The fellowship explores the role that contemporary art, inspired by ethnographic methodologies and an anthropological framework, can have in the study of contemporary societies and cultures and in fostering civil participation.
Our joint research project focuses on the possibility of a Museum of the Commons – a place where economic practices become configured and reconfigured in art, and where social experiments in art take ethnographic methodologies as a starting point for social engagement and for the commoning of skills, knowledge, property, and ecological resources. Massimiliano Mollona’s research is based on experimenting at the intersection between anthropology and socially engaged art, both through theoretical elaboration (ART/COMMONS, 2021) and through practical engagement with the art world, such as collaborative film projects; directorship of the Athens Biennale and the Bergen Assembly and the founding of the Institute of Radical Imagination, a collective of social centres, curators, museums, and artists operating at the intersection of art and urban activism.
Mollona’s work explores how artistic practices can function as spaces of imagination and prefiguration of possible post-capitalist worlds and institutions. His book ART/COMMONS (2021) is itself a practical manual of how to implement forms of cultural and material commons via socially engaged art.
Massimiliano Mollona
Vita
Massimiliano Mollona’s main research focus is on labour, class, and post-capitalism. His work experiments at the intersection between anthropology and socially engaged art, both through scholarly contributions, and through practical engagement with the art world, such as collaborative film projects; directorship of the Athens Biennale and the Bergen Assembly and the founding of the Institute of Radical Imagination, a collective of social centres, curators, museums, and artists operating at the intersection of art and social activism. Mollona is leading the project Cinema as Assembly, a collaboration with major European museums and international scholars on cinema as tool of political gathering across indigenous locales in the global south; with anthropologist James Clifford he is working on Impossible Realism, and with artist Dora Garcia, on the ‘unartist’ as part of his project on communist art.
Brazilian Steel-town. Land, Labour, Machines and Commoning in the making of the working-class. New York-Oxford, Berghahn Press 2020.
Worldwide Mobilizations. Class Struggles and Urban Commoning, New York-Oxford, Berghahn Press 2018 (with Don Kalb).
Made in Sheffield. An Ethnography of Industrial Work and Politics. New York-Oxford, Berghahn Press 2009.
“Seeing the Invisible: Maya Deren's Experiments in Cinematic Trance,” in: October 149 (2014), pp. 159-180.
“Trabalho e ação coletiva: Memória, espaço e identidades sociais na cidade do aço,” in: Horizontes Antropologicos 19 (39) (2013), pp. 125–148 (with Marco Aurélio Santana).
“Observation, performance and revolution: exploring ‘the political’ in visual art and anthropology,” in: Visual Anthropology 26 (1) (2013), pp. 34-50.
