reclaiming our commons

Reclaiming Our Commons: A Proposal for Cultural Collaboration Across the Arab Region

Culture Resource is launching the open call “Reclaiming Our Commons: A Proposal for Cultural Collaboration Across the Arab Region,” which was formulated in partnership with A.M Qattan Foundation and has been developed by a number of fellow and partner organizations, including Ettijahat – Independent Culture, Aflamuna, and L’art Rue, which constitute a nucleus contributing to project funding and programming.

“Reclaiming Our Commons” is a call to contribute to building a participatory creative process addressed to initiatives, cooperatives, independent cultural and artistic organizations, as well as artists and cultural actors. It seeks to support artistic and cultural projects across diverse artistic and interdisciplinary domains, provided they adopt cooperative, participatory, and/or commons-based approaches, whether at the project development level, project ownership, project interpretations and outputs, or project revenues.

Why Reclaim Our Commons?

The project suggests the commons/publicness as a concept, approach, practice, and value that does not necessarily provide immediate solutions. Instead, it establishes creative pathways for inclusive cultural work and collective social change. Through its participatory process, the project aims to generate new approaches that inspire individuals and organizations within the cultural sector to explore sustainable ways forward. It also seeks to contribute to producing a discourse and/or practices that advocate for reclaiming communal space, memory, and imagination by transforming the private or official into participatory, collective, and public.

The project is built upon the premise that non-consumerist cultural production has succeeded in critiquing consumerism and mainstream culture. However, it failed to achieve sustainability. Despite several organizations in the sector ensuring institutional independence from donors, non-consumerist cultural production still operates within marginal economies, rendering it unviable, with infrastructure that is either limited or fragile. Additionally, it clashes with several intellectual currents that oppose pluralism, and functions within an extremely violent colonial reality. Therefore, the project suggests exploring communal cultural practices as a potential avenue for addressing these challenges.

About Commons/Public

In this project, we avoid adopting a single definition for commons or its approaches. Instead, we offer the project itself and the projects falling under it an opportunity to interpret it and approach it as ideas and practices that vary across cultures and geographies. We acknowledge the fact that those who determine the meaning of commons are the actors and the people who produce and work within it. The concept of commons is often associated with “democratization” or defined as natural resources or neutral properties and spaces organized and codified by society.