School of Commons

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School of Commons

We’re a learning community dedicated to the study and development of self-organized knowledge production—through commons based methods and practices.

Hosted at Zurich University of the Arts SoC is a community-based initiative dedicated to the study and development of self-organized knowledge, located at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), but taking place mostly online.

02/06/2026

Introducing: Spaces of Thought

A project by Martha Oelschläger — participant in School of Commons 2026.

Martha Oelschläger works in transdisciplinary projects at the intersection of art, theory, and space. Her practice combines documentary, scenographic, and essayistic formats to explore processes of thinking, perception, and memory.

Spaces of Thought begins with the observation that we often describe thinking through spatial images: we orient ourselves, lose the thread, move between positions, or venture into unknown territory. Rather than simply illustrating thought, these metaphors actively shape how knowledge is produced and understood.

Through a symposium, exhibition, and ongoing research, the project investigates spatial metaphors as epistemic tools across art and science. Emerging from this work is a glossary of nineteen figures of thought — including Archive, Bridge, House, Labyrinth, Resonance Space, and Mirror — through which different forms of knowledge encounter one another.

Research questions emerging through the project include:

— How do spatial images and metaphors function as epistemic tools in different disciplinary contexts, and how can their roles and potentials be made visible and tangible through a spatially organized transdisciplinary setting? 
- How do spatial metaphors structure processes of thinking and knowledge production in art and science?
- What kinds of spaces of thought emerge from discipline-specific spatial imaginaries?
- What happens when these metaphors encounter one another within a shared space?
- To what extent can a symposium and exhibition function as instruments of knowledge production?
- What forms of knowledge emerge between language, experience, and spatial arrangement?

Learn more: https://schoolofcommons.org/program/labs/spaces-of-thought

Impression aus dem Kunstraum, ZHdK, Veranstaltungsort des Symposiums ©Guillaume Musset. Image courtesy of Martha Oelschläger

28/05/2026

Embodied Resourcing in Times of Unraveling
With Camille Sapara Barton

Tuesday, June 9
18:30–20:00 (CEST)
Public/Online (link in bio)

How can we cultivate agency—and a cumulative, collective approach—in the times we are living through?

This 90-minute session invites participants into an exploration of somatics as a tool for grounding, sense-making, and cultural change. Drawing from their work as an embodiment social designer, Camille will share practices and perspectives that connect body-based awareness with socially engaged art making.

Through gentle somatic exercises, guided reflection, and open conversation, the session offers space to arrive, anchor, and think together. Participation in embodied practices is optional throughout.

Together, we will explore questions such as:

— What an ancestral (& decolonial) approach to somatics looks like in contrast to the version presented by white wellness culture?

— How can we use somatics to cultivate agency and begin building collective power in the times we are living in?

— What does it look like to cross-pollinate culture change prototypes with people more directly involved in organising and policy-making, creating coalitions that allow intentions to spread and evolve?

What becomes possible when we connect artistic practice with organising and policy-making—allowing ideas to move, scale, and evolve across contexts?

This is an invitation to consider how we resource ourselves—and each other—while navigating uncertainty and transformation.

Camille Sapara Barton is a writer, embodiment social designer, and interdisciplinary artist who creates resources and collective experiences that prototype culture change. For over a decade, they have combined training in political economy and somatics with creative facilitation to address complex issues, enhance relational well-being, and support people through transition.

Author of Tending Grief: Embodied Rituals for Holding Our Sorrow and Growing Cultures of Care in Community (2024), Camille also designed and directed MA Ecologies of Transformation (2021–2023), exploring embodiment and socially engaged art making as tools for cultural change.

26/05/2026

Guest Lecture: Transforming Time(s)
With Maro Pantazidou & Alex Pazaitis

🗓 Tuesday, June 2
⏰ 18:00–19:30 (CEST)
💻 Zoom — join via link in bio

Transforming time(s): The politics of the commons in challenging time(s)

How does the system of production shape the way we experience time?

We measure it, divide it, trade it.
We lose it, gain it, try to invest it —
in work, in rest, in those we love.

But what if time isn’t an individual asset to manage —
but something collective, relational, and produced together?

Like forests, oceans, rivers, and air,
time is something we take for granted —
until we begin to run out of it.

As planetary pressures intensify,
what would it mean to rethink time
as a social and political commons?

Can the commons offer a way out of the treadmill of our times?

Maro and Alex are friends and collaborators in research and pedagogy. Over the past few years, they have been plotting various schemes to take over the world, perhaps most notably the summer school ‘Life After Growth’ taking place since 2023 on the Tzoumerka mountains of Greece. They are core members of two action-research collectives P2P Lab and Quokka, which keep them rather meaningfully occupied to fend off their existential despair, while working to advance commons-based alternatives.

Join us for a conversation on time, value, and collective futures.

22/05/2026

Introducing: a poetry of homing

A project by Nguyễn Phương Anh and Angela McIntosh — participants in School of Commons 2026.

Nguyễn writes poems, is in the water, grows vegetables, and continues learning how to walk while hugging tangled fibres — practising simple writing and self-decaying freely.

Angela is an Australian-Canadian interdisciplinary artist, facilitator, and steward of two acres of rural land in Ontario, Canada. Her practice-led research centres on co-regulation, interconnectedness, and material biographies.

a poetry of homing explores the multiplicity of what ‘home’ can be. Some leave and enter many homes. Some never feel at home. Some always have a home. Some locate home within the self.

Home may be elusive — a memory, a smell, a conflict within the body, a dominant culture, a violent scene, a warm hug, a plant, an imagined forest, an old book, a breath, a relationship that has faded, a distant star. What else might home be?

In an increasingly complex world, one may no longer feel at home within their place of origin. The project asks how understandings of home might be extended beyond the familiar, and what new practices this could open.

Research questions emerging through the project include:

— What are some ways of perceiving the concept of ‘home’ or ’nhà’* in different circumstances?

*a note on translation: while our shared working language is English, Vietnamese is the mother tongue of one of us. Home and house both mean ‘nhà’ in Vietnamese: a place to come back to, and can also be understood as hometown.

— How can we extend our understanding of home beyond the familiar? What can we do differently?

Learn more: https://schoolofcommons.org/program/labs/a-poetry-of-homing

Image courtesy of a poetry of homing: Handwritten invitation on Vietnamese dó paper

19/05/2026

Introducing: MALED IT! – Body Rebellion and Flowing Knowledge: Drag Kinging as a Collective Utopia & Un/learning

A project by Marilyn Nova White — participant in School of Commons 2026.

Marilyn Nova White is a Berlin-based performer, actor, and Drag King working at the intersection of performance, intimacy, and artistic research. Their practice moves between stage, workshop, and embodied experimentation, exploring how identity is constructed, performed, and transformed.

MALED IT! explores Drag Kinging as a method of embodied, collective knowledge production. Rooted in q***r-feminist and anti-normative practices, the project builds on a long-term workshop series developed since 2018, creating spaces for q***r, trans*, non-binary, and FLINTA* participants to engage in drag as a form of joyful resistance and transformation.

Within School of Commons, the project develops Drag Kinging as a commons-based methodology for peer learning, critical play, and transdisciplinary research. The focus shifts away from performance as an outcome, towards what becomes possible through the act of becoming someone else together — reshaping norms, reclaiming agency, and imagining alternative futures through the body.

Research questions emerging through the project include:

— How can Drag Kinging become a shared method for collective learning, unlearning, and knowledge production? 
— What knowledge emerges when stepping into alternative masculinities* and gender roles, and how can this be shared? 
— What can the body know that language cannot articulate? 
— What role does cultural memory play in embodied gender performance? 
— What might an archive of gestures look like? 
— How can utopia be made visible without fixing it?

Learn more: schoolofcommons.org/program/labs/maled-it

18/05/2026

Introducing: Hard Boiled Wonderland

A project by dancer and choreographer Manning D**g — participant in School of Commons 2026.

A research method which focuses on understanding and re-experiencing the relationship between ourself and social structures through bodily experience and perception.

Viewing the body as a medium of perception and history. “Presence” as a strategy, connects the subjective inner world with the objective rules of the external world. Exploring how it is shaped, responds to, and creates new relationships within different social and spatial contexts.

Research questions emerging through the project include:

— How does the development of movement change when the body is situated in different environments, and how are these changes linked to memory, experience, and emotion?

— When perception is a way of collective writing/choreography, what kind of path will it generate?

Learn more: schoolofcommons.org/program/labs/hard-boiled-wonderland

Image courtesy of Manning D**g

15/05/2026

Introducing: The Text Bites Its Tongue

A project by footnotes — participants in School of Commons 2026.

footnotes consists of Eliana Kirkcaldy, Johanna Ackva, and Lotta Beckers, who have met at a crossroads of intersecting curiosities around historical and contemporary languages of desire. Looking at (mostly female*) writing on longing, the erotic, and one’s own and/or the lover’s body, they search for moments in which (hetero)normative representations of desire are disrupted, counterpointed, and stripped of their power to shape relationships and intimacy.

The Text Bites Its Tongue is a trans-disciplinary collaborative research project exploring written and spoken languages of desire — understood as a shifting field where sensuality, sexuality, intimacy, and affect intersect.

At its centre is language itself: its grammars, its attractions, its humour, and its failures — playing as much of a role as the visceral experiences it seeks to describe, and the unconscious dimensions it cannot fully grasp.

Research questions emerging through the project include:

— How can the experience of desire be transformed by commoning its languages? 
— How does writing and speaking desire reveal its more-than-personal, structural, and social dimensions? 
— How can we foster languages of desire as a way of searching for a more desirable world?

Learn more: https://schoolofcommons.org/program/labs/the-text-bites-its-tongue

Image courtesy of The Text Bites Its Tongue

15/05/2026

Introducing: Peerticipatory Worldplay

A project by Rok Kranjc and Pablo Somonte Ruano — participants in School of Commons 2026.

Rok Kranjc is a researcher and artist working with games and performative methods as engines for networked post-capitalist imagination. With a background in sociology and political ecology, he collaborates across initiatives including Crypto Commons Association, Futurescraft, Aksioma, Maska Institute, and the P2P Foundation.

Pablo Somonte Ruano’s practice explores prefigurative politics, alternative economies, structural violence, and decentralized technologies, engaging with the politics of computation, language, value, time, and games.

Peerticipatory Worldplay brings together speculative design, worlding, and LARPing as tools for collective imagination and economic experimentation. The project explores how shared fictional worlds can function as “commons” — remixable, co-owned, and generative of further world-building and social practice.

Rooted in four years of collaboration across “gaming for the commons” and speculative design, the project develops a modular framework for “alternative economic worlding” — combining open-source worldbuilding, role-play, collaborative storytelling, and speculative artefacts as tools for rehearsing radical alternatives.

Research question emerging through the project:

How can speculative design, worlding, and LARPing function as hyperstitional tools to build shared, self-sustaining fiction commons for prefigurative politics and collective economic experimentation?

Upcoming:
WORLDPLAY
07.06.2026 — 13.06.2026
Commons Hub, Hirschwang an der Rax, Austria
https://worldplay.art

WORLDPLAY is an opening move for a network exploring the revolutionary potential of play: what changes when games are treated as ways of organising, not just expressing? How do those changes travel beyond a single gathering, carried through practice?

Learn more: schoolofcommons.org/program/labs/peerticipatory-worldplay

13/05/2026

Introducing: Unwrapping The Arts

A project by Anna Campani — participant in School of Commons 2026.

Anna Campani is a Fine Arts student at Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), born in Rome, Italy. Her project emerges from two intersecting concerns: the lack of affordable materials available to students, and the significant waste generated by museums, galleries, and exhibition spaces.

Unwrapping The Arts explores how materials discarded by exhibition systems — from display structures and packaging to archival remnants and storage elements — might be recirculated into artistic practice. While often no longer needed institutionally, these materials remain viable for experimentation, prototyping, and creative production.

The project seeks to create a dialogue between cultural institutions and art students, connecting surplus materials with those who need them, and reframing waste as a shared resource.

Research questions emerging through the project include:

— How can museums, galleries, and exhibition spaces be put into dialogue with students seeking materials for their artistic practice? 
— How can this relationship be made visible and actionable, creating a direct link and a form of cooperation in response to the climate crisis?

Learn more: schoolofcommons.org/program/labs/unwrapping-the-arts

Image courtesy of Unwrapping The Arts

13/05/2026

Introducing: Mou Gan Project

A project by Chengwei Xia, Huiqiao Qiu, Shuhao Lin, Songzi Wang, Xiyun Tan, and Gu Qiu — participants in School of Commons 2026.

Mou Gan Project is a transdisciplinary collective bringing together a community leader, artists, a social science researcher, an ethnographic writer, and an environmental expert. Together, the group approaches bio-cultural practice through multiple lenses, fostering dialogue among communities navigating ecosystem degradation, the erosion of cultural memory, and governance challenges — particularly the marginalisation of local knowledge within environmental governance.

Based in Laoshi village in western Hainan Island, China, the project unfolds within a landscape where seawater meets freshwater flowing from the island’s central mountains. This meeting of salt and fresh water sustains rich biodiversity while supporting the traditional practice of sea salt production — both historically and in the present day.

Through situated research and collective inquiry, the project explores the village’s bio-cultural history as a living entanglement of ecology, foodways, beliefs, traditions, and the relationships between human and non-human entities.

Research questions emerging through the project include:

— How do residents culturally and socially shape relationships between ecological systems and community life through everyday practices? 

— What collaborative actions — through art, science, storytelling, and governance — can nurture, restore, or reimagine connections between local ecologies and culture?

— How can learning from a specific local knowledge system reshape broader understandings of knowledge production and environmental governance?

Like the growth of a tamarind tree, the project understands these questions as interconnected systems: roots grounded in local context, a trunk enabling exchange, and branches extending outward toward wider governance and ecological questions beyond the village itself.

Learn more: schoolofcommons.org/program/labs/mou-gan-project

Images courtesy of Mou Gan Project

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