The Exhibition
Commons & Communities
How can art drive community building? How can art empower communities? And more crucially: how can art, architecture, and design meet the challenges facing our communities today?
With this exhibition, we seek answers. Artists and architects, sociologists and city planners, and theorists and practitioners across disciplines explore new projects, strategies, and tools for understanding and using common goods, values, places, and spaces we share.
FACTS
COMMONS
land or resources belonging to a community
COMMUNITY
a group of people living in the same place
COMMONING
the practice of providing common rights to land use
Today, the question of how to handle and preserve our common resources is becoming more and more urgent. Climate changes, population growth, financial mining of ‘floating’ or shared resources, and changing economies and production are not only altering our common resources but the premises on which our communities are based.
Every day, we all share multiple resources. As humans, we share natural resources such as the air we breathe and the water we drink. As residents of cities, large and small, we share our open spaces and interspaces, architecture, parks, squares, and streets. All these resources are shared by a community, making up a sort of ‘commons’.
However, by virtue of their nature, these common resources can be destroyed, abused, misused, and overused if we who share these resources neglect to develop and preserve them for the future. They decrease if they are not cared for or utilized responsible – at the expense of the communities themselves. And, finally, the nature of these common resources confronts us with an uncomfortable question: who has access to our ‘common’ resources – are they really common to all?
On the other hand, there are fundamental elements that we have in common in our society, elements that do not decrease or diminish the more we ‘use’ them but, rather, grow by sharing: Art and culture. Art and culture – like knowledge – are not exclusive unless we make them so. Art and knowledge only bloom and expand the more we, as a community, share and take part and make an effort to make them inclusive. This is an apposite task for art, architecture, and design.
“ART AND KNOWLEDGE ONLY BLOOM AND EXPAND THE MORE WE, AS A COMMUNITY, SHARE AND TAKE PART IN THEM”.
Ellen Braae
Architect
Professor of Landscape Architecture Theory and Method at University of Copenhagen. Chairperson of the Danish Art Foundations Committee for Architecture. Heading the research group ‘Landscape Architecture and Urbanism’. Her current research focus on ‘welfare landscapes’ and the role of public space. She is the author of Beauty Redeemed: Recycling Post-Industrial Landscapes (2015) and (with H. Steiner) Routledge Research Companion to Landscape Architecture (2018).
Commons & Communities
The question of commons and communities and their interdependent relationship may seem simple – in a sense, almost commonsensical – when seen from the distance of theoretical abstraction. Yet, the precondition for a sustainable community is access to sustainable common resources that can, in fact, sustain the community. And vice versa. The precondition for a sustainable common resource is a strong community that is actually able to preserve and develop it for the future.
However, in practice, the relationship is complex. It poses a series of difficult problems. The potential limit of the commons confronts us with the limit of the community itself. Whom do we consider as part of the community? And who controls the access to and the management of our common resources?
These questions expose the political, economic, and cultural dimensions of commons and communities. We cannot reduce this to a question of how we design our cities, our public spaces, or the places that we inhabit. We must challenge the very preconditions that ‘allow’ or limit us to construct our cities and public spaces in a certain way and to produce art in a certain way.
New ideas for how to live together and new ways of interacting in our communities can be developed – through art, architecture, and design. These new ideas may show the way to reform political, economic, and cultural conditions.
This exhibition, Commons and Communities, asks whether art, architecture, and design can provide answers to some of the challenges we face today in our cities and communities. Let us engage in conversation and share ideas and possible solutions, person to person, community to community, city to city, country to country. And let us start right here. In Commons and Communities.
The Exhibition
The exhibition too is a resource made to be shared and developed further in common. It derives from a larger Danish initiative conceptualized and encouraged by the Danish Art Foundation | Committee for Architecture 2018-2021 around the theme of “Commons and Community”. The initiative involved the first Danish contribution to the 2019 Chicago Architectural Biennial, the Danish contribution to the 2021 Venice Architectural Biennial, as well as a Travel and Talk program in 2019 for 30 architects and artists from Chicago, Detroit, and Denmark.
The exhibition presents artistic practices and projects that are centered on communities and common resources. The exhibition consists of elements at three different levels: Texts and statements, Large case studies and a series of Short case studies, all of which focus on specific artistic project and practices. It builds on the globally most commonly-shared format, the paper A format, and the fact that A3 printers of high quality have become more affordable. The various components of the exhibition can be increased and decreased in number, enabling the exhibition as a whole to shrink or expand to fit different exhibition spaces, places and local contexts. Most important, however, is the exhibition’s adaptive capacity to grow the more people take part in it. New local entries can be added to the series of Short case studies at each new place it is exhibited. It is our hope that the possibility of adding local projects will allow for a more open dialogue, meaningful to the local communities where the exhibition is put on display. Furthermore, it is our hope that it can help to connect different communities and projects, by accumulating more knowledge and new examples of artistic practices and projects working with commons and communities – as a growing common open resource in itself.
Ellen Braae
Architect
Professor of Landscape Architecture Theory and Method at University of Copenhagen. Chairperson of the Danish Art Foundations Committee for Architecture. Heading the research group ‘Landscape Architecture and Urbanism’. Her current research focus on ‘welfare landscapes’ and the role of public space. She is the author of Beauty Redeemed: Recycling Post-Industrial Landscapes (2015) and (with H. Steiner) Routledge Research Companion to Landscape Architecture (2018).
6705 Project
Tina Ratzer has specialized in color workshops as a way to engage the community in creative processes.
Playing with Lines
Artist Thomas Wolsing has created a garden for the senses on an empty site in a village in Thy.
Lokstallarna
On a cold November day in 2018, approximately 2000 people visited Lokstallarna in Malmö, Sweden and experienced an area full of cultural activities.
Monument of Stitches
Monument of Stitches - A Social Art Project was created in 2015 and consists of several knitted triangles, created by 700 people knitting side by side.
Ride It Sculpture Park
Power House Productions is operated by long-term residents of the Davison/Conant area, who view “engagement” with other neighborhood residents not as an added task but an essential component of living here.
Cabbage Patch
The first official Danish contribution to the Chicago Architecture Biennial in 2019.
McKinley Park
The McKinley Park Community Play Garden is an engaging and innovative nature play garden located adjacent to the McKinley Park Library, southwest of downtown Chicago.
ReDane
A new countryside?
Tom Lee Park
The new Tom Lee Park transforms a significant piece of Memphis’ Mississippi river front into a signature public space, where community life can flourish along the water’s edge.
Avis + Elsmere
‘Inside Southwest Detroit’ is a collection of initiatives that promote youth and community development.
Field of Stairs
Camilla Nørgård has collected materials and stories in cooperation with local residents and formed a “landscape of stoops”.
Black Box Garden
The cultivation of an urban wasteland in the heart of Copenhagen.
Detroit Cultivator
A 6-acre landscape that combines food production, cultural activity, and civic assets to strengthen the social and economic fabric of the community.
