@Santa Sofia · Roundtable on Economy

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.

Moderator

Art curator and researcher

Fabiola Fiocco

Fabiola Fiocco is a curator and researcher based in Rome. She holds a PhD from the Edinburgh College of Art. Her work focuses on imaginaries of (post-)work in contemporary art, infrastructural critique, and the impact of feminist epistemologies on art methodologies and theories.

Speakers

Massimo De Angelis

Political economist and founding editor of the web journal The Commoner

Massimo De Angelis is Professor Emeritus of Political Economy at the University of East London and the founding editor of the web journal The Commoner.

Kathrin Böhm

Artist

Kathrin Böhm works as an artist and organiser across interdependent realms of cultural production, including art worlds. Her organisational and spatial work supports collective forms of (re-)producing public space, reclaiming the economy for more-than-capitalist futures, and enabling a new trans-localism that acknowledges the rural. As a researcher, she contributes to the broader topics of New Economies, Cultural Democracy, Usership of Art and Commons-based World Building.

Keir Milburn

Writer, researcher, and consultant

Dr. Keir Milburn is a writer, researcher, and consultant. He has a background as an academic in political economy and organisation theory and is currently a director of the action-research think tank Abundance.

Masaki Fujihata

Media Artist

Masaki Fujihata, born in Tokyo, is one of the pioneers of Japanese new media art.

Silvia Sacchetti

Silvia Sacchetti is Full Professor of Economic Policy at the University of Trento,

Silvia Sacchetti is Full Professor of Economic Policy in the Department of Sociology and Social Research at the University of Trento, where she also coordinates the research unit on Economic Institutions and the Common Good (Cives).