On Saturday 27 March from 10:00–15:00 the first C4R (Cultures for Resilience) seminar will be held online, aiming to question governance tools for civic

Nous sommes ravis de découvrir que GAK Bremen a encore exposé notre travail 'Eselsohr' que nous avons fait là-bas en 2005. Nous avons réalisé un magazine participatif avec des personnes qui cherchaient un emploi dans la ville sur lequel le magazine avait pour but de proposer un compte critique. Nous avons utilisé nos frais d'artiste pour payer les gens pour créer leurs propres emplois en tant que rédacteurs de magazines.

The new book by Hans Widmer (aka P.M., author of bolo'bolo) is now published. "Auf den Boden kommen" (flyer in german), meaning "down to earth", a title inspired by Bruno Latour's work. The book builds on previous collective work curated and edited by Hans Widmer (Die Andere Stadt and Nach Hause Kommen) focusing this time at the neighbourhood scale (20000 inhabitants), the 2nd out of 5 "glomos". One of the book's proposals for living within ecological boundaries without sacrifice is the "terrestrial" Internet, an adaptation of the concept of the organic Internet by Panayotis Antoniadis (through C4R partner NetHood). The initial text has been written in English and is published also as a separate booklet, available to download here. The terrestrial Internet will be then the topic of the next event of the 7at7 series, on Monday February 7 at 7pm CET, with the CIRCE group as a special guest. You can join at https://7at7.digital.

Created thanks to several workshops gathering users, associations, and local representatives at R-Urban Bagneux, the interactive map "shared neighborhoods" identifies sharing and solidarity activities in Bagneux and in the surrounding cities. This map presents the domains of sharing (ecology, culture, sport, solidarity...) but also what is shared (knowledge, material goods, services...) and with which participants. Discover here the result of these collective mapping sessions and learn more about the sharing network of Bagneux and its surroundings.

What enables a community to operate with minimal reliance on money? The Rojava Film Commune works for the production, distribution, and reception of films depicting and documenting the stateless society of Rojava, Kurdish and Arab culture, and the region’s continuing military and ideological struggles. The Rojava Film Commune is a collective of filmmakers founded in Rojava in 2015, it was created with the purpose of bringing cinema to the people of Rojava and further developing its democratic revolution. Rojava is more than a region located in the Northern and Eastern Syria. It is an autonomous government established in 2014 while surviving what’s often referred as the Syrian war ridden with geopolitical complication. It’s based on the radical democratic principle whereby key values such as cooperativism, diversity, women, ecology rule. The film commune is one of many communes that form the basis of Rojava governance. SOURCES: Roza The Country Of Two Rivers, a Documentary of Rojava Revolution by Rojava Film Commune: Rojava Film Festival CHANNELS You can watch a selection of the collective's works on their youtube channel here. You can follow Rojava Film Commune's communication channels here and here.

What shape can the infrastructure for the solidarity economy take? The Open Collective is working to build legal, financial, and technical tools which are open source and transparent – enabling connections between financial institutions, cooperatives, mutual aid groups and non-profit organizations. Open Collective Foundation (OCF) is creating a legal, financial, and technical commons for the solidarity economy. Community is about trust and sharing. Open Collective lets you manage your finances so everyone can see where money comes from and where it goes. Collect and spend money transparently. OCF has a unique role to play as steward of a legal, financial, and technical commons—a piece of shared infrastructure—that is resonating deeply with the solidarity economy movement. We can build bridges between 501(c)(3) fiscal sponsorship, the open source community (where we have deep roots), mutual aid groups (100+ are hosted by OCF today), and the movement at large. A new clarity has emerged for Open Collective Foundation: Solidarity will be our guiding principle. Source: https://blog.opencollective.com/solidarity-as-our-guiding-principle/ RESOURCES You can find the Solidarity as Guiding Principle tool by the Open Collective Foundation here. Watch a brief presentation of the OCF:

How can artists organize against the increasing inequality amplified by the pandemic conditions globally? Art for Universal Basic Income – a campaign initiated by artists – is converging energies with movements across the world challenging the market’s current modes of exploitation. Art for Universal Basic Income by the Institute of Radical Imagination (IRI). While the art market confirms his status as a safe-haven assets provider for the financial elite, the current pandemic has highlighted the fragility and precarity of art workers around the world, a condition common to a growing portion of humanity. In this situation a UBI (Universal Basic Income) would then represent a solution and indeed an urgent measure to implement. But UBI is not “only” a response to poverty, it is a necessary condition in order to rethink our extractivist ecological model, to correct many race and gender asymmetries and, last but not least, to change the art world’s present neoliberal structure. UBI must be seen as a tool to open up new subjective spaces, alternative to the dominating entrepreneurial individualism and focused instead on commons and care. If artists are already creating new collective economy models and alter-institutions, these small scale experiments will be much more valuable when connected with those growing social movements around the world fighting for a Universal Basic Income. The Institute of Radical Imagination (IRI) is a think-tank consisting of curators, artists, and scholars, whose aim is to develop various forms of research intervention for the transition into post-capitalism. Together we want to explore and develop new practices and knowledge that contribute to the formation of new forms of life and its meanings as the practices of struggle for the commons. IRI is located at the threshold between Europe and the Mediterranean. The School of Mutation is IRI's pedagogical outlet, focused on the need to learn anew and re-make the world of culture in the unfolding of the biopolitical emergency brought on by Covid-19. Art For UBI is a campaign initiated in the framework of the School of Mutation. ART FOR UBI (MANIFESTO) 1/ Universal and Unconditional Basic Income is the best measure for the arts and cultural sector. Art workers claim a basic income, not for themselves, but for everyone. 2/ Do not call UBI any measures that do not equal a living wage: UBI has to be above the poverty threshold. To eliminate poverty, UBI must correspond to a region’s minimum wage. 3/ UBI frees up time, liberating us from the blackmail of precarious labor and from exploitative working conditions. 4/ UBI is given unconditionally and without caveats, regardless of social status, job performance, or ability. It goes against the meritocratic falsehoods that cover for class privilege. 5/ UBI is not a social safety net, nor is it welfare unemployment reform. It is the minimal recognition of the invisible labor that is essential to the reproduction of life, largely unacknowledged but essential, as society’s growing need for care proves. 6/ UBI states that waged labor is no longer the sole means for wealth redistribution. Time and time again, this model proves unsustainable.Wage is just another name for exploitation of workers, who always earn less than they give. 7/ Trans-feminist and decolonizing perspectives teach us to say NO to all the invisible and extractive modes of exploitation, especially within the precarious working conditions created by the art market. 8/ UBI affirms the right to intermittence, privacy and autonomy, the right to stay off-line and not to be available 24/7. 9/ UBI rejects the pyramid scheme of grants and of the nonprofit industrial complex, redistributing wealth equally and without unnecessary bureaucratic burdens. Bureaucracy is the vampire of art workers’ energies and time turning them into managers of themselves. 10/ By demanding UBI, art workers do not defend a guild or a category and depreciate the role that class and privilege play in current perceptions of art. UBI is universal because it is for everyone and makes creative agency available to everyone. 11/ Art’s health is directly connected to a healthy social fabric. To claim for UBI, being grounded in the ethics of mutual care, is art workers’ most powerful gesture of care towards society. 12/ Because UBI disrupts the logic of overproduction, it frees us from the current modes of capital production that are exploiting the planet. UBI is a cosmogenetic technique and a means to achieve climate justice. 13/ Where to find the money for the UBI? In and of itself UBI questions the actual tax systems in Europe and elsewhere. UBI empowers us to reimagine financial transactions, the extractivism of digital platforms, liquidity, and debt. No public service should be cut in order to finance UBI. 14/ UBI inspires many art collectives and communities to test various tools for more equal redistribution of resources and wealth. From self-managed mutual aid systems based on collettivising incomes, to solutions temporarily freeing cognitive workers from public and private constraints. We aim to join them. Source: https://instituteofradicalimagination.org/the-school-of-mutation-2020/som-iterations/art-for-ubi/ ART FOR UBI RESOURCES: * ART FOR UBI (MANIFESTO) | launching campaign * ART FOR UBI (Manifesto) #1 | Open online Assembly * ART FOR UBI (Manifesto) #2 | Open online Assembly * The paradoxes of gift economy and how basic income could save, change, abolish art making. A conversation with Dmitry Vilensky and Oxana Timofeeva

The Never-ending story of commoning a farmhouse in the lost farmlands. Looking back at Erfgoed (Agricultural Heritage and Land Use). Looking back at the stories of the project Erfgoed (Agricultural Heritage and Land Use). Erfgoed, a project by The Outsiders and Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, was initiated to build a sustainable platform for ecological practices that conjure art, agriculture, and the commons in the area Leidsche Rijn, a sprawling new residential neighborhood in the Dutch city of Utrecht. You are welcome to visit the Collection of the stories of Erfgoed to find out more!

Resilient practices in the Romanian countryside Statistics show that in 2020 around 78 thousand people moved to the villages from urban centres in Romania, not counting those who have returned home from abroad. In itself, it is not a very telling statistics, as almost double this number moved the other way around and, comparing to other EU countries, Romania still has one of the highest rates of poverty in the rural areas. What is interesting is that the majority of those deciding to “downshift” to the countryside are the middle-class who can afford the telework. They want to reconnect with nature, with their families’ roots, they take classes on permaculture, they exchange advice, photos and business ideas with peers on the many Facebook dedicated groups – the most famous of which, “Moved to the countryside. Life without the clock” counts now 147000 members, having doubled in the year of the lockdown . Within this trend, a special place is occupied by those who make this move as not only an individual life-style, but also trying to be consistent with a sustainable and ecological living with and for larger communities. We are looking at practices that redefine the relationship with the countryside, with land and soil, with nature, with food and natural resources, with the rural communities and also with people in the big cities who are looking for sustainable alternatives to their lives. We are mapping some of these practices: a regenerative farm in Dambovita; an ecological farm that delivers fresh products to people in Bucharest, also in a village in Dambovita county; a community and educational centre built on ecological principles in Mogosoaia; a village eco-touristic campus and co-working space in Banat region, and others. A more in-depth mapping takes place of a series of case-studies on ecological or regenerative farms or gardens, thus focusing this part of the research on a different approach to the land as not only provider of resources but also as a fragile ecosystem that needs to be tendered and respected. We are conducting sociological interviews, interpreting them, we are asking questions about motivations, structure, sustenance, difficulties encountered, awareness of the wider contexts and of the climate change impact. In addition, we are observing with artistic means (video-documents, sketches, drawings, notations), in order to situate these case-studies within a larger picture of emancipatory practices in the relation between people, nature and communities.

HERE IS A METHOD FOR VALUING THE MULTIDIMENSIONAL ASPECTS OF URBAN COMMONS. This method draws from and contributes to a broader conception of social or community returns on investment, using the case and data of a vibrant project, strategy, and model of ecological resilience, R-Urban, on the outskirts of Paris. R-Urban is based on networks of urban commons and collective hubs supporting civic resilience practices. We use data from 2015, the year before one of the hubs was evicted from its site by a municipal administration that could not see the value of an “urban farm” compared to a parking lot. We combine estimates of the direct revenues generated for a host of activities that took place in R-Urban, including an urban farm, community recycling centre, a greenhouse, community kitchen, compost school, café, a teaching space, and a mini-market. We then estimate the market value of volunteer labour put into running the sites, in addition to the value of training and education conducted through formal and informal channels, and the new jobs and earnings that were generated due to R-Urban activity. Finally, we estimate the monetary value of the savings made by an environmentally conscious design that focused on water recycling, soil and biodiversity improvement, and social and health benefits, breaking them down by savings to the organization, participants and households involved in R-Urban itself, as well as savings to the state and the planet. Although our article is built on specific quantities from a concrete project, the method has wide applicability to urban commons of many types seeking to demonstrate the worth and value of all their many facets and activities. Click here to access the details on this project