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