SoC Assembly 2026

The School of Commons Assembly 2026 unfolds within a moment of strain and transition. It follows a Town Hall* titled Tensile Structures, which gathered our community under conditions of uncertainty, making visible both the fragility and the strength of what has been built together over the past nine years. As School of Commons faces the withdrawal of familiar institutional support, the questions that surface are no longer abstract: how do we hold each other, how do we stretch without tearing, how do we sustain collective structures when the ground beneath them is shifting? This Assembly does not ask how to escape pressure, but how to remain with it - together - with a sustained hope that something more aligned, nourishing, freeing, and supportive can be born without collapse.

If Tensile Structures names the condition, Making a Vessel in the Sky names a collective response. Drawing from SoC’s annual peer-led publication ISSUES—its metafesto and the image of the boat in the sky—the Assembly imagines collectivity not as something fixed or grounded, but as something brought into being through shared belief, care, and coordination. A vessel that exists because we insist on it. A structure made not of certainty, but of relation. Not a monument, but a practice.

The SoC Cohort 2025 can be understood in these terms: fourteen projects sustained not by sameness, but by productive tension between bodies, histories, tools, technologies, landscapes, and ways of knowing - redistributing weight as existing supports shift, stretch, or fall away. Knowledge moves not as property, but as something held in common, shared through games, radios, kitchens, rituals, mentoring relationships, and experimental infrastructures. Across the cohort programme, learning takes shape through layered spaces: commons, assemblies, platforms, and shared systems that expand participation without flattening difference or excluding those most affected.

Across the cohort, research unfolds within ecological, political, and epistemic precarity, asking what it means to remain connected without tearing, to stay responsive while under strain. Projects move across communities already living in and with crisis, drawing from cultures that have long practiced collective solutions to collective problems through mutual solidarities. Learning here is relational and situated - shaped through proximity, care, and collective responsibility, rather than extraction or ownership.

Another current moves through archives, memory, and more-than-human relations. Projects reimagine the archive beyond Western epistemologies - towards oral traditions, embodied knowledge, ephemeral art, mourning rituals, and the body itself as a living archive of trauma and transformation. Others attend to food sovereignty, disappearing ecologies, and post-glacial landscapes as sites of learning and resistance. Queering methods and myth-making practices centre multiplicity, monstrosity, chimera, and more-than-human voices, opening narratives in which humans are no longer the only narrators.

Communication and translation emerge as tensile acts in themselves: how to speak across difference, how to say the same things in A2 English, how to make climate data accessible, how to foster inclusive education, how to activate accountability rather than neutrality. These are not secondary practices, but structural ones - ways of steering the vessel, ways of staying together while in motion. Taken together, the Assembly’s conversations, practices, and gatherings form a constellational structure under tension - stretched across geographies, disciplines, generations, and species, sustained through relation rather than stability. In doing so, they affirm School of Commons as a living, relational infrastructure: one that flexes, listens, and responds in a world that is still being pulled apart.

These questions of holding, imagining, and transmitting knowledge converge in the ISSUES Launch 2025: Exquisite Commons. Refusing linear sequence, the publication circulates, drifts, returns, disappears, and reappears - treating publication itself as a commoning practice, an open archive, a shared vessel for collective voice. Neither manifesto nor manual, it operates as a metafesto: an orientation device for navigating uncertainty together, an invitation rather than an instruction.

The Assembly is held between two moments both titled Tensile Structures: the Town Hall that opened this period of transition, and the Round Table that will close it, reconvening guest facilitators from the previous SoC Assembly of 2025. Together, they stretch the structure across time, memory, and relation - linking past, present, and possible futures through shared attention and collective reflection. These moments echo the cohort’s inquiries and extend them across the Assembly’s shared spaces, inviting continuity, care, and renewed conversation as living forms of relation.

Together, the Town Hall, the cohort programme, the ISSUES launch, the Round Table, and the Assembly as a holding space, form a single relational structure: not a stable institution, but a roaming one; not a fixed framework, but a vessel in formation.A sky-boat held together by imagination, mutual dependency, care, humour, friction, and trust.

There is no single entry point. No first page. No fixed ground.

The moment you choose to step onto the vessel in the sky, you are already part of its making.

*Town Hall — a core part of the SoC methodology: a shared space for collective reflection, accountability, and reorientation.

____________________________________________________________________________________________ Programme Thursday, 5 February 2026 15:30 - 16:00 Opening by SoC 16:00 - 16:30 Collective Score For What Is Gone by AWOL - Glacier Rapport This work unfolds as a collective act of listening and sounding. Glacial soundscapes form an unstable ground, further fractured by the digital conditions of the meeting. Within this terrain, participants are invited to enter intuitively. Voices appear briefly—without discussion or response—becoming part of a live composition that cannot be repeated. Nothing is resolved or explained; the piece exists only for the duration of our listening together. 16:30 - 17:00 Stretching Exercises To Feel Climate Change by Ula Liagaitė This presentation shares three stretching exercises developed over the past year as a live, embodied practice for sensing climate change. Through audio and visual documentation, Liagaitė traces the scores and processes shaping the work. If time permits, the audience is invited to participate in one of the scores, shifting the presentation from documentation to experienc 17:00 - 17:30 Opening Up (d)structura For Public Use by (d)structura This presentation shares the process of opening the (d)structura project for public use in Barcelona, highlighting its critical points and potential. It includes a five-minute guided activity that invites participants to engage directly with the work. 17:30–18:00 Cool Down

____________________________________________________________________________________________ Programme Friday, 6 February 2026 15:00–15:30 A Somatic Practice of Multiplicity by CHIMERA CHIMERA investigates the multi-body body, drawing inspiration from the folkloric Chimera – a hybrid goat, lion, and snake – as a model for queer multiplicitous identities. To access the felt-sense of being many, the researchers engage in somatic exercises that play with inner systems of three.As a collective worldbuilding experiment, we extended beyond the inner chimera, using the model of multiplicity to challenge the boundaries around the self and repattern relational intimacies. This presentation of work will give an overview of the research experience, and offer a brief practical play in chimerizing. 15:30–16:00 Mentoring as Practice by Nora Sobbe This project introduces a note-spitting machine—dispensing small pieces of paper with short text prompts—to mentees, mentors, and those interested in starting a mentoring relationship. Mentoring serves as a vessel for learning and teaching, often embedded in everyday study at art universities. By leaving the exact mode of engagement to participants, the project highlights mentoring as a format that raises questions about how and in what constellations we choose to learn together. 16:00–16:30 Break 16:30–17:30 Enough English! by Klara Branting Paulsell An experiment in using all the other tongues we have to arrive somewhere easy. Basically a game of describing things to different people in different languages to find out what information was actually important all along. 17:30–18:00 Boats Floating in a Basket by Jere Ikongio and Ambrose Idemudia The workshop and live performance invite participants into Likon’yor, a participatory sonic environment exploring sound as archive, memory, and commons. Using a custom Max/MSP patch, the session explores how oral histories, fragmented voices, and ephemeral gestures can be transformed into a shared, living sonic archive. (20mins) The workshop includes a short introduction to the Max/MSP patch as both tool and collaborator. frame as an open, responsive instrument and playground capable of listening, translating, and reshaping collective input. (10mins)The performance extends this process into a collective composition. Using material from the workshop and performing with the patch in real time. The session also introduces concepts behind the work: hacking as an act of care rather than disruption; the archive as something lived and performed; and sound as a medium that refuses borders, permanence, and categorisation. No technical knowledge is required. ____________________________________________________________________________________________ Programme Saturday, 7 February 2026 10:30–11:00 Waves and Workings by Shortwave Collective This presentation shares the collective’s creative methods for working together, including approaches to sharing labour, organising pay, and developing writing practices that honour multiple voices while striving for equity. It also introduces ideas that have emerged over the past year through their involvement in School of Commons around the electromagnetic commons, reflecting on how these concepts inform their approaches to collaboration, learning, and shared responsibility. 11:00–11:35 Flavor in the Anthropocene by Broudou School A moment of collective thinking, interaction, creation, and design—an intentional response to a challenging situation that threatens both human and non-human species.Throughout the workshop, the idea of collectiveness will unfold through diverse group management approaches. These collaborative structures are designed to explore how we work together, how efficiency emerges within groups, and how collective action can generate meaningful, resilient responses. 11:35–12:00 Break 12:00–12:30 The Poetry in Names: The Aesthetics of Traditional Chinese Colors by Yue Wu This presentation explores key differences between the histories and naming of colors in Chinese and Western traditions. Focusing on traditional Chinese pigments, it highlights a poetic approach to color naming that is deeply connected to nature, and shares research findings emerging from this inquiry. 12:30–13:00 Tensile Structures by Sala de té [an itinerant, unwalled Paradise for cultivating climate futures] A brief exploration on allocation and location. ____________________________________________________________________________________________ Programme Sunday, 8 February 2026 11:00–13:00 (with 15 min break) ISSUES 2025: Exquisite Commons Digital, Print & Broadcast Publication Launch Event Join us for the online launch of the digital, print, and broadcast formats of ISSUES, the annual peer-led digital publication marking the collective milestone of each School of Commons (SoC) program cycle, which this year assembles under the collective theme: Exquisite Commons. ISSUES collates and contextualises the processes, practices, and methodologies of each participating project within SoC. Each participating project is invited to contribute to ISSUES in a form and style that is both reflective of, and complementary to, their own ways and workings. As such, experimentation and the re-working of traditional publishing modes are always encouraged. Moreover, for each edition of ISSUES, the SoC Cohort collaboratively develops a collective framing that brings together the thematic threads and working methods they have both individually and collectively explored and developed during their 10-month peer-learning journey. Each Edition of ISSUES is also typically coupled with a Collective Editorial developed by the SoC team in collaboration with the Cohort which adds further layers of contextualisation to the programme and outputs of each SoC offering. However, for the 2025 edition of ISSUES, the SoC Cohort brought their theme of ‘Exquisite Commons’ to life by taking the foundations of the ISSUES structure and bringing it into an entirely new process of self-organisation. This evolution of a previously linear practice has produced new connective pathways between the collective theme and individual project contributions, as well as for the publication itself. Which, for the very first time, will now live as a digital, broadcast, and print format. Traces of this Exquisition Commons approach can be found throughout the publication, most obviously in the scrapping of the aforementioned Collective Editorial for the Collective Metafesto: ‘Making a Vessel in the Sky’, and the bridge prompts that you will notice accompanying each text, that draw a poetic line not only between each individual contribution and the collective theme, but to its entangled clan of fellow contributions, too. The launch event will feature activations by the ISSUES Steering Committee*, centred around the collaborative offerings of the publication and broader insights into the SoC 2025 cohort’s contributions, projects, and research.

Event Programme: 11.00-11:15 Brief introduction to ISSUES from editor, Amy Gowen

11.10-11.55 Deep listening session of the Broadcast Publication

Break

12-12:15 Open dialogue on reflections, by ISSUES Steering Committee

12:15-12:30 Introduction to the digital print publication

12:30-40 Print publication reveal with reflections from committee on ‘self-publishing’, by ISSUES Steering Committee

12:40-13:00 Collective Activity: The carrier-bag theory of self-publishing, by ISSUES Steering Committee

A note on participation:

The first hour of the launch will be dedicated to the broadcast publication. Participants are therefore invited to lay down, take a walk, and have a little away-from-screen time, to relax, and enjoy whilst actively listening. A quiet space and quality headphones are encouraged for optimal participation. You are also actively encouraged to stay for the full 120 minutes, as the final activity: ‘The carrier-bag theory of self-publishing’ includes a collective exercise in experimenting with alternative modes of distribution, in order to join the vessel in the sky.

Anyone and everyone interested in collaborative research, experimental publishing, and connecting with the wider SoC network is most welcome to attend.

*The ISSUES Steering Committee comprises of: Belén Arellano Cañizares, Chantelle Lue, Klara Branting Paulsell, Lou Croff Blake, and Layla Fassa

____________________________________________________________________________________________ Programme Sunday, 8 February 2026 15:00–17:00 (with 15 min break) Learning Commons Round Table: Tensile Structures Co‑facilitated by: Amy Gowen, Chantelle Lue, and Gabriel Hensche This public roundtable invites a wide audience into a shared conversation on Tensile Structures - how collective spaces, learning communities, and cultural initiatives hold together under pressure, adapt through change, and imagine new forms of sustainability. Reconvening guest facilitators from the SoC Assembly 2025, this session brings together: Aline Hernández CASCO Art Institute (Utrecht, NL) Fiky Daulay & Nuraini Juliastuti KUNCI Study Forum (Yogyakarta, Indonesia) Sepp Eckenhaussen Caradt Research Group of the St. Joost Academy/ Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam, NL) CASCO Art Institute (Utrecht, NL) Yuri Tuma Institute for Postnatural Studies (Madrid, Spain) Zoë Heyn‑Jones & Ana Rivera Materia Abierta (Mexico City, Mexico) Taking place at a moment of transition for the School of Commons, the discussion opens broader questions that honour whilst extending beyond any single organisation or context:

• How do alternative educational and artistic spaces survive and sustain under structural instability?
• What systems of support, alliances, and solidarities make collective work possible?
• How might we design new models of care, governance, and shared responsibility?

Rather than offering fixed answers, the roundtable creates space for collective thinking, listening, and exchange - bringing together voices from different geographies, practices, and contexts to explore both challenges and possibilities. As the final event of the SoC Assembly 2026, this session closes the programme and marks the beginning of a longer public programme continuing throughout the year - extending these conversations through dialogue, collaboration, and shared inquiry.