Diagram from Figuring Planetary Space: Abandoning Man's Measure, by Patricia Reed, 2026

Alex Gence: I would like to start with a little weather update on the topic of ‘commoning’ as a project model for artistic practices and how you think it has evolved in the last decade. In that sense how has the what could be become the what is in the identified sites, roadblocks and ambitions of commoning?

Patricia Reed: I haven’t been doing too much research specifically on this topic, so from general observations, this interest in commoning seems to fall into two strands over the past years, which may overlap. The first sees commoning as a practice for organizing artistic collectives, their resources and labor; the second as researching and documenting historical and current commoning practices (usually not affiliated with the arts) through artistic means. In the first instance, we’ve witnessed a proliferation of artistic collectives, many of whom operate under some form of commoning principle, where these modes of practicing have attained more formal institutional recognition – Lumbung being appointed as curators for documenta 15 certainly indexes this shift in recognition, and there was recently even a temporary MA program with the same name at Sandberg Instituut dedicated to this as an educational endeavor.[note]“Lumbung Practice (2024–2026),” Sandberg Instituut, Accessed September 12, 2026, https://sandberg.nl/departments/lumbung-practice.[/note] In the second instance, the artist Marwa Arsanios jumps to mind who investigates historical commoning practices from Lebanon, Palestine and the Levant region (known as Al Masha) towards a collective effort to communalize an actual piece of privatized land in Northern Lebanon.[note]Marwa Arsanios,“Melek – Mashaa',” Afterall, January 2024, https://www.afterall.org/articles/melek-mashaa/.[/note] Additionally in this second vein, the work of the research architecture office Forty Five Degrees has a series of ‘road trips’ documented in their ongoing book series entitled ‘Radical Rituals’, where they meet with, and learn from communities who are living and breathing various commoning experiments in their daily lives.[note]“Radical Rituals. An Itinerant Survey Along the 45ºN Parallel,” Forty Five Degrees, Accessed September 12, 2026, https://www.forty-five-degrees.com/radical-rituals/.[/note] These books are a helpful and inspiring inventory in bringing ‘commoning’ outside a purely discursive space, demonstrating various ways in which people are already enacting such forms of life. 

In our climate of dwindling funding in the arts, not to mention the lack of affordable spaces to experiment with real estate crises all over Europe, commoning is perhaps a necessary survival response, manifesting self-determined structures of working and mutual support. What I find promising in this first instance of commoning is an implicit recognition of how artistic labor, which was once exceptional, has become a prototype for the precaritization of labor writ large. So, while this was an accidental consequence of an avant-garde desire to merge art and everyday life, can this labor-prototyping capacity be put to another use? There was a great deal of discussion around 10 years ago on this topic of artistic labor, and perhaps the proliferation of commoning collectives we see today, can be seen as demonstrating alternative prototypes for labor practices, which in this case, happen to be in the arts. 

What I find most exciting, drawing from the example of Marwa, is the negotiation of commoning that leverages the artistic context beyond endosystemic critique. Her work takes lessons from historical precedent, and grapples with legacy legal codes related to property as a medium for tinkering, so hers is both a model and tangible engagement where we can witness a fundamentally different relationship to land – from ownership to usership. It goes beyond its critical-representational documentary form of commoning as it circulates within the world of art, and exceeds those bounds by speculating on legally viable claims predicated upon maintenance and use-value. It strikes me that this kind of approach has echoes in the bold, narrative unsettling we saw in the Dawn of Everything book – where from the empirical archaeological record, we discover evidence working against the longstanding myths undergirding the evolution of capitalism: that as soon as human developed agriculture, a relation to land based on property ownership became a ‘necessity’.[note]David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, London: Penguin Books, 2022.[/note] What David Graeber and David Wengrow demonstrated in their book, was that this founding, cosmogonical myth is empirically erroneous, since there is evidence around the globe that humans have experimented with a variety of organizational structures, despite sharing an agricultural similarity. Gestures and practices like these help undo some of those naturalizations we are told are ‘necessary’ by demonstrating the real existence of other ways to relate and co-exist. This is important work that helps us come out from the capture of capitalist realism. 

A. G.: It is definitely encouraging to see these various practices and sites of commoning proliferating and effectively developing artists’ rights, institutional ethics of production and representation, as well as finding new ways of engaging beyond the artworld itself. I am however wary that these practices are emerging as entrenchments to cope with an ever-demanding state of late capitalism which has exacerbated its subalternizing effects with the help of digital technology, thus acting as sites and gestures of necessary preservation rather than new forms of governance and ways of being. In that respect, to what extent can commoning counter the ongoing loss of agency and autonomy that is a symptom of our digital age? Do you think that these labor-prototyping and documentary strands of commoning have adapted to the notions of ownership and usership that exist today and how do they differ from a techno-libertarian conception of commons?

P. R.: I’ve admittedly struggled with ‘autonomy’ and ‘agency’ for some time, since there can be a nostalgia attached to such loaded, legacy concepts from political philosophy that strike me as problematic for our large-scale complex integrated societies, when not recontextualised. Autonomy for whom, at what scale, and for what decisions? What is our understanding of the ‘self’ (auto) in self-legislation, and how can its activities be held accountable when its byproducts will always exceed the contours of whatever boundary condition is outlined upon the ‘selfhood’ of a person or community? Thinking of something so critical as agriculture, in what environmental conditions would autonomy be materially (and chemically) possible today, considering the enduring consequences of colonial land management, soil fertility, and extreme climate events. There can be punitive, destructive, or isolationist forms of autonomy that bend towards a hoarding self-sufficiency for the very wealthy, while in other contexts and conditions, absolutely liberating. Just as China Miéville once said, we already live in Utopia, it just isn’t ours. The same could be said of autonomy: special economic zones, start-up tech cities like Prospéra in Honduras, New Zealand survivalist Sea-Steading for billionaires – all highly autonomous, just not for the gaping majority.[note]China Miéville, “The Limits of Utopia,” Salvage, Accessed September 12, 2026, http://www.salvage.zone/mieville.html.[/note] 

What’s infuriating about Silicon Valley’s insatiable hunger for larger and larger data models, especially in commercial LLM development, is their utter capitalization of pirate economies and anti-copyright initiatives that often pass with impunity, or at most, fines that are ‘the cost of doing business’. That said, we can’t lose sight of the fact that said pirate commons have been enabled by computational technologies in order to create access to human cultural labor and knowledge – so more differentiation is needed than suggesting ‘digital technologies’ per se, strip autonomy and agency. What entities like Open AI (the name directly a reminder of their false promise to actually be open: in 2025 they changed to a for-profit structure, and in June 2026 filed for an IPO), and Anthropic (who use what can only be described as a book guillotine to destroy physical records and scrape the last vestiges of AI-free human texts/images), have effectively highjacked a knowledge commons, that could have only existed in pirate economies to maneuver around proprietized, restrictive access to knowledge. We haven’t even touched upon the metabolic consequences of these scale-hungry entities upon water supply, their energy voracity, acoustic environmental disturbances to humans and more-than-humans.

Returning to this problem of autonomy, I suppose I’m more invested in thinking our predicament and failure of existing governance structures in terms of interdependence. This doesn’t necessarily imply an opposition to, or invalidation of autonomy (which is an interesting dilemma to sit with), but interdependence puts more emphasis on relations as constitutive of inhabitable modes of coexistence, not to mention, foregrounds a metabolic perspective that can account for the fact our coexistence is not only an inter-human affair, but necessarily takes place amidst other life-worlds immersed in biogeochemical feedback systems. Politically, this would translate into a higher prioritization in theory and practice of constructing ‘we’s’ towards formations of planetary solidarities, off-setting a thinking of the political outlined by the Nazi legal architect Carl Schmitt for whom the political is about drawing separations between an us and them. It’s always bothered me how widely his base definition has been used in left-leaning political theory, without much contextualization of when and where this idea of the political took hold, and more crucially, what its effects were and are. That said, constructing ‘we’s’ is not some global love-in. Clearly not. It is equally troubling to see moves claiming a ‘we’ that depoliticize human histories by way of scale tricks: from a ‘we’ expressed by way of the Anthropos of climate collapse, or on the level of us all being a collection of vibrating atoms. In both instances a ‘we’ is predicated on articulating sameness, whereas I’m thinking through a ‘Solidarity without Sameness’ principle, inspired jointly by Denise Ferreira Da Silva’s concept of ‘Difference without Separability,’ and Sylvia Wynter’s system that demands we learn to narrate ourselves stereoscopically between regionally, culturally specific human communities and experiences had therein, and general species history.[note]Denise Ferreira Da Silva, “On Difference Without Separability,” in Jochen Volz and Júlia Rebouças (eds.), 32nd Bienal de São Paulo – Incerteza Viva. Catalogue, São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 2016, pp. 57-65.[/note] Of note is how both thinkers, although not explicitly identified, interface site-specificity with scale-specificity, at least in theoretical terms, which complexifies diagrams of regionality or locality, relative to spaces and geographies wherein autonomy may be exercised. As a thought experiment, from an angle of interdependence the premise of politics focuses less on power-grabs articulated through claims on sovereignty, but rather on constructing, maintaining, and repairing relations for conditions of distributed empowerment – including relations with our technosphere. Governance would take on a very different institutional design when departing from a structural recognition of entanglement, that does not flatten everything into sameness but implies a shared space of coexistence that is uncommonly threated, and oriented by constructing conditions of inhabitability.

A similar line on the question of agency holds as well. As may be evident by now, I take seriously the question raised by historian Dipesh Chakrabarty that the planetary isn’t something we merely know about, but it addresses us in a way that the globe does not.[note]Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2021.[/note] When it is no longer tenable to separate Human and Natural histories (arguably since Vladimir Vernadsky collapsed biogeochemistry into a continuous field with his concept of the Biosphere, 100 years ago), what implications does this have upon inherited categories, ideals, definitions, aspirations, and crucially spaces of realizability.[note]Vladimir I. Vernadsky, The Biosphere, Mark A. McMenamin (ed.), David B. Langmuir (trans.), Göttingen: Copernicus, 1998.[/note] I think we’re in a rather profound moment of reevaluation of how agency is understood, by that I mean in non-mechanical forms. In our human-scaled, phenomenologically attuned Umwelten, it is satisfying to perform an action in the world as a cause, and witness a transformative result as an effect. Certainly, we experience this mechanical operation at play at a certain scale of our everyday sensed reality, like completing a task, or offering a stranger help with their luggage who smiles in return. Beyond our immediate experience, however, we’re confronted with the reality of complex, nested systems that are impacted by, but morally indifferent to our articulations of agency. There is a form of agency in driving a car, yet that manifestation of short-term human agency at a small scale, produces byproducts that diminish agential possibility elsewhere and elsewhen at a very different scale of impact. So again, it seems crucial to parse our understandings of agency in site and scale sensitive registers. Some fundamental questions emerge in view of this non-mechanical, somewhat intergenerational view, such as: what does it mean to possess agency? In which instances of human-machinic coupling are agencies increased and beneficial? In which instances are we negligently off-loading agency to automated systems? How is agency refigured in interdependent, relational terms that may include coupling with other species as agency-enhancing, such as the clams in Warsaw that ‘collaborate’ in water sanitation monitoring, or lichens that provide us informational agency about air pollution? In more recent developments with agentic AI, what happens to the question of agency when humans are merely behavioral data points, from which purely machinic decisions are based? How is this adjudicated in view of the violent and destructive articulations of exclusively human agency, in our living historical record? This is probably a frustrating non-answer, but hopefully the slew of questions this topic provokes at least gestures to the need to rethink what we mean by ‘agency’ adapted to planetary conditions, and how exclusively mechanical figurations of it, fall short. It was a form of agency to produce the technosphere which grants certain practical and communicative affordances to billions, while at the same time, in its current mode of operation, comes with extreme cost of eradicating the very possibility of human agency – the minimum condition for which is an inhabitable milieu. 

A. G.: You’ve been a big proponent of diagramming: as a practice, a way of thinking, as world building and as an antagonistic approach to dominant diagrams; which notably includes attempts in diagramming the commons. Would you tell us a bit about this dynamic and critical framework for thinking through the commons but also how you’ve conceived this practice as a way of producing a commons?

P. R.: I wouldn’t put such grand claims upon what my diagrammatic work does, my response is much simpler. It’s how I make arguments, propositions, and ideas understandable to myself – by charting key concepts in a spatialized, systematized, and relational way. If I can’t diagram a thought, it probably means ideas aren’t quite yet clear and need more fermentation – I often joke that diagrams are a good BS detector, a personal, methodological bulwark against theory-word-salad (hopefully)! Diagrams can be seen as compression devices that are helpful in communication and getting orientation in an idea. Like a zip file that can be easily sent, one can compress a 10’000 word essay in a single diagram, and then it becomes a useful prop to de-archive in live narration. I suppose this isn’t entirely separate from ‘producing a commons’ since communication and coordination therein is crucial.

You may be referring to a text written more than 10 years ago called “Diagramming the Common,” which was actually a lecture with some rudimentary hand-drawn diagrams as slides.[note]Patricia Reed, “Diagramming the Common,” Lecture, Symposium at Dampfzentrale, Bern, initiated by Nicolas Y. Galeazzi, 2014.[/note] This was partially the result of a first encounter with the work of Gilles Châtelet – a queer activist, mathematician and philosopher who notably wrote a provocative pamphlet To Think and Live Like Pigs, but the book of his I open several times a year is Figuring Space: Philosophy, Mathematics and Physics.[note]Gilles Châtelet and Robin Mackay, To Live and Think like Pigs: The Incitement of Envy and Boredom in Market Democracies, London: Urbanomic, 2014. Gilles Châtelet, Figuring Space: Philosophy, Mathematics, and Physics, Science and Philosophy, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000.[/note] Diagramming, for Châtelet, is not a disembodied, cold formalism, but an expression and record of thought in gesture. The book, in many ways, is a celebration of the elaboration of thought experiments (mainly in math and physics) articulated through diagrams, and how they can unhinge us from conventions of thought to imagine and think otherwise. So less about the fact of some person arriving at a radically different idea in their field, but how that process of arrival works. The book celebrates this process by demystifying it to some degree. I appreciate this elaboration a great deal since it not only unsettles the picture of a singular genius miraculously endowed with capacities most of us don’t have, it undermines the idea that demystification leads to disenchantment that we often read in critiques of reason. I think it’s the opposite, where demystifying a certain phenomenon can lead to more enchantment with the world; there’s an excitement in discovering that something held as true or immutable, is completely otherwise. There’s an enchantment with the witnessing of possibility, is what I’m getting at. 

Although it’s not focused on cognition directly, the way that diagrams are externalizations we imaginatively interact with, points to the bigger process of how it is possible to think things we do not already know, envision things we have no experience of, and learn to do away with familiar paradigms in structures of knowledge and social organization. Perhaps we could consider Planetary Commoning as a genre of thought experiment, not something equate-able with sheer immensity, nor merely scaling-up existing models, but a commoning attuned to inhabitability within planetary metabolisms. In recent work Figuring Planetary Space, I’ve sketched this in terms of a need to abolish the measure of eurohumanist ‘Man’ as a default spatial-agential-conceptual setting, whose ‘agencies’ have historically produced the urgencies and path dependencies we experience today.[note]Patricia Reed, “Figuring Planetary Space - Abandoning Man’s Measure,” International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam, Accessed September 12, 2026, https://iabr.nl/en/projects/research/agent-of-change-patricia-reed.[/note] The diagram of early Euromodern space corresponds to the operational birth of this ‘Man,’ (for Wynter, a genre of being human); this diagram mediated a radically different self-narration at the time, yet one where rationalizing capacities were evaluated in terms of exceptional mastery, separation from nature, cartographic inflation, and entitled domination. That apprehension of ‘rationality’ turns out to have been a very narrow one, lubricating all sorts of inter-human and ecological violence. Where critique may give us a necessary and useful analysis of this historical process, what counter-diagrams could enable a mediation of self-picturing from without the measure of ‘Man,’ as a prognostic exercise in thinking from other frameworks? Measures unbounded by Vitruvian enclosures that can account for interdependencies, feedback, and mutual vulnerabilities that are dynamic, relational and crucially – distributed in space and time. This metabolic distribution poses a challenge to conventions (heuristic and legal) of fixing sites and defining the contours of what and where a location of a ‘commons’ is (acknowledging the legacy of commoning bound to territory), at what resolution is it understood, and what mediums it is entangled with (air, water, soils, minerals, microbes).