Marion von Osten

An Architektur

First, all commons involve some sort of common pool of resources, understood as non-commodified means of fulfilling peoples needs. Second, the commons are necessarily created and sustained by communities—this of course is a very problematic term and topic, but nonetheless we have to think about it. Communities are sets of commoners who share these resources and who define for themselves the rules according to which they are accessed and used. Communities, however, do not necessarily have to be bound to a locality, they could also operate through translocal spaces. They also need not be understood as “homogeneous” in their cultural and material features. In addition to these two elements—the pool of resources and the set of communities—the third and most important element in terms of conceptualizing the commons is the verb “to common”—the social process that creates and reproduces the commons.

Tom Holert

Although Gibson-Graham do not address the realm of culture and cultural production explicitly, their thinking remains relevant to the question of how design can be approached within the scope of a post-capitalist project. Even if aspects of their discourse appear familiar in the context of theories pertaining to art and to cultural production in general—and may therefore lack the scandalizing or provocative edge they purportedly have in the disciplines of economics and geography—even savvy readers trained in narratives of “becoming” should gain a sense of how politics can be framed differently with regard to predominant “progressive” discourses of radical-democratic or neo-Maoist persuasion.

Natascha Sadr Haghighian

A few months before the Treuhand was founded, and very close to its headquarters in the former Nazi Air Ministry, a group of people squatted the former WMF (Württembergische Metallwarenfabrik) building. It was one of many squats in the former East German capital. The ambiguous ownership and apparent absence of law enforcement had led to a renewed squatting movement that had previously been strong in the West Berlin of the 1970s and ‘80s. Botschaft, the group that squatted the WMF building, worked collectively and between disciplines to provide a platform for activism and cultural practice outside the frameworks of traditional formats such as art, film, or politics.

Jesko Fezer

If design is to transcend its complacent function as a tool of urbanization in the service of private interests, the intentions of designers, as well as the potential of critical action beyond economic considerations, must be considered. The current emergence of ethically motivated attempts to redefine the paradigms of design, employing the catchwords “sustainability,” “social compatibility,” and “producer-consumer equity, generally fall short. They argue vigorously in terms of market-alignment and reflect a consumer-oriented or individualist approach, with the result that urban or social objectives—and hence also any design-political dimensions—remain off the map. In order to deal productively with this dilemma, one must necessarily challenge the self-image of the design profession.

Florian Zeyfang

In this context, two things keep coming up: Julio García Espinosa’s “cine imperfecto” (imperfect cinema) and Franz Kafka’s “minor literature,” and its contemporary applications. Espinosa’s text “Por un cine imperfecto” (For an imperfect cinema) is one of the most important texts of Third Cinema. We could imagine adapting to the art world its assumption that “the perfect cinema—technically and artistically masterful—is almost always reactionary cinema.” However, we are primarily interested in its anti-elitist approach and its focus on the process over outcomes and analysis. When referring to the late 1960s and early 1970s, today’s art-cinema practitioners rarely acknowledge that experimental film and concept art developed in parallel with political, emancipatory, and anti-colonial projects.

Manuela Bojadžijev and Serhat Karakayalı

Ten years ago, we gave a name to our efforts to create a new basis for political work dealing with migration: the autonomy of migration. Dazzling term, slogan, and program all at once, its use, first and foremost, functioned for many as an act of liberation. It not only demanded that migrants themselves be allowed to speak of their struggles (or, more generally, that migration discover its own language) nor did it simply seek to interrupt the helpless recourse to the history of victimhood that oppresses through racism; and it certainly was not about adding another decentralized social movement to those that replaced the workers’ movement after its demise—on the contrary, the idea was to contribute to the construction of new connections within the social struggles concerned with migration, in order to gather the different layers of subjectivity (as men and women, as workers and employees, as citizens and the illegalized) to form a foundation with which to accelerate these struggles in emancipatory ways.

Isabell Lorey

The European movements of the precarious and their associated theoretical discourses have been able to identify commonalities through precarization—unreasonable demands as well as opportunities—and have left identity politics behind. Even if it now appears as though at least the EuroMayDay movement’s time has passed, it is important to remember it not only as context from which new forms of the political emerged, but also in which important mosaic patterns were composed, setting in motion a process of common political empowerment. Even if these compositions dissolve again, their experiences and knowledge will remain. Even if the movement appears to be losing its force today, it is not to be mourned. To me it seems much more interesting to find the processes of constituting continue to generate further interruptions and unforeseeable breaks elsewhere.

Judith Hopf

It is certainly true that my position entails a question of a political nature, and thus cannot be ceded to modern experts—neither to professional scientists, the touch-screen specialists, the Web designers, nor the professional politicians. No, the question that manifests itself in my body and spirit, the question that thrusts me forward to courageously take action is one that fully and completely affects the freedom and totality of our social future!

Fahim Amir, Eva Egermann, Marion von Osten, and Peter Spillmann

EE: Just as you have described it, we are experiencing an accelerating shift in the configuration of capitalist conditions. After the transformations of the past decades—from the postwar Fordism shaped by Social Democracy and Keynesianism to a neoliberal mode of government driven by financial markets—cracks are becoming apparent in today’s neoliberalism, and not just since the financial crisis of 2008; which is to say, its social hegemony is crumbling. Whereas alternatives have in the past appeared highly unlikely, changes in the social, political, and cultural conditions have now become more conceivable.

Sebastian Lütgert

I’ve thought about this configuration a great deal recently, when thinking about cities in Southern and Western Asia, the few artist collectives there, the even more unlikely non-elitist and self-organized ones, the rare attempts at creating spaces just for themselves, the instant international recognition they get from curators, the predictable way in which the first biennial usually tears them apart, the irreversible centrifugal energy when they partition (typically along the lines of class, caste, gender, or passport) into frequent and not-so-frequent flyers, and how fortunate, in contrast, the situation had been in Berlin in the nineties, when a few people got a bit of time, and space, to just find out and repeat and refine what they were doing, on their own terms.

Antke Engel

It therefore seems most important to emphasize those moments in Gibson-Graham that underline the necessity of dealing with and socially organizing “negotiation, struggle, uncertainty, ambivalence, disappointment” rather than solely focusing on “friendliness, trust, conviviality, and companionable connection.” Even as I introduce this insistence on thinking of transformation as a power struggle—although a pleasurable one—I would still like to point out the promising potential of Gibson-Graham’s proposal of understanding desire and economy as inherently intertwined and mutually constitutive. It is this conceptual move that connects the politics of language, the politics of the subject, and the politics of collective action, allowing for new political imaginaries to develop practical effects.