Towards institutions of the common
Raúl Sánchez Cedillo, Universidad Nómada: An institution of the common is a way of satisfying the needs and desires of the masses that constitute the production and reproduction of life today: the social environment that forms the basis of the common production between singularities. So, an institution of the common is the expression that makes it possible to consolidate, expand, protect and amplify this dimension of the common in political terms and in the production of subjectivity and art. Institutions of the common are really a myriad of projects and experiences that enhance, preserve and amplify the dimension of the common. There’s an era of transformation at play in a revolutionary sense in this idea. Or in the sense of unimaginable devastation, destruction and social breakdown. With the common, nothing less is at stake than society’s ability to self-reproduce in terms of power, freedom and enjoyment.
Berta Sureda, director of public activities at the Museo Reina Sofía: What’s most important is to stop thinking about museums as spaces that offer one linear reading and transmit a fixed body of knowledge to the visitor and start seeing them as spaces for common knowledge and multiple communities, where knowledge can be fully shared and disseminated. They must cease to be almost sacred spaces where the relationship between the museum and the object is given priority and become spaces for experience, exchange, the circulation of knowledge and the promotion of critical awareness.
Jesús Carrillo, director of cultural programmes at the Museo Reina Sofía: In some ways, museums have been reinvented over and over and updated. When their traditional educational mission was exhausted, they reinvented themselves in terms of the tourism and culture industries. However, upon deeper analysis, we see that museums alone, as traditional institutions, cannot generate relevant discourses for society. They are often limited to reproducing discourses and messages that are frequently out-of-date and obsolete. The legitimacy and relevance of the cultural activities of a formal institution like the Reina Sofía come from their ability to recognise the authority and cultural legitimacy of other institutions that we called anomalous, but which reflect or are connected to the impulses of the masses.
Carlos Prieto, Universidad Nómada: At the Universidad Nómada, we have tried to provide movements and citizens in general with discursive and analytical elements, with paradigms to interpret social reality as openly and democratically as possible. We think that the intellectual and organisational products deriving from the practice of politics must be more accessible to all social entities. By ‘commons’, we mean that there are infrastructures, social processes and conditions for reproducing life that we hold in common and essential for society to function in the short, medium and long-term. Without them, social life is impossible in the sense that cooperation in work and society is increasing, and without the institutions of the common, society will become more and more fragmented, unequal and authoritarian.
Ana Sánchez, La Tabacalera SSC: Maybe the idea of self-organisation, which is also linked to social centres, doesn’t go far enough, because you have to think about autonomy not only in economic terms, but in terms of the capacity to apply the rules that govern the group to yourself. This is probably the most powerful element of self-management, thinking about these institutions. What’s more, the concept of self-management also reflects the openness of this type of institution, as opposed to cultural management institutions. One of the values that we always keep in mind at La Tabacalera is this openness, meaning that we want to preserve the public value of the institution for its members at all times, providing content as well as norms to guide the group. This preserves the common much more than any classic programmatic policy.
Carlos Vidania, La Tabacalera SSC: La Tabacalera is a construction of the common, but not because what it produces is not licensed (even though everything produced at La Tabacalera is free and ‘copyleft’ and follows the path of permanent horizontality). But the very composition and way of organising the institution that we are building is a creation of an institution outside of the usual conventions. Investigating a model and experimenting with a collective management model and common issues imply the construction of the common by their very nature.
Raúl Sánchez, Universidad Nómada: Today the production of wealth and the ways of life behind the production of wealth are based on the cooperation between minds and bodies connected in a network – or in a metropolitan dimension of relationships of affection, care and innovation. This is critical, because to the extent that wealth is based on this dimension, the result is clearly a hegemony – a form of capitalist domination – that from a legal point of view is based on the prevalence of property, not only physical goods, but also intangible goods, the products of collective intelligence.
