Commoning Collective Care

Open call: Commoning Collective Care. Curating on the Move—An international curatorial and artistic workshop. A collaboration between TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary and OnCurating. June 14–17, 2023, in Córdoba, Spain

Application period: May 5–24, 2023. Applications received will be processed on an ongoing basis.

Open call for public program and workshops: The workshop program is open for cultural practitioners of all fields and disciplines. Attendance via registration. No fees are attached. Accommodation, travel, and other expenses are not covered by the program and have to be organized individually. Please find the registration form and apply here. Full program here (EN) and here (ES). Note: the program is subject to change.
 
Public events: June 14–17, 2023
With Tarek Atoui, Ursula Biemann, Mekhala Dave, Rosela Del Bosque, Sonia Fernández Pan, Margarida Mendes, Azahara Ubera Biedma, and Teresa Vicente Giménez. Public events are free and open to the general public.

Workshops: June 15–17, 2023
At C3A Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía, Córdoba. With Sascia Bailer, Ursula Biemann, Ronald Kolb, Sofia Lemos, Anja Lückenkemper, PLATA, Dorothee Richter, Azahara Ubera Biedma, and Daniela Zyman.

Alongside the exhibition Remedios: Where new land might grow
Works from the TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection / Curated by Daniela Zyman. At C3A Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía, Córdoba. April 14, 2023–March 31, 2024. See more here.

“Where the commons give refuge; where refuge gives the commons.” —Fred Moten

The commons are most simply defined by a common vision of care and sharing access to material and immaterial resources across differences, based on collective decision-making, solidarity, and responsibility for what is being held and cared for together. Rather than offering a stable ground for political action, they are constantly being reimagined, reclaimed, and renegotiated by practitioners.

Commoning Collective Care is a four-day intense seminar/workshop convened to collectively explore the different implications, practices, and artistic explorations of the ethics of commoning in a fragile and fractured world. Relying on dialogue, conversation, and embodied engagement, it proposes a multi-sensorial pedagogy of learning to live collectively with the exhausting environmental and social threats and the ongoing violence in times of planetary transformations. Focusing on issues such as Building Caring Infrastructures; Gendered Landscapes and Queered Nature; the rights of nature in the form of legal personhood, an example of which was announced in October 2022, when Spain’s Mar Menor, a coastal saltwater lagoon in Murcia, was recognized as such; the larger analytics of the so-called Hydrocommons; and the safeguarding of ancestral plant knowledge, the participatory workshops and presentations foreground how the commons are a site of struggle, a political position that strengthens the capacities of collective doing and transformative thinking against hyper-individualism, extractive neoliberalism, and the destruction of more-than-human life.

Commoning Collective Care is curated by Dorothee Richter, Ronald Kolb, and Daniela Zyman.