Culture Commons: a forum on the sustainability of culture

Forum on Sustainability

2026 | Culture Commons: International Forum on the Sustainability of Culture

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from Sep 25, 2026 to Sep 26, 2026

Forum

onSustainability

fromSep 25, 2026toSep 26, 2026atSanta Sofia New York Shenzen

Culture Commons: global perspectives for building a more collaborative and sustainable culture.

Following the success of its first edition, the 2026 International Forum on the Sustainability of Culture is expanding its international network and deepening its reflection on culture as shared infrastructure.

The second edition, dedicated entirely to Culture Commons, will take place on 25–26 September 2026 in a hybrid format — in person and live-streamed on YouTube and social channels.

The edition's theme, Culture Commons, also shapes how it is organised: the Forum unfolds through a distributed network, rooted in each of the territories that host it. Both days follow the same relay-style schedule, moving across the time zones of eight hubs — Tokyo, Shenzhen, Tanguiéta, Jakarta, Berlin, Guatemala City, Santa Sofia, and New York — connecting them in real time, online and in person. The roundtables, made up of artists, economists, scholars, and cultural professionals, invite open participation and live questions from anywhere in the world.

A branching structure with a single aim: to put the commons to the test as a model. Are they genuinely applicable to cultural, economic, and social life? And where they are, with what practical tools? Each roundtable is conceived as a collective laboratory, tasked with posing practical questions and formulating concrete answers.

Many of the in-person events across the various venues are designed to generate social impact in the places where they unfold. At the Santa Sofia venue, the work on local engagement begun in the previous edition blossoms into a group exhibition and a closing assembly (not streamed), conceived to translate the themes discussed at the international roundtables into practice within the specific local context — one rich in grassroots community associations.

FRIDAY 25 SEPTEMBER

14.00 – 14.30 Welcome and opening of the Forum

Institutional greetings

14.30 – 14.45 Presentation of the Forum

Objectives and themes of the 2026 edition

THEME 1 · Digital Commons, Technology and Artificial Intelligence #DIGITAL_COMMONS

What commons emerge through technology, and what role can technology play in their development?

14.45 – 15.45 Michel Bauwens · Lecture

Q&A and discussion to follow.

15.45 – 17.00 🌍 International connection · Roundtable discussion

Berlin
In person at Trust
Includes Q&A and discussion.

THEME 2 · Shared Governance and participative cultures #POWER_DISTRIBUTION

What collaborative and democratic models exist for the distribution of power?

17.00 – 18.00 Silvia Federici · Lecture

New York
In person at Prime Produce - New York City
Includes Q&A and discussion.

18.00 – 18.45 Patricia Lannes · Interview

Online
Includes Q&A and discussion.

18.45 – 20.00 🌍 International connection · Lunch and roundtables discussion

New York
In person at Prime Produce + Cybernetics Library + Wikimedia NYC
Open to the public
Includes Q&A and discussion.
(The in-person event will start at 18.00; the first phase will not be streamed)

20.00 – 20.15 Gladys Tzul Tzul · Interview

Online
Includes Q&A and discussion.

SATURDAY 26 SEPTEMBER

9.30 – 10.15 🌍 International connection · Roundtable discussion

Tokyo
In person at Denkiyu
Open to the public
Includes Q&A and discussion.

10.15- 10.45 Laura Pando Martínez · Interview

Includes Q&A and discussion.

11.00 – 12.00 🌍 International connection · Roundtable discussion

Shenzhen
In person at Sea World Culture and Arts Center
Open to the public
Includes Q&A and discussion.

THEME 3 · Post-Capitalist Economies and Mutualist Models #MUTUALIST_ECONOMY

What mutualist economic structures are viable in post-capitalism?

12.00 – 13.00 🌍 International connection · Roundtable discussion

Tanguiéta (Benin)
In person at the Écomusée Tata Somba
Open to the Public
Includes Q&A and discussion.

13.00 – 14.00 Break

14.00 – 15.00 🌍 International connection · Roundtable discussion

Jakarta
In person at ruangrupa
Not open to in-person public
Includes Q&A and discussion.

15.00 – 16.45 🌍 International connection · Roundtable discussion

Santa Sofia (Italy)
In person at the Vero Stoppioni Gallery of Contemporary Art
Open to the Public
Includes Q&A and discussion.

16.45 -17.00 End of live streaming
____________________________________________
The following sessions are part of the community and territorial work in the Santa Sofia territory, started by Institution in the first edition of the Forum.
These will not be streamed, but open to the audience in person.

17.15 - 19.15 Collaboration and Territorial Synergies Table · Roundtable discussion

Santa Sofia (Italy)
In person at the Vero Stoppioni Gallery of Contemporary Art
Open to the Public
Includes Q&A and discussion.

19.15 - 20.00 Opening of the group exhibition dedicated to the Territorial Network

Santa Sofia (Italy)
In person at the Vero Stoppioni Gallery of Contemporary Art
Open to the Public

____________________________________________

The event will be streamed on our YouTube channel.

The complete program will be released soon.

Thematic Tables

Sep 25 at 07:45 AM GMT+2

Michel Bauwens · @online · Lecture on Technology

Can technology build commons rather than concentrate power? Founder of the P2P Foundation, Bauwens has studied commons-based peer production for two decades — communities that create and collectively govern shared resources, from open software to open design. Known for "cosmo-localism," he makes an affirmative case for technology as infrastructure for cooperation.

Sep 25 at 15:45 PM GMT+2

@Berlin · Discussion on Technology

Can technology be held in common, rather than extracted as a resource? Hosted by Trust and the Cybernetic Library in Berlin, this node asks what it takes to build and maintain digital tools, infrastructures, and knowledge as shared goods — and tests whether cybernetic and speculative approaches can imagine technologies that are collectively governed and non-extractive by design, while probing where those models reach their limits.

Sep 25 at 10:00 AM GMT+2

Silvia Federici · @New York · Lecture on Governance

What can a feminist reading of the commons teach us about cooperation today? Scholar, activist, and one of the most influential theorists of the commons, Federici has spent decades tracing how care, reproduction, and collective life are enclosed by capitalism — and how they might be reclaimed.

Sep 25 at 18:45 PM GMT+2

@New York · Roundtable on Governance

How — and where — does it make sense for small cultural organisations to hold more in common? Hosted in New York across Prime Produce, the Cybernetics Library, and Wikimedia NYC, this node gathers artists and cultural practitioners for a convivial working session — a lecture by Silvia Federici, a shared lunch, and a streamed conversation reporting back to the online audience — asking not whether commoning is desirable, but under what concrete conditions it can grow.

Sep 25 at 13:00 PM GMT+2

Gladys Tzul Tzul · @online · Interview on Governance

Gladys Tzul Tzul is a Maya K'iche’ woman from Totonicapán. She is a writer and essayist. Holding a PhD in Sociology, she has conducted research in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Mexico, Ecuador, and the United States.

Sep 26 at 14:30 PM GMT+2

@Tokyo · Roundtable on Governance

Why open the Japanese node in a bathhouse? Denkiyu is a sentō in Tokyo's Kyojima neighbourhood — a place that makes collaboration visible not only as organised action but as a quiet, reciprocal form of care. Katsuhito Okubo, who runs it, joins scholars of the commons to reflect on the specifically Japanese sense of commoning, and on what cultural institutions can do with it: preserve it, let it grow, or set it in motion — without deciding in its place.

Sep 26 at 03:00 AM GMT+2

Laura Pando · @online · Interview on Governance

What if the real work of a cultural institution is to be the glue? At Julie's Bicycle, Pando sees institutions less as buildings or programmes than as connective tissue — the quiet infrastructure binding subcultures, associations, and people who would otherwise stay scattered, and asks what it means to measure their value by the relationships they sustain rather than the output they produce.

Sep 26 at 04:00 AM GMT+2

@Shenzen · Roundtable on Governance

What forms of cooperation are possible between small, independent cultural spaces — and how do they hold one another up? Hosted at the Sea World Culture and Arts Center, the Shenzhen node gathers artist-run, self-organised, and youth-led spaces from the Pearl River Delta that sustain themselves through shared ownership, mutual support, and consensus — looking not at the commons in the abstract, but at how they actually cooperate within their own context.

Sep 26 at 05:00 AM GMT+2

@Tanguiéta · Roundtable on Economy

What if tourism could generate value without taking heritage away from the communities that make it? The Koutammakou Ecomuseum works within the living landscape of the Batammariba, where land, architecture, knowledge and livelihoods stay interconnected. A network of 15 cooperatives — mostly women, custodians of earthen-architecture knowledge — turns local resources into value and channels 20% of profits into a permanent fund for maintaining the sikien. Structured as a causerie-débat, the session asks whether museums can move beyond preserving heritage to sustaining the living systems that keep it alive.

Sep 26 at 07:00 AM GMT+2

Ruangrupa · @Jakarta · Discussion on Economy

Lumbung is the shared rice barn: you pool the surplus — funds, time, knowledge, networks — and decide together how to redistribute it. ruangrupa, the Jakarta collective running this table, applied the principle to Documenta 15, turning a whole exhibition into an exercise in sharing. With Gudskul, their learning space, they treat generosity and hanging out (nongkrong) as economic infrastructure. The node asks what it means to sustain culture through sharing rather than competition — and how far the model travels beyond the context that grew it.

Sep 26 at 08:00 AM GMT+2

@Santa Sofia · Roundtable on Economy

Cultural institutions largely depend on private support and national funding — and when those falter, so does their capacity to keep going. The Forum's home table in Santa Sofia gathers economists, commons researchers, ethical-finance practitioners, and voices from the art world around a mutualist question: can institutions sustain themselves through cooperatives, shared funds, and mutuals rather than dependencies that leave them precarious? It shifts the question from who pays for culture to how a community decides, together, to keep producing it — and asks how far mutualist models can carry that weight.

Keynote Speakers

Philosopher

Silvia Federici

Silvia Federici is a feminist activist and a renowned political theorist. One of the most important voices on the Commons.

Sociologist

Gladys Tzul Tzul

curatorial collective

ruangrupa

ruangrupa (which loosely translates as ‘a space for art’) is an artist’s initiative and collective started in Jakarta, Indonesia in 2000.

Interim CEO of Julie’s Bicycle

Laura Pando

Laura Pando Martínez, is a culture and climate expert practitioner and the Interim CEO of Julie’s Bicycle.

Venues

Berlin (Germany)

Trust

Trust is a Berlin-based knowledge community and research collective, active since 2017, describing itself as "an incubator for utopian conspiracy."

New York City (USA)

Prime Produce Apprentice Cooperative

Prime Produce Apprentice Cooperative operates a grassroots, cooperatively-run member space in Hell's Kitchen, New York.

New York City (USA)

Wikimedia New York City

Wikimedia NYC è un'organizzazione no-profit 501(c)(3) e una sezione locale di Wikimedia che riunisce New York per condividere un ecosistema di conoscenza libera più ricco e rappresentativo.

New York City (USA)

Cybernetics Library

The Cybernetics Library is an interdisciplinary browsing library that re-contextualizes the expansive history of cybernetic thought and practice.

Tokyo (Japan)

Denkiyu (電気湯)

Denkiyu (電気湯) is a historic sento — public bathhouse — in the Kyojima neighborhood of Sumida ward, Tokyo. It was one of the locations of the movie Perfect Days by Wim Wenders.

Shenzen (China)

Sea World Culture and Arts Center

The Sea World Culture and Arts Center (SWCAC) sits on the Shekou coast, Nanshan district, Shenzhen, overlooking the mountains of Hong Kong

Tanguiéta (Benin)

Écomusée Tata Somba

The Écomusée Tata Somba, opened in March 2021 in Tanguiéta (Atacora department, 25 km from Pendjari National Park), is West Africa's first ecological museum.

Santa Sofia (FC), Italy

Vero Stoppioni Gallery

The Vero Stoppioni Gallery of Contemporary Art in Santa Sofia was inaugurated in 1990, growing out of the long tradition of the Campigna Prize, an art event founded in 1955 by the Municipality of Santa Sofia thanks to the commitment of teacher Vero Stoppioni, to whom the gallery is dedicated.

Partners