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Daphne Dragona: Commoning the Commons: Revisiting the Role of Art in Times of Crisis
Commoning the Commons: Revisiting the Role of Art in Times of Crisis
(p. 101 – 124)

Daphne Dragona

Commoning the Commons: Revisiting the Role of Art in Times of Crisis

PDF, 24 pages

  • digital culture
  • art
  • copyright
  • authorship
  • aesthetics

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Daphne Dragona

is a curator and writer based in Berlin. Through her work, she engages with artistic practices and methodologies that challenge contemporary forms of power. Among her topics of interest have been: the controversies of connectivity, the promises of the commons, the challenges of artistic subversion, the instrumentalization of play, the problematics of care and empathy, and most recently the potential of kin-making technologies in the time of climate crisis. Her exhibitions have been hosted at Onassis Stegi, Laboral, Aksioma, EMST (National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens), Alta Technologia Andina, and Le Lieu Unique. Dragona was the conference curator of transmediale from 2015 until 2019. Her articles have been published in various books, journals, magazines, and exhibition catalogs by the likes of Springer, Sternberg Press, and Leonardo Electronic Almanac. She holds a Ph.D. from the Faculty of Communication & Media Studies of the University of Athens.
Shusha Niederberger (ed.), Cornelia Sollfrank (ed.), ...: Aesthetics of the Commons

What do a feminist server, an art space located in a public park in North London, a ‘pirate’ library of high cultural value yet dubious legal status, and an art school that emphasizes collectivity have in common? They all demonstrate that art can play an important role in imagining and producing a real quite different from what is currently hegemonic; that art has the possibility to not only envision or proclaim ideas in theory, but also to realize them materially.

 
Aesthetics of the Commons examines a series of artistic and cultural projects—drawn from what can loosely be called the (post)digital—that take up this challenge in different ways. What unites them, however, is that they all have a ‘double character.’ They are art in the sense that they place themselves in relation to (Western) cultural and art systems, developing discursive and aesthetic positions, but, at the same time, they are ‘operational’ in that they create recursive environments and freely available resources whose uses exceed these systems. The first aspect raises questions about the kind of aesthetics that are being embodied, the second creates a relation to the larger concept of the ‘commons.’ In Aesthetics of the Commons, the commons are understood not as a fixed set of principles that need to be adhered to in order to fit a definition, but instead as a ‘thinking tool’—in other words, the book’s interest lies in what can be made visible by applying the framework of the commons as a heuristic device.