Museums can be perceived as static, cold, and distant structures. The commons, by contrast, as softness. Commons need bodies entering shared space, adjusting to one another's presence, activating what remains inert without collective participation. Hence, the question: Can museums built on hierarchy and measurable outcomes ever accommodate practices as such, rooted in continuous negotiation, embodied vulnerability, and process over product?
In November, Museion in Bozen hosted a three-day forum to address this question. Culture as a Commons, organized by Brita Köhler, head of the education department at the museum, brought together commoning practitioners and cultural workers from Italy and the Netherlands, contexts where culture is funded radically differently. In Italy, cultural work survives under conditions of scarcity, restricting initiatives to local, fragile scales as reflected by invited collectives like La Rivoluzione Delle Seppie, Le Compagnie Malviste, and Oriente Occidente. In the Netherlands, consolidated spaces such as CASCO, Dans op Recept, and Kunstinstituut Melly benefit from robust public funding that positions culture as a marker of national identity. Against both backdrops, the commons emerged not as a panacea but as a diagnostic lens: a way to examine how resources are allocated, how scarcity is produced, and whose labor gets valued.
Crucially, Museion's own workers participated as active subjects rather than institutional functionaries, recognizing that those who sustain institutions daily must shape any reflection on how they operate, and how they might operate otherwise. The main day unfolded as a ten-hour marathon addressing the promise and contradictions of commoning, from ensuring intergenerational continuity to accounting for practices that resist capitalist ways of structuring and quantifying labor.
Fig.1
Commons as Anti-Capitalist Ecosystems
Throughout the forum, participants returned to a fundamental assertion: commons are anti-capitalist in structure. They challenge regimes of property, material, and intellectual, and refuse the notion that only specialized, professionalized voices can participate in cultural production. CASCO's practice exemplified this: rather than managing space and programming from above, they create minimal structures for hosting, especially for communities subjected to marginalization and discrimination. What emerged from their presentation was a notion of community not as a buzzword, but as the political condition in which culture forms despite precarity and oppression. Their work demonstrates the abundance of practices that emerge when institutions provide loose frameworks for holding rather than structured apparatuses for programming.
Yet CASCO does not romanticize this model. Material conditions remained central to their presentation. Commons require infrastructure to endure: pools of resources, accessible spaces, and time. Without these material foundations, commoning cannot be sustained.
The Temporal Trap: Funding Cycles vs. Continuous Care
Public money operates in cycles. Commons do not. Marlien Seinstra, director of Dans op Recept, articulated this temporal mismatch as one of the fundamental contradictions facing commoning practices. Across the forum's discussions, practitioners agreed: public cultural funding finances products rather than processes, demanding legibility that cannot be assessed a priori when it comes to the commons. Cultural production rooted in commoning must continuously adapt to accommodate funding criteria rather than the other way around, creating discrepancies between dominant commodity culture, lauded and socially visible, and commoning practices that constantly struggle to survive.
Dans op Recept's own survival strategy revealed this structural impossibility. Working with elders and people affected by chronic illness, they advocate for the right to be understood as full human beings rather than just symptoms or diagnoses, turning dance into a social resource that bridges somatic practices and public health. Their funding comes from the governmental health sector rather than the cultural sector, a tactical adaptation born from structural necessity.
Practice as Belonging
La Rivoluzione Delle Seppie, a nomadic network of spatial practitioners based in southern Italy, posed a crucial question in their presentation: what forms of cultural production emerge when we root creation in everyday practices rather than predefined bodies of knowledge? Working in Belmonte Calabro, renamed Belmondo (i.e., beautiful world), they involve local, temporary, and migrant communities in their projects to bring new use and life to disused buildings. By recuperating traditions without ossifying them, by involving migrants and refugees often working in monocultural agriculture, they offer a reading of belonging based on practice rather than officially sanctioned spectacles. They counter forms of social categorization in Italy that discriminate against both the South, disparaged as archaic and underdeveloped, and migrants, traduced as parasitic on the social fabric.
Legal questions threaded through the panel. Transforming a public good into a commons is not a straightforward process. A public good, notionally at least, is owned by the state and put at the service of the public. A commons is not owned by the state, nor is it the property of the commoners. Commons exist in a legal gray zone that both protects and endangers their survival.
Fig.2
Movement as Common Ground
Oriente Occidente raised questions about audiences and communities, for example, how to encourage audience attendance that bridges cultural differences. The cultural association designs networks of relationships—East and West, North and South, form and content, ethics and aesthetics, past and future—using dance as a means of transcending ethnicity, gender, age, and culture. As with Dans op Recept, here dance offers a loose structure through which everyone can contribute what and who they are to a work, expressing their cultural markers and prerogatives, but also negotiating continuously and collectively through movement. Oriente Occidente works to make communities visible within specific social contexts, not necessarily to find a common sensibility, but rather common ground defined by differences. The common labor results in an annual festival. In their presentation, Oriente Occidente emphasized that alliances across borders and fields of knowledge are crucial, not only to stimulate dialogue but also to bring economic support to the project. Thus, they circled back to the question of funding, expressing the hardship of adapting their process-based ecosystem to strict programming requirements.
The session concluded with the question of what commons actually are. Everyone in the room expressed resistance to settling on a unifying definition; it would betray the idea itself. However, a general liveliness and political engagement were claimed and protected as aspects of a definition. The shared assessment that emerged understood commoning as a way of reclaiming, structurally and methodologically, resources, identities, and knowledges that racial capitalism operates to undermine. Where commons give agency to people and communities to negotiate their own ways of organizing and commoning, a frequent phenomenon for those working within formalized institutions is a kind of self-suspension. Many workers describe slipping beneath a "cloak of the institution," where individual positioning, difference, and dissent are muted in the name of upholding the institutional structure.
An incompatibility emerged between the context and people-centric modus operandi of commoning and the appurtenances of the museum, optimised instead for structural clarity, hierarchy, and often discursive safety. A fundamental question then followed: could a museum ever truly become more than merely a showroom for participatory practices, but instead a space structurally shaped by the act of commoning itself?
Fig.3
Shedding the concrete layer
During the lunch break, I visited Nicola L.'s retrospective I Am The Last Woman Object, curated by Leonie Radine at Museion, and part of the curatorial cycle The Softest Hard. Her body of work, the pénétrables, or "second skins," was designed to be activated on the streets among people struggling, only later bringing that energy back into the museum transformed. These pénétrables felt to me political art in its most sensual form. Just like The Fur Room (1970).
In the work, only a wooden cube is visible from the outside; to enter, one dons a second skin, a purple fur leotard that renders the person continuous with the violet velvet interior. L. called it "a house made of empty figures that you can enter, empty human body shells that you can penetrate." Fourteen fur garments hang limp on the cube’s walls, awaiting activation. These skins acted as a metaphor for my understanding of the commons: not abstract principles on a page, but enacted relations performed by the body. The room remains inert in L.’s work; it doesn’t have a function until bodies inhabit it, negotiate proximity, and adjust to one another's presence, but the spatialization also presents the question of how a commons is bounded, and how discrete it must remain from the wider world. Commoning is a labor of activation, a continuous practice of becoming-with others that requires embodied participation, vulnerability, and mutual adjustment. It fundamentally rejects the institutional model of optimization, replicability, and predictability, as well as the bourgeois model of art consumption: distanced, contemplative, sovereign.
The work made me remember a somewhat cliché question I would sometimes ask people outside the cultural sphere: what materialized in their imagination when thinking of a museum? The answer was strikingly consistent: a concrete cube. A simple, recognizable, and replicable architectural form. This image, in stark contrast with the soft visualization of the Fur Room, expressed staticity and an affective regime of coldness and distance.
Fig.4
Making the Institution Visible
Such tension was directly challenged during a tour inside the belly of the Museion, organized by CASCO and the multidisciplinary collective Post Disaster. The spatial organization of the work, which took the audience through the actual offices of the Museion, revealed residual hierarchies: unequal access to light, space, autonomy, and proximity to shared areas. Rather than an external critique, the tour functioned as a collective visualization. Staff members were introduced not as anonymous functionaries but as agents sustaining the institution. In the director's office, planning boards displayed the museum's program as an ongoing, analogue process shaped through weekly negotiation, an unusual degree of procedural transparency, I thought, for an institution operating at this scale.
Following the tour, staff and audiences gathered to discuss how a museum might function as a commons. This discussion sharply contrasted with the dominant institutional norm for “community engagement”, in which audiences are seldom brought together with staff to address governance issues, and workers perform roles without questioning the structures organizing their labor. Questions of use emerged as well. Could museums offer their spaces to external organizations that themselves lack infrastructure? Could they host regular assemblies to collectively determine cultural priorities? Museion has already prototyped such possibilities through initiatives, including Museion Art Club, which offers space, visibility, and networking opportunities to communities operating in Trentino. But the assembly pushed further: if museums preserve and present cultural heritage, how can they open up curation to be collectivized, rather than attributing all responsibility to the head curator?
Museion's head curator Leonie Radine, who was present in the assembly, addressed this query personally. Curators are always hosts and bridge-builders between agents and resources; in a way, they are commoners. Curating is a political gesture that senses urgencies and artists who speak to our times, relying on formal and informal relationships, and curators can facilitate those relationships and provide space for them to flourish. Yet the operation is much more complicated, because agents participating in the process often do not have the same levels of power. And those with more power and influence will inevitably have more leverage in the process.
When asked whether Museion could restructure itself—its governance, labor relations, spatial organization, and funding—so that commoning becomes an institutional practice rather than supplemental educational programming, Museion's director Bart van der Heide identified the constraints the museum faces: public status, multiple investors, and competing interests. Such honesty is important. It clarifies that museums cannot become commons without dismantling the ownership structures and funding dependencies that define them as institutions today. But perhaps this, too, is the wrong question. Perhaps asking museums to become commons mistakes the relationship these forms should hold, respectively.
Fig.5
The commons exist outside, alongside, and often against institutional logics. They don't seek institutional validation; they create alternative infrastructures for cultural production precisely because institutions cannot accommodate their ways of working. Museums, meanwhile, hold different responsibilities, not to replicate commoning, but to redistribute resources toward it, to use institutional privilege to protect practices the market would destroy, to create platforms where the commons can reach wider publics without being domesticated in the process. Culture as a Commons succeeded not because it resolved these tensions but because it made the gap between museums and commons visible and inhabitable, even if only temporarily.
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- Image Credits
Cover and Fig.3: Nicola L., La Chambre en Fourrure, 1970. Courtesy Nicola L. Collection and Archive and Alison Jaques, Copyrights Nicola L. Collection and Archive
Fig.1/2/4/5: Culture as a Common Symposium, Museion, Bozen 2025.
