Elliot Anderson, Asst Professor of Art and DANM faculty, invites you to join the Bay Area Nonsite Collective for COMMON/USE, a series of events, performances, and discussion as part of SF Camerawork's residency/exhibition: As Yet Untitled,  January 5th - April 23rd, 2011.

As Yet Untitled

Artists and Writers in Collaboration

Members of Nonsite Collective will interrogate and define concepts of the Commons while in residency at SF Camerawork. The public, activist organizations, and Camerwork members are invited to participate in a series of events, meetings, and interventions that examine Common/Site, Common/Ground, Common/Matter, and Common/Waste.

From the time of the Magna Carta, the "commons" has connoted all the benefits afforded by shared resources needed for subsistence: the means for food, water, firewood, grazing land, etc. Historically, the protection of the commons prevented the enclosure and the privatization of shared woodlands. Traditionally, "to common" is the practice of sharing the benefits of the land.

Under contemporary regimes of capitalist accumulation, how are we to understand the commons today? Does it exist? Has it been subject to complete privatization? What are our shared resources? How do these resources extend beyond traditional understandings of shared land to include information, architecture, patterns of exchange and production, and collective affect and action? And how might we render, nourish, and use them as a commons--commoning--in ways that are not subject to the dominant laws of economic exchange? Is there a way of imagining a practice of commoning that would offer an alternative to neoliberal enclosures?

The Nonsite Collective is a collective of Bay Area visual artists, writers, activists, archivists, independent scholars, and non-traditional learners, all working together to stimulate new forms of collaboration and public participation around a range of interdisciplinary projects. The collective is not only committed to promoting new work, but to sustaining discussion about the projects it promotes. We do this through modes of self-organized pedagogy, whereby collectively proposed “curricula” become ongoing series of interrelated investigations, presentations, study groups, and events. This allows participants — artists and non-artists alike — to test new ideas, while developing shared vocabularies across disciplines, stimulating new forms of discourse around the inquiries that sustain our work. Thus Nonsite creates multiple points of leverage for ongoing cultural engagement and social action.

More information:

Camerawork

Nonsite Collective