The Commons Around Us: a workshop for a commons based society
Workshop held by Georgia Nicolau
20.09.2018
5-7 pm
This workshop is an invitation to look at the world through the commons from the experiences of each participant. An experiment in construction developed by the Procomum Institute, a Brazilian organization that has the commons as its practice, path and mission. The proposal is a joint immersion in commons concepts and practices, understanding commons as communities that create their protocols to take care of their common properties. Wether it is in nature, in society, in education, in culture or in Internet. It is a concept, an idea, a way of living, practiced for many and many around the world, every day.
A room for everyone: training for a commonist ethics/aesthetics
Talk by Georgia Nicolau & Binna Choi
22.09.2018
5-7 pm
Georgia Nicolau & Binna Choi come together in a conversation aiming to investigate, from both a theoretical and practical perspective, the meaning and practices of network based artistic production, the hacker logic in building collaborative platforms and constructions of art. Planning to elaborate together on the multiple aspects and functions that the common takes into structuring our lives, the two will explore the intricate relation between aesthetics, ideology and common resources, drawing on personal experiences as fundamental pillars in a better understanding of the necessity and importance of commonism. Where is the common around you and how can we make it unravel for the future? In which ways do commonist aesthetics and practices explore the residual world and stimulate marginal subjectivities? What resources should we mobilize to make our lives more livable? How can we re-appropriate the common, once it had been captured in the hideous massive machine of capitalism?
Photos by Petre Fall.
Biographies
Georgia Nicolau
Georgia Nicolau is a hybrid professional with experience in public policy – as director of creative economy and innovation of the Brazilian Ministry of Culture – in big media corporations and in arts and civil society organizations. In 2016 she founded the Procomum Institute, an organization focused on the valorization of the commons, where she is currently the program director. Among their projects: a citizen laboratory, which functions as a relational device of organizational experimentation and constructions of tools for collective life and bem viver.
Binna Choi
Binna Choi is director of Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, formerly Casco – Office for Art, Design and Theory in Utrecht, the Netherlands since 2008. She conceived and co-developed with the team and numerous others a long-term artistic research project like Grand Domestic Revolution (2009/2010-2013) and Composing the Commons a three-year interdisciplinary and artistic research programme (2013-2015); has been part of the faculty of the Dutch Art Institute /Masters of Fine Arts Programme in Arnhem; and working for and with a trans-local network Arts Collaboratory since 2013. Her curatorial projects also include three day seminar Cultivate or Revolutionize?: Life Between Apartment and Farmland at Times Museum, Guangzhou (2014, with Nikita Choi) and summer school and exhibition Group Affinity at Kunstverein Munich (2011, with Bart van der Heide). For the 11th Gwangju Biennale (2016) she worked as the curator. As part of her practice, she also engages with writing, editing, publishing, and contributing to discursive platforms with lectures, discussion and workshops.