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Forschungsprojekt

PROPOSAL FOR A MUSEUM OF THE COMMON

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