Our Common Grounds: Start Up Meeting
2 December 2026
Michele Masucci
Online
Participation is free. Booking required (Book here).
About
Our Common Grounds is an open research group convened through a seminar series. It brings artistic research into conversation with microhistories of rural revolt, agrarian struggle and the collective organisation of commons, past and present.
The series asks how apparently local episodes can make wider political and material relations visible. How have people collectively reorganised land, labour, food, water, care and decision-making? What forms of knowledge and political imagination emerge through occupations, uprisings, cooperatives, communal land practices, anticolonial struggles and contemporary movements against enclosure and extraction?
Commons are approached neither as inherited traditions nor as inherently harmonious communities. The seminars will consider commoning as a contested practice shaped by conflicts over ownership and use, internal hierarchies, gendered and racialised labour, displacement, migration, state authority and the uneven distribution of resources.
About the Start-up Meeting
The meeting will introduce the research group and open a collective discussion about its questions, methods and future programme. Participants will be invited to share their interests and propose cases, materials or possible contributions to subsequent seminars.
Future sessions may include presentations of work in progress, collective readings, screenings, conversations and engagements with archives, oral accounts, songs, images, landscapes and contemporary practices of collective organisation.
The meeting is open to artists, writers, filmmakers, researchers, historians, translators, archivists, activists, farmers, community organisers and others interested in these questions. No institutional affiliation or completed research project is required. No preparation is necessary.