SPACES OF COMMONING: Artistic Research And The Utopia Of The Everyday

Book presentation and talk of volume 18 of the Publication Series of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

The editors will be present and talk to Elizabeth Giorgis. Elizabeth W Giorgis is currently professor of theory and criticism at the College of Performing and Visual Art and the Director of the Modern Art Museum: Gebre Kristos Desta Center at Addis Ababa University.

Spaces of Commoning: Artistic Research and the Utopia of the Everyday is the outcome of a research project by a group of artists, architects, and social theorists. In the face of an exhilarating politics of accumulation and dispossession, the group explores commoning as the subject as well as the means of their collective study. The power of the commons, this book suggests, does not reside in the promise of a coming together free of friction. As different dimensions of power organize the terrain of the social, social movements are often caught between competing agendas, and the gap between aims and everyday life. It is precisely the sites of these struggles that the book calls spaces of commoning. As such, this study is part of a much wider recognition of the necessity to rethink and undo the methodological premises of Western sciences, arts, and architecture, and to raise unsettling questions on research ethos, accountability, and the entanglement of power and knowledge.

With contributions by Berhanu Ashagrie Deribew, Anette Baldauf, Tesfaye Bekele Beri, Aluminé Cabrera, Silvia Federici, Elizabeth Giorgis, Stefan Gruber, Stefano Harney, Moira Hille, Mihret Kebede, Annette Krauss, Lisa Lowe, Maria Mesner, Vladimir Miller, Stavros Stavrides, Pelin Tan, Team at Casco—Office for Art, Design and Theory, Brook Teklehaimanot, Ultra-red, Mara Verlič, Hong-Kai Wang, Julia Wieger.
The research project “Spaces of Commoning: Artistic Practices, the Making of Urban Commons and Visions of Change” was supported by the WWTF—Vienna Science and Technology Fund.