Dispatch: The Commonsverse and Situated Organisations – or why the era of big institutions will come to an end

The Navel

Reflecting on the six intense days of meetings, debates, conferences and workshops organised by L’Internationale under the title ‘School of Common Knowledge’ I keep returning to the idea of the centre of the world as put forward in the myth the ‘navel of the world’. The myth appears in several mythologies, and it is particularly prevalent in Greek mythology. The ‘Omphalos’ (navel), located in the city of Delphi, had its origins in the story of Zeus throwing two eagles into the sky in opposite directions from both ends of the earth. The eagles crossed paths in Delphi, which Zeus declared to be the navel of the world, and where throughout antiquity people from several Greek city-states went to consult the oracle. The pilgrimage extended from the 7th century BCE until the 4th century A.D. when the Christian emperor Theodosius I banned pagan practices and closed the ancient temples.

It might seem anachronistic to recall the Omphalos in the hyper-globalised world of 2024, and in relation to the concept of ‘Situated Organisations’ – one of the central themes of the group’s discussions (and quests) during those six days. But perhaps it is precisely from this principle of paradoxical articulation, between the importance given to the local (as the navel) and the connections built with the global that we can understand the potential of Situated Organisations, which I felt so strongly in the meetings and visits during the SCK.

Situated Organisations

During the SCK we met, got in touch, and reflected on the activities of a number of Situated Organisations in Croatia, Slovenia and across the Balkans:

Pykë-Presje – an independent publishing house and cultural space in Prizren, Kosovo.

Živi Atelje DK – a collective space and atelier in Zagreb, open to the city’s community in general.

BLOK – a curatorial collective founded in 2001 and based in the Trešnjevka neighbourhood in Zagreb. Engaged in an articulated resistance against the neoliberal condition, they started the ‘Political School for Artists’ in 2016.

What, How & for Whom/WHW – a collective curatorial endeavour based in Zagreb, Vienna and Berlin that has existed since 1999.

Crvena (Association for Culture and Art) – an association in Sarajevo that organises, among other activities, the ‘Nona Residence’, a residency for artists based on an informal structure of affinities and affections.

Center for Contemporary Culture KRAK – an independent space deeply committed to the city of Bihać in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

ISU – Institute for Contemporary Art – a fluid collective association that develops research, archival practices and educational programmes in Cetinje, Montenegro.

Krater – an initiative in Ljubljana that emerged from the occupation of a forgotten space, an old construction site that, thanks to the collective’s work, is now dominated by vegetation that dialogues and interconnects with the artistic production they develop.

The Commonsverse and the End of Bloated Institutions

The commons movement, which gained traction in the 1990s, galvanised across the world in resistance to ‘Enclosures’: appropriations and expropriations that intensified in the last decades of the 20th century within the dynamics of neoliberalism.11.A quick survey of Commons publications published in the 1990s and early 2000s reveals that this was not an isolated phenomenon: Rose, 1986/1994; Maurer, 1997; Klein, 2001; Bollier, 2002; Dietz, Ostrom and Weber, 2002; Mann, 2002; Harvey 2003 – just to quote a few. The so-called ‘Commonsverse Movement’ could be understood through designer Thomas Lommée’s phrase: ‘The next big thing will be a lot of small things’.22.See openstructures.net.

The period since the 1990s is marked by the expansion, enlargement, and even swelling of major cultural institutions.33.The first years of the new millennium saw an explosion in the number of new museums (or expansion of the older ones) to the point that the phenomenon was called ‘The Golden Age of Museums’ (Conn, 2010, p. 1).  It is not by chance that this ‘movement’ coincides with the assimilation, by many museums and cultural institutions, of management principles dictated by market logic.

Today, museums are everywhere, and the bigger ones are huge enterprises. Some scholars and museum professionals facing the challenge of defining these enormous and tentacular undertakings call them the ‘museum-industrial complex’ (Preciado, 2017), ‘hybridized hypermodern organizations’ (Prior, 2003), ‘museum-as-factory’, ‘flagship store of Cultural Industries’ (Steyerl, 2012) and ‘Necromuseo’ (Preciado, 2017). Or as Manuel Borja-Villel wrote: ‘The museum, the ancient temple of the muses, idealised and idealising, has become a space of consumption and consensus’ (Borja-Villel, 2016).

The affinity with market logic established in many museums around the world has caused an ‘identity crisis’ in these institutions, which found themselves torn between social commitment on the one hand and the demands of market rules on the other. At some point many institutions became detached from their communities, failing to address their most pressing concerns. Many have become distanced from their local reality, rather ‘targeting’ what they loosely term ‘a broader public’.

The idea of Situated Organisations works against this current. For these institutions and associations, the local is the ‘navel of the world’ from which the reason and power of their existence emanates. In this sense, Situated Organisations offer an alternative path to cultural practice by proposing a new aesthetic of participation. Their ties to the community are continually renegotiated, and their relevance extends miles from the so-called ‘cultural industries’. The deep connection with local reality is the driving force of its activities and a propulsive mechanism from which further ramifications, translated into extra-local partnerships, develop. It is specifically in the articulation of the local as the navel, the centre of the world, that unprecedented connections occur within those spaces, and sometimes as well, connections are established much further away, linking diverse contexts.

When those connections are born from specific, yet common interests, the results dare to be free and become sustainable in ways that the public programmes from traditional cultural institutions and museums can no longer achieve, whose relationships have been frayed by the need to serve too many masters, like the story of the Harlequin who himself served two masters,44.In Carlo Goldoni’s play ‘The Servant of Two Masters’ from 1746, the character Truffaldino serves Beatrice and Florindo simultaneously. Most comic scenes come from Truffaldino’s races and confusion, trying to please them both. running frantically between the two, sometimes forgetting which he was serving. On the other hand, the political potential of Situated Organisations rests in forging lasting connections, and the relationship they materialise between purpose and action. In this way, as we heard in Zagreb and Ljubljana, they can serve as a model for the construction of a new cultural dynamic.

References:

Lauren Berlant, ‘The Commons: Infrastructures for Troubling Times’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 34(3) 393–419, 2016.

David Bollier, Silent Theft: The Private Plunder of Our Common Wealth, London: Routledge, 2002.

Manuel Borja-Villel, ‘The Museum Questioned’, in Relational Objects – MACBA Collection 2002–07, Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), 2009.

James Boyle, ‘The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain’, Law and Contemporary Problems, 66: 33–74, 2003.

John Byrne, Elinor Morgan, November Paynter, Aida Sánchez de Serdio, Adela Železnik (ed.), The Constituent Museum – Constellations of Knowledge, Politics and Mediation: A Generator of Social Change, Amsterdam: Valiz and L’Internationale, 2018.

Steven Conn, Do Museums Still Need Objects? Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010.

Massimo De Angelis, ‘Reflections on Alternatives, Commons and Communities, or Building a New World from the Bottom up’, The Commoner, 6: 1–14, 2003.

Massimo De Angelis, ‘Separating the Doing and the Deed: Capital and the Continuous Character of Enclosures’, Historical Materialism 12(2), 57–87, 2004.

Thomas Dietz, Elinor Ostrom, Elke U. Weber, et al. (ed.), ‘The Drama of the Commons. Committee on the Human Dimensions of Global Change’, Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2002.

Pascal Gielen, ‘Institutional Imagination: Instituting Contemporary Art Minus the “Contemporary”’, Institutional Attitudes: Instituting Art in a Flat World, Amsterdam: Valiz, 2013.

David Harvey, The New Imperialism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom, Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007.

Robert R. Janes, Museums in a Troubled World: Renewal, Irrelevance or Collapse? London: Routledge, 2009.

Naomi Klein, ‘Reclaiming the Commons’, New Left Review, vol. 9, 81–89, 2001.

Geoff Mann, ‘Class Consciousness and Common Property: The International Fishermen and Allied Workers of America’, International Labor and Working Class History 61: 141–60, 2002.

Bill Maurer, ‘Colonial Policy and the Construction of the Commons: An Introduction’, Plantation Society in the Americas Vol. IV, no. 2 & 3 (Fall 1997): 113–33.

Anthony McCann, ‘Understanding Enclosure Without and Within the Commons’, beyondthecommons.com (accessed 17 May 2005).

Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Paul Preciado, El Museo Apagado Pornografía, Arquitectura, Neoliberalismo Y Museos, Buenos Aires: MALBA – Fundación Eduardo F. Costantini, 2017.

Nick Prior, ‘Having One’s Tate and Eating It: Transformations of the Museum in a Hypermodern Era’, in A. McClellan (ed.), Art and Its Publics: Museum Studies at the Millennium, Oxford: Blackwell, 2003, pp. 51–76.

Carol M. Rose, ‘The Comedy of the Commons: Custom, Commerce, and Inherently Public Property’, University of Chicago Law Review, 53(3), 711, 1986.

Carol M. Rose, Property and Persuasion: Essays on the History, Theory, and Rhetoric of Ownership, Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994.

Stavros Stavrides, Common Space: The City as Commons, London: Zed Books, 2016.

Hito Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012.