisible labor that is essential to the reproduction of life, largely unacknowledged but essential, as society’s growing need for care proves.

6/ UBI states that waged labor is no longer the...

The Never-ending story of commoning a farmhouse in the lost farmlands. Looking back at Erfgoed (Agricultural Heritage and Land Use).

Looking back at the stories of the project Erfgoed (Agricultural Heritage and Land Use). Erfgoed, a project by The Outsiders and Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, was initiated to build a sustainable platform for ecological practices that conjure art, agriculture, and the commons in the area Leidsche Rijn, a sprawling new residential neighborhood in the Dutch city of Utrecht.

You are welcome to visit the Collection of the stories of Erfgoed to find out more!

“…growing spiritually and practically. […] Abubuya, a word that in the Mojeno language means ‘to let oneself go with the flow’ […], in the Amazon basin, when the river rises, it is time to move to a higher location and to go ‘abubuya’.”

By Sina Ribak & Raquel Schwartz, KIOSKO / Arts Collaboratory, Bolivia

Abubuya, a word that in the Mojeño language means "to let oneself go with the flow", was the first thing we learned about this culture during our journey to the river Mamoré. The Mojeño community lives in the oriental part of Bolivia in the Beni region where rivers and fluvial cycles are impacting people's lives. Here in the Amazon basin, when the river rises, it is time to move to a higher location and to go "abubuya". We were immediately captivated by the sound of the word and its simple and real meaning with so much metaphorical content. This term, abubuya, not only became the title of the project but it was also the spirit and energy that moved the whole development and process of the project. A dozen artists from Argentinia, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, USA, México, Perú, Puerto Rico and Venezuela followed the current of the Mamoré river aboard the flotel Reina de Enin. Working, playing and creating with the mojeña community El Rosario we learnt about the river (hi)stories. During weeks and months following the ‘Abubuya KM0 International Artist Workshop’, river creatures such as caimans, captains and pink dolphins appeared in our dreams. Their cosmos makes itself visible, becoming more like a vision than a memory. Since then, in KIOSKO we use abubuya in our language in the daily institutional and personal life to express the necessity to go with a rhythm of processes given by 'nature'.

The C-words campaign is inspired by the format of Casco’s third Annual Assembly We Owe Each Other Everything that takes place online in December 2020. Participants were invited to reflect on their collective working practice by choosing a word beginning with C.

Together these formed C-words for the Commons and were a starting point for the different Assembly groups to discuss the diverse stories and experiences that stemmed from these words. The outcomes of the Assembly mapping workshops were to highlight new ideas, relationships and creative entanglements to adopt when working collectively.

In 2021, Casco is launching a poster-campaign that illustrates six C-words (Coin, Community, Care, Climate, Cosmos and Culture) by six Utrecht-based illustrators. The posters are disseminated all around Utrecht and online especially aiming to appeal to a younger audience to engage with these urgent issues and to visit Casco’s website to learn more about the Commons through art.

The C-words campaign identifies ecological, social and economic urgencies from which discussions, projects and coalitions can be derived in order to imagine new ways of resiliently tackling these issues through collaborative practices and thinking.

Resources

Abubuya

Trailer

Documentary

Resilient practices in the Romanian countryside

Statistics show that in 2020 around 78 thousand people moved to the villages from urban centres in Romania, not counting those who have returned home from abroad. In itself, it is not a very telling statistics, as almost double this number moved the other way around and, comparing to other EU countries, Romania still has one of the highest rates of poverty in the rural areas. What is interesting is that the majority of those deciding to “downshift” to the countryside are the middle-class who can afford the telework. They want to reconnect with nature, with their families’ roots, they take classes on permaculture, they exchange advice, photos and business ideas with peers on the many Facebook dedicated groups – the most famous of which, “Moved to the countryside. Life without the clock” counts now 147000 members, having doubled in the year of the lockdown . Within this trend, a special place is occupied by those who make this move as not only an individual life-style, but also trying to be consistent with a sustainable and ecological living with and for larger communities.

We are looking at practices that redefine the relationship with the countryside, with land and soil, with nature, with food and natural resources, with the rural communities and also with people in the big cities who are looking for sustainable alternatives to their lives. We are mapping some of these practices: a regenerative farm in Dambovita; an ecological farm that delivers fresh products to people in Bucharest, also in a village in Dambovita county; a community and educational centre built on ecological principles in Mogosoaia; a village eco-touristic campus and co-working space in Banat region, and others. A more in-depth mapping takes place of a series of case-studies on ecological or regenerative farms or gardens, thus focusing this part of the research on a different approach to the land as not only provider of resources but also as a fragile ecosystem that needs to be tendered and respected. We are conducting sociological interviews, interpreting them, we are asking questions about motivations, structure, sustenance, difficulties encountered, awareness of the wider contexts and of the climate change impact. In addition, we are observing with artistic means (video-documents, sketches, drawings, notations), in order to situate these case-studies within a larger picture of emancipatory practices in the relation between people, nature and communities.

The Atelier d'Architecture Autogérée, AAA, is a research and action platform that explores and develops spatial tactics and strategies with a strong ecological, social and political dimension at the level of the everyday.

AAA's work is rooted in local contexts and, at the same time, is connected to research networks at different scales.

Since its creation in 2001, AAA has been initiating and accompanying citizen ecological transition strategies (R-Urban) on a local and international scale. AAA acts at the roots of global crises (ecological, economic, democratic, social, etc.) by creating opportunities for the greatest number of citizens to join the ecological transition through resilient and sustainable lifestyles: short circuits, local production and consumption, reuse and recycling, collective governance of common goods, etc. To implement these ecological transition strategies, aaa co-designs and co-builds ecological transition hubs that are initially managed with local actors and, subsequently, are managed by the project leaders who emerge around these urban resilience hubs (urban agriculture farms, solidarity economy spaces, waste reuse and recycling units, ecological housing cooperatives, etc.).

AAA works through a network open to multiple perspectives: architects, artists, students, researchers, retirees, politicians, activists, residents and all concerned users. aaa's projects have been exhibited and presented at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2012 and 2016, MoMA New York, Berlin Biennale, Pavillon d'Arsenal Paris, Palais des Nations Unies Geneva, etc. For its work, aaa has received several national and international awards including the International Resilient Building Award Building for Humanity (2018), the European Prize for Political Innovation in Ecology (2017), Laureate "100 projects for the climate" at the COP21 (2015)...

To see some projects

R-Urban ecological transition strategy

What is to be done ? 4 Questions

Wiki Village Factory

Odaia in Brezoi, Romania

Agrocité in Gennevilliers, France

Agrocité in Bagneux, France

Passage 56 in Paris, France

Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons envisions better ways of living together through practicing art and the commons. Through co-exploration and study with collective art projects as well as organizational experiments, our projects grow from critical questions and radical imagination – forming community and together generating art and knowledge as common resources.

Do you believe that to transform yourself is to transform the world? Has cooking, singing, dancing, gardening, healing, dreaming, and making things with other people been part of your transformation? If so, you already know about art and the commons.

The commons can be described as the natural and cultural resources held in common by a community. For example, community gardens, mutual aid networks, and open source software are all examples of the commons. The commons requires a collaborative process, which we call “commoning,” based on shared ethics and values such as diversity, equity, pluralism, and sustainability. Art is an imaginative way of doing and being, which connects, heals, opens, and moves people into the new social visions. Art is in fact inherent to the commons, as they are shared resources to keep the culture of community alive. In turn, the commons may well sustain art. With art and the commons we can draw a worldview beyond the divides of private and public, to shape together a new paradigm of living together as “we” desire - be it decolonial, post-capitalist, matriarchal, solidarity economies -- we name it!

Art and the Commons are two key practices for Casco Art Institute. We see them as both tools and visions for better ways of living together. Casco Art Institute works for this vision of art and the commons by creating a space, or “Casco” meaning in Dutch a space of basic structure for change, for co-exploration and study with collaborative art projects as well as organizational experiments. We co-develop collaborative art projects out of critical questions and dreams. They are process-based and place specific, forming community and generating art and knowledge as common resources, together. Organizational experiments take place with all of these projects, including Casco Art Institute itself. We dream of offering an example of a commonly desirable institution of art and the commons that embodies diversity, equity, pluralism, and sustainability.

All of the collaborative art projects and organizational processes we engage in are open to active participation from anyone who shares values around the commons and responsibility. Anyone with curiosity can experience multiple activities and publicly available common resources from the projects, in person, and in community with Casco. We especially welcome those who seek change in their life as well as in the world while feeling vulnerable alone or within other institutions. Since Casco Art Institute was born and has grown in Utrecht, we are committed to people and communities in Utrecht. We also engage with communities elsewhere, especially outside of western Europe, recognizing the world is intricately connected and the commons transcends national borders.

Would you like to learn more about what Casco does?

You...

Remix the commons is an open and intercultural collective for sharing, co-creating and remixing documents and projects and initiatives of commoning.

You are welcome to visit Remix the Commons website to find out more!

Tools for acting, thinking, learning and organising by commoning

Remix the commons is an open and intercultural collective for sharing, co-creating and remixing documents and projects and initiatives of commoning. Remix is a production collective at the service of the commons movement. It proposes actions and supports collaborations oriented towards a politicisation of the commons. Remix allows the identification, collection and invention of mechanisms that constitute the engineering of the commons. It enables the knowledge produced by the commoners to be preserved by structuring the information, in particular through semantic web tools and by making visible a grammar of collective solidarity action. Remix mobilises activists and researchers around operational projects that bring the experience of commoning to life while at the same time equipping the commons movement with new methodological and technical tools. Meeting formats (Appel en commun, Commons Camp, ...) for collective publication (Dossier Remix, Cahiers Politiques des communs, Horizons communs, ...) Tools for co-managing resources (open budgets) and multi-linguism (FSMET commons, Commons camp, meet.coop) are original, co-constructed tools that are being re-appropriated by the actors of the social movements that revolve around Remix. In the continuity of this dynamic, Remix continues to develop a shared infrastructure of commons based on the models of the federation (Fediverse) and cooperative platforms, the first bricks of which are the digital konbit and meet.coop. Remix is seeking the conditions for an inclusive federation of media players on the Commons to open up a space for computational communication at the service of projects and the Commons movement, based on values of digital sovereignty, ecology and ethics.

Remix’s initiatives are also the privileged terrain for building alliances within social movements with actors engaged in redefining public space (intermediary places, third places,...), especially those who are bearers and explorers of the territorial question. Remix operates in this place as a resource space for activists and their collectives, with no desire to enroll them, creating a space for cooperation that crosses national, disciplinary and sectoral boundaries. These spaces are the focal points for the deployment of self-supporting (self-managed) activities by collectives, both face-to-face (such as the Commons Camp) and conceived as asynchronous and distant online devices as for example Les Cahiers politiques des communs. One of the critical challenges for the commons movement and for Remix is to make tangible the place of the commons, so far invisible through the distinction between the formal and informal activity. Remix is involved in action research projects such as those conducted by Atelier d’Architecture Autogéré (AAA) on Agrocités and R’urban. This work is a continuation of the Remix pioneering approach to the analysis of legal tools (les chartes des communs urbains begun in 2015, which can be used as a basis for thinking about the governance of commoning complexes. In the long term, we hope...

Our first seminar will take place online on March 27. Want to be there?

The first C4R seminar organised by AAA, Remix the Commons and and other C4R partners and collaborators (CASCO, Tranzit.ro, NetHood) focuses on the concept of resilience governance.

The seminar proposes to compare a diversity of experiences of governance within civic cultural institutions as well as within resilience networks at different scales. This will open the field of reflection and experimentation on commons-based resilience through a process of semantic mapping and database creation.

Schedule

Introduction of the seminar in the context of the Culture for Resilience (C4R) project

Presentations of a series of experiences of resilience governance through commons:

• ZAD de Notre Dame des Landes (Isabelle Fremeaux, FR)
• Fédération Murs à Pêche de Montreuil (Clément Girard, FR)
• Agrocite Bagneux (Pascale Maker/ Constantin Petcou, FR)
• CLTBruxelles (Sophie Ghyselen, BE)
• MOBA Housing SCE (Ana Džokić/ Marc Neelen, RS/NL)
• Asilo Filangeri (Angela Osorio, IT)
• NetHood (Ileana Apostol, CH)
• Transition Vallée de la Bièvre (Simon Burkovic, FR)
• R-Urban (Doina Petrescu/Andreas Lang FR/UK)
• Transition Town (tbc)
• DisCO (Stacco Troncoso, ES)
• Remix the commons / Chartes des communs urbains (Frederic Sultan, FR)
• femProcomuns (Monica Garriga, ES)

Keynotes:

• Maria Francesca De Tullio /Assilo Fillangeri (IT)
• David Bollier / Schumacher Center (USA)

You can register here by next Friday for the link.

The seminar will be held in English / French.

“…treat people as oneself […] be curious of their stories […] be grateful for the open hearted sharing”

By Yuchen Li of Weaving realities

Our society demands constant high-level productivity and efficiency. Care, instead, is deemed as irrelevant or even a sign of weakness in this ever “expanding”, “growing” and “progressing” world. However, art is here to actively question and critically re-think the way we organize our lives.

For me, art is also to create or facilitate a time-space where we can practice the principles that we hold dear of. It takes a lot of imagination, creativity, courage, perseverance and faith. One principle we hold dear of is Care. Care reflect- ed in the way our collective work with others is to treat people as one self, before attaching to the tags - guest, performer, artist, professor, interviewee, refugee, curator, director, janitor, intern and so on. Who are they? Am I curious about their stories? Am I grateful for the open-hearted sharing before thinking how they are relating to my work? Do I act with reciprocity to their attention, contribution and trust?

All these questions serve as constant reminders and self-reflection in my head. Of course, this is not easy. In our collective, we work in communi- ties in resistance, such as activists against Forced Disappearance in Mexico, indigenous Arhuacan in Colombia, but also with academic professors and university students in the Netherlands. Not everyone’s voice can be heard or valued equally by the system we live in. But when I am humbled to listen, I have learned so much: the Mexican activist impressed me with her courage to fight, some professors open up about their own struggles in putting theory into practice, the wisdom of the Arhuacans brings me to another dimension of understanding the world. And the work that comes from care has the true power to affect and influence the others.

My partner in Weaving Realities, Aldo, went to the Normal School in Ayotzinapa Mexico in 2016, hoping to find personal stories of the 43 disappeared students. The school was flooded with people from outside who were interested in the case, journalists, artists, scholars, activists. Aldo met with two women at the school entrance who offered to give him a tour in town. During the conversations Aldo learned that they were also family members of one missing student Christian. Mayra is the aunt of Christian who actually brought him up. Laura, the cousin. Aldo wanted to collect stories from the families but Mayra refused “You are just the same type of people that we will only see once and never again.” Many people came with their own questions, got their “answers” or “materials”, published under their name, and never came back. It was until Aldo let go of his questions by truly listening than he gained the trust of the family members who later shared with him their experiences. Aldo kept in contact with the people he met there, including Mayra. They greeted each other and shared...

“…take money into account for grounding utopian projects: coin is an object that encrypted certain relationship dynamics”

By Yin Aiwen of ReUnion Network, Rotterdam

The C-words campaign is inspired by the format of Casco’s third Annual Assembly We Owe Each Other Everything that takes place online in December 2020. Participants were invited to reflect on their collective working practice by choosing a word beginning with C.

Together these formed C-words for the Commons and were a starting point for the different Assembly groups to discuss the diverse stories and experiences that stemmed from these words. The outcomes of the Assembly mapping workshops were to highlight new ideas, relationships and creative entanglements to adopt when working collectively.

In 2021, Casco is launching a poster-campaign that illustrates six C-words (Coin, Community, Care, Climate, Cosmos and Culture) by six Utrecht-based illustrators. The posters are disseminated all around Utrecht and online especially aiming to appeal to a younger audience to engage with these urgent issues and to visit Casco’s website to learn more about the Commons through art.

The C-words campaign identifies ecological, social and economic urgencies from which discussions, projects and coalitions can be derived in order to imagine new ways of resiliently tackling these issues through collaborative practices and thinking.

Resources

Conviviality relates to good company. Democratic conviviality is an ideal of everyday life that bonds people in communal public actions.

In the cooperative text "Tools for Conviviality" (New York: Harper & Row, 1973) Ivan Illich elaborates an extended definition of the concept; e.g., (p.11), 'autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment.' Based on his definition, Lisa Peattie (1998, p.246) described democratic conviviality as 'small-group rituals and social bonding in serious collective action, from barn raisings and neighborhood cleanups to civil disobedience that blocks the streets or invades the missile site'.

A few (main) characteristics: Conviviality requires spaces that contribute to the formation of the necessary social bonds -spaces of use and exchange- within a vision of political life that enables access to various forms of life in common. By privileging local face-to-face interactions, public life may truly acquire political dimensions, providing for democratic activities.

Open questions / Future work / How to:

• Do spaces produced through abstract ordering accommodate Lisa Peattie’s democratic conviviality?
• "City life as an openness to unassimilated otherness, however, represents only an unrealized social ideal" (Iris Marion Young 1990, p.227).
• "A non-totalising politics should only enable an indefinite multiplicity of creative activities in common, without subsuming their diversity under an all-encompassing figure or an overarching end" (Alexandros Kioupkiolis 2019, p.16).

Representation

A few words about "why this image?"