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The Future of Culture is Common - Conference

1, 2 & 3 June 2022, Antwerp

  • A conference on Commoning Cultural Activism, Aesthetics, Organization and Policy, with keynotes, workshops and multiple events organized by Valiz in the Fringe Space!
  • Valiz will organize events related to our publications: CAPS LOCK, operatie wooncooperatie and Fragility/Kwetsbaarheid 
  • Sign up for the conference and meet us in Antwerp here: https://forms.uantwerpen.be/en/aria/future-of-culture-common-conference/

What: The Future of Culture is Common - Conference
When: Wednesday 1— Friday 3 June 2022
Where: Lange Sint-Annastraat 7, 2000, Antwerp
Organised by: Culture Commons Quest Office (CCQO) with Antwerp University and Valiz
Language: English
Admission: €20 to €35 per day for regular visitors €10 to €15 per day for students. (Visiting the full conference is €90,- for a regular visitor, €40,- for a student) 

This three-day conference investigates the many ways in which commons shape culture, and, vice-versa, how culture shape the commons. The conference is structured on the basis of four thematic clusters: ACTIVISM, POLICY, COMMONS ORGANIZATION and AESTHETICS. Combining lectures with debates, workshops and artistic presentations, the conference is aimed at scholars as well as policymakers, activists, artists, cultural professionals and students who want to work with and in (culture) commons. 

Keynotes by: Friederike Landau-Donnelly, Pascal Gielen, Manuela Zechner, Oli Mould


During the conference, Valiz will host a few events in the Fringe Space of the conference, related to our titles: CAPS LOCK, operatie wooncoöperatie and Fragility/Kwetsbaarheid. Find out more below!

The Fringe Space is an open space where people can go, chat, listen to short presentations in a relaxed way, exchange thoughts on the conference and gather inspiration. A side section to the main programme, where participants can see practices of “commons” mindsets! We hope to meet you there!

June 2nd 14.15-14.45

CAPS LOCK; commons, capitalism, and culture. Organizing new forms of cultural resistance and exchange. 

Author Ruben Pater in conversation with Gijs de Heij and Ludi Loiseau (TBC) from Open Souce Publishing (OSP).

Graphic designers have long operated in service of market and state. As we learn from Ruben Paters latest book CAPS LOCK: How capitalism took hold of graphic design and how to escape from it (Valiz, 2021), designers are caught in a system of exploitation and profit, a cycle that fosters inequality and the depletion of natural resources. 

How can graphic designers employ tactics of commoning to carve out spaces beyond markets and state? In this conversation, Ruben Pater enters into dialogue with Open Source Publishing members Gijs de Heij and Ludi Loiseau (tbc) to discuss what values inform their practices, and to explore how graphic designers can apply principles of commoning in their work. 

  • Ruben Pater was educated as a graphic designer, worked in several design studios, also independently, and as an educator (e.g. MA Royal Academy of Art, The Hague). With Untold Stories Pater makes critical work on the edge of graphic design, journalism and activism.
  • Open Source Publishing questions the influence and affordance of digital tools through its practice of (commissioned) graphic design, pedagogy and applied research. They prefer to use exclusively free and open source softwares. Currently the group is composed of people with backgrounds in graphic design, typography and development. They find excitement in the cross-over between its members respective fields and competences. Legally OSP is structured as a bilingual Belgian non-profit organization and aims to question and find alternatives to the standard graphic design studio model.
  • Formed at the Ecole Estienne (Paris), Ludi Loiseau relearned everything in Brussels. She immersed herself in the centre for graphical delicacies Speculoos and met the OSP group aboard a van on route to Poland in 2008. Ludi questions the contemporary role of typography and her practice is reflected in her courses at the Ecole de Recherche Graphique (ERG), where she is a lecturer in typography and free software. She is one of the founders of Médor project, a quarterly Belgian investigation and storytelling magazine.
  • Gijs de Heij is a graphic designer and programmer. Next to his activities within OSP he is a member of the research group Algolit where he researches the potential of algorithmic literature. He lives and works in Brussels with a particular interest in pen plotters.

June 3rd 14.15-14.45 

operatie wooncoöperatieOut of the housing crisis through shared ownership. 

Talk by Arie Lenkeek.

Affordable housing has become virtually impossible in the Netherlands. Inequality is increasing in all kinds of areas: between generations and between those who are wealthy and those who are not, and the real day-to-day economy and the housing bubble are also out of step. The solutions to the lack of affordable housing proposed by the market and politics address the symptoms but do not provide structural innovation.

This book focuses on the community economy and positions the ‘housing cooperative’ as a third alternative between rent and purchase. Not the individual question ‘how do I want to live?’, but the joint design of the question ‘how do we want to live together?’ is leading in this. Housing is a fundamental right, not a commodity. Citizens can shape this together.

operatie wooncoöperatie tells the history of our housing; why the cooperative disappeared from the picture and how the housing crisis came about. It documents ten special projects from Vienna, Zurich and Munich and explains how these types of projects can only arise through conscious choices on the part of local authorities. It works towards an optimistic, offensive, applicable and feasible proposal: out of the housing crisis through communal ownership.

June 3rd 17.00-17.30 

Fragility: To Touch and Be Touched. 

Pascal Gielen in conversation with Alexandra Tryanova. 

In a competitive existence we hide our weak spots. Evaluation madness and the constant urge to innovate and evaluate pushes people back further and further into a virtual shell. Anyway, we are all just messing about, Marlies De Munck says. She therefore pleads for openness and compassion. All this sheltering keeps you from touching and from being touched. Pascal Gielen warmly advocates an aesthetic skill: the ability to experience, through all our senses, a ramshackle and fragile reality and still see it as a coherent whole. Art, theatre, dance, and music can touch us deeply and unexpectedly, show us new connections, and change rigid opinions. That is the power of art and culture: to reconcile us with life, even amid its turbulence, incoherence and precarity.

  • Pascal Gielen is sociologist of culture. He is based at the Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts (ARIA) of Antwerp University. There he leads the research group Culture Commons Quest Office (CCQO).
  • Alexandra Tryanova is a Ukraine-born independent curator based in Antwerp, Belgium. She is a graduate of the Curatorial studies postgraduate program at KASK & Conservatory, Ghent, and holds MAs in Cultural studies and Law. Her current research focuses on topics of recreation, Eastern European conceptual art, gender, and institutional critique. In 2017/2018, she was a curator of the Museum of Odesa Modern Art; in 2018/2020, she was a curator at the PinchukArtCentre (Kyiv), and then she worked on policies in higher art education at the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine. Since 2021 she has been collaborating with Jester (Genk, Belgium).