Can technology be used to build commons, rather than to concentrate power? Founder of the P2P Foundation, Bauwens has spent two decades studying how people produce value together beyond both market and state, through commons-based peer production: communities that create shared resources — from open software to open design — and govern them collectively. He is best known for "cosmo-localism," the principle that what is light (knowledge, design) can be shared globally, while what is heavy (fabrication, production) is best made locally. His contribution puts forward an affirmative case — technology not as market disruption or hype, but as infrastructure for cooperation — while leaving open how far such models can scale, and where they run into their limits.

Can AI be held in common, rather than extracted as a resource?
No technology makes the tension between collective and extractive logics more visible: today's models are trained on the shared output of human culture — language, images, code, accumulated knowledge — yet the systems built from that commons are concentrated in a few hands, their compute, energy, and human-labour costs kept largely out of view. This node asks what it would actually take to build and hold AI, along with the digital infrastructures and knowledge that surround it, as a shared good rather than an enclosed one: from questions of governance, rights, and ethics to the ordinary, ongoing labour of keeping shared systems alive over time. It asks whether AI can be imagined as collectively governed and non-extractive by design — and where those models reach their limits.

The threshold of the commons: who crosses and on whose terms

Stavrides has long worked on thresholds — those in-between spaces, neither fully open nor closed, where a community decides who may cross, on what terms, and how they will belong. Here he stands at the opening threshold of the Governance theme, reasoning on what governance means for a cultural commons: not the ownership of a resource, but the ongoing question of who decides how it is used, who gets to enter, and who sets the rules — and how firmly those rules should hold. Giving everyone access is not yet giving everyone a say: many "participatory" gestures stop at access and leave power where it was. So how much structure does a cultural commons need to hold together, and how much before it hardens into a new hierarchy?

The Common as Social Organization
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 have been enclosed by capitalism — and how they might be reclaimed. Her contribution opens the Forum's inquiry from this vantage point: not the commons as an abstract ideal, but commoning as a lived, precarious, and continually contested practice, rooted in the everyday work of sustaining people and relationships.

Established institutions: can commoning bring the public closer?

A large, established museum carries a weight that smaller places don't. Hierarchy, regulation, sometimes a whole public mandate, are written into what it is and what it can do, and that makes it slow to share. Decisions tend to travel upward, and much of the time the public arrives and then leaves again. These are also the institutions with the most reach and the most resources, which makes their closure matter more. And what they hold is in some sense already shared. A national collection is kept in the public's name, an inheritance that belongs, at least on paper, to everyone — which makes the distance stranger, and the closure harder to explain. The question is structural before it's a matter of goodwill, whether a form built to conserve and to instruct can be loosened enough for a community to take some real part in what it does. And it's worth asking how far the language of the commons actually reaches inside an institution of this scale, where it helps and where the weight of the form is too much to carry.

The meeting will take place at Prime Produce, 424 W 54th St, New York, NY 10019. For those attending in person, the event will open with the streaming of Silvia Federici, then the in-person session of Patricia Lannes + Roxana Fabius, followed by a shared lunch and an in-person participatory discussion, running through to the end of the @New York slot.

Join this Luma link to participate in person: https://luma.com/n6y5ihc3

Sustaining the commons: between care and institution

A commons is less a resource than something people continually do together — so what allows that doing to last? Massimo De Angelis, founding editor of The Commoner and a longtime theorist of commoning as a social process rather than a shared object, closes the Governance theme by turning it into a question of political economy: not how power is distributed within a structure, but how a community sustains the value, care, and reproduction practices that let it govern itself at all. Drawing together the two threads that have run through the afternoon — the intimate labour of care and reproduction, and the weight and reach of established institutions — his vision asks under what conditions commons can hold their ground between market and state, and whether even large institutions might be remade as places where that reproduction becomes possible.

How — and where — does it actually 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, thinkers, and cultural practitioners for a relaxed but active working session on the structure and governance of commons. The format is convivial by design: following a lecture by Silvia Federici, a shared lunch invites everyone to think together around roundtables, and a smaller streamed conversation then brings table representatives together to report the discussion back to the online audience. Bringing together some of the small, independent associations and institutions that make up New York's cultural fabric, the session asks not whether commoning is desirable in the abstract, but under what concrete conditions — and between whom — it can meaningfully grow.

The meeting will take place at Prime Produce, 424 W 54th St, New York, NY 10019. For those attending in person, the event will open with the streaming of Silvia Federici, then the in-person session of Patricia Lannes + Roxana Fabius, followed by a shared lunch and an in-person participatory discussion, running through to the end of the @New York slot.

Join this Luma link to participate in person: https://luma.com/n6y5ihc3

Hybrid institutions: where the cultural space is also "home"

In many contemporary cities, the ways in which communities form and shared resources are established and made available reflect particular conditions shaped by contemporary life: population mobility takes millions of people far from their hometowns; a "compressed modernity" concentrates within a single generation social transformations that elsewhere might have unfolded over a century; and intense working rhythms continually encroach on personal time and private life.
When "home" is elsewhere, a sense of belonging needs to be built anew in the places where people arrive.
Shenzhen is perhaps one of the clearest examples of this phenomenon. From its beginnings as a border city, it has grown in just over four decades into a metropolis of nearly 18 million people, with population growth driven almost entirely by migration. It also has one of China's youngest populations and an exceptionally high proportion of permanent residents without local household registration. People come here and increasingly choose to stay, marry, have children, raise them and send them to school here.

Connective institutions: holding a scene together

What if part of the real work of a cultural institution is not only to build or to programme, but to hold others together? These are cultural institutions in the full sense — with their own aim and their own voice — yet ones that choose to turn outward: to listen to the community that passes through them and to place themselves, in some measure, at its service, without letting go of what they are for. Julie's Bicycle has spent years researching how the cultural sector can become sustainable, and that inquiry keeps leading back to the same ground — that environmental resilience is inseparable from the strength of the communities and networks a scene is made of. From there, Laura Pando works at the scale where an institution produces culture and, at the same time, keeps a whole web of it in relation: the connective tissue that links subcultures, small associations, and individual people who would otherwise remain scattered. Her contribution asks what such an institution actually does when it holds a scene together — how it can support networks of cooperation without absorbing or flattening them, and what changes when its value is measured by the relationships it sustains as much as by what it produces.

Intermediary institutions: translating between high culture and community life.

Between high culture and the wider community there is often a distance: of language, of threshold, of who feels entitled to enter. Some places — ones we don't always recognise as cultural in the ordinary sense — act as intermediaries and narrow that distance: they sit at the point of passage and put back into everyday language what elsewhere stays closed within a cultivated one. They aren't made for this, yet this is where they end up working, taking in even those usually left outside culture.
The Japanese node, hosted at Untitled Space in Tokyo, takes these thresholds as its subject. Its reference points are the kinds of places never called cultural that carry culture anyway: a public bath, a neighbourhood café where people still gather, the corner shop that holds a street together. Placing art in them raises a question the field tends to sidestep: what happens to curatorial authority and quality when the work is made with a community rather than merely shown to one? Community involvement is easily suspected of softening rigour — welcomed as socially generous, quietly filed as artistically minor. Yet the reach of such initiatives may depend precisely on how demandingly they are conceived, and on how clearly they name the community they address. Which is the prior question: what "community" means when culture enters these places — whom it includes, where it ends, how you enter it from outside. Because if culture is there to move people — to help them live more creatively and more consciously — then the encounter has to be tuned to that: opening the doors is not enough; we have to ask why we do what we do, for whom, and with whom.

The Koutammakou Ecomuseum offers a practical African response to these questions. Rather than separating heritage from everyday life, the ecomuseum works within the living cultural landscape of the Batammariba, where land, architecture, knowledge and livelihoods remain deeply interconnected. Its experience offers a grounded case study for rethinking the economics of cultural commons through circular bioeconomy, community governance and regenerative tourism.
At the heart of this experience is a network of 15 Cooperatives of Economic and Cultural Interest (CIEC), bringing together 373 members, predominantly women who are custodians of traditional knowledge associated with earthen architecture and the maintenance of the sikien, the inhabited architectural units at the centre of Batammariba cultural life. Through agriculture, livestock, non-timber forest products and food processing, the cooperatives develop locally rooted economic activities based on circular principles: local resources are transformed into value, waste is minimized, and economic benefits are reinvested in the cultural landscape. Twenty percent of cooperative profits are allocated to a permanent fund dedicated to the maintenance of the sikien. Heritage therefore becomes not simply something to be preserved, but part of a functioning local economy that contributes directly to its own conservation.
The emerging Tourism of the Sikien takes this approach a step further. Community-based mapping and georeferencing, initially developed to support cooperative management and heritage documentation, are now creating the foundations for carefully designed visitor experiences. Visitors can discover the architecture, landscape, knowledge and ways of life of Koutammakou while contributing to the local economy. The objective is not to transform the sikien into museum objects, but to create a form of regenerative tourism in which visitation contributes to the continued vitality of the places and communities being visited.
Structured as a causerie-débat, rather than a conventional academic panel, the session will create a circle of dialogue inspired by the importance of collective speech and intergenerational transmission in Batammariba society. The conversation will bring together the director and founder of the Koutammakou comuseum, a woman leader from a CIEC, the network's entrepreneurship and advisory lead, and a young graduate of the museum's construction chantiers-écoles. Their different perspectives will reveal how cultural heritage, women's economic empowerment, youth engagement, traditional knowledge, circular economy and sustainable tourism can converge within a single community-based model. The discussion ultimately asks a broader question for museums worldwide: Can museums move beyond preserving heritage to helping communities build the economic, ecological and social conditions that allow heritage to remain alive? The Koutammakou experience suggests that the future of sustainable museums may lie not in owning more collections, but in strengthening the living systems, knowledge and economies that sustain heritage in place.

Lumbung: pooling the surplus, sharing the decision

Lumbung is a working method to share resources, referring to the Indonesian agriculturally vernacular rice-barn — the surplus of a harvest gathered into a common store, and redistributed by collective decision. ruangrupa, the collective that runs this table, has carried that principle across a series of experiments in the field of culture: Gudang Sarinah Ekosistem (2015–18), Gudskul, their collective learning space (2018–ongoing), and Lumbung 1, also known as documenta fifteen (2022) — and continues to practise it today. Connecting these experiences to the economy of the commons, the conversation asks what it means to sustain culture through sharing rather than competition, how far a method grown in one context can travel to others, and what the difficulties are in implementing it.

The session takes place in person at Gudskul (Jl Durian Raya no.30A, Jagakarsa, South Jakarta), with some speakers connected online. 

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The economy as a political choice: how to transform capitalism

We take for granted that economics is a technical matter, made of neutral laws and inevitable constraints: markets know, the books must be balanced, there are no alternatives. But the categories through which we read it — growth, debt, unemployment — are not objective descriptions of the world; they contain choices about what counts, and for whom. Recognising them as political, rather than as destiny, changes what we are able to imagine.

If capitalism is a historical construction and not a natural order, then it too can be transformed — and culture is no stranger to this possibility. Cultural institutions, networks, and commons are not marginal spaces with respect to the market: they are places where mutualist and cooperative economic models can be practised, not only theorised. The question this talk leaves open is where the line runs between declaring an alternative and sustaining it over time: what conditions make it truly inhabitable, and not merely thinkable.

In today's unstable economic climate, the fragility of the prevailing cultural model is felt with new force: 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 cultural institutions sustain themselves through cooperatives, shared funds, mutuals, and other self-organising structures, rather than through forms of dependency that leave them precarious? The discussion shifts the economic question from funding to organisation — from who pays for culture to how a community decides, together, to keep producing and maintaining it — and asks how far mutualist models can actually carry the weight of sustaining cultural life.

The session takes place at the Galleria Vero Stoppioni in Santa Sofia (FC), viale Roma 5, 47018, with some of the speakers connected online; it is open to the public.