Constellation 2:
RE-COMMUNING
People can occupy the same space while remaining profoundly unsupported by one another. I learned this slowly, through rooms full of politically fluent language where nobody noticed who could or could not comfortably access the conversation. Through collaborative projects sustained disproportionately by a few overextended people.
Through institutional invitations to “build community” that depend upon unpaid emotional labour from those already navigating precarity. The word community begins to feel overused, polished smooth through repetition. Detached from responsibility, risk, and the difficult work of sustaining relations over time. Because communing is not simply sociality, it’s maintenance, negotiation, and adaptation. It is about remaining accountable to one another beyond visibility.
The German term Allmende refers to common land collectively maintained and shared. [1] I find this useful not only because it offers a nostalgic image of the commons, but because it foregrounds responsibility. A commons survives only through ongoing collective care. Re-communing therefore becomes less about belonging and more about maintenance: how shared life is sustained under conditions of exhaustion, precarity, and institutional fragmentation.
Community here is not about consensus. If anything, I have become suspicious of communities that appear too harmonious. Re-communing is less about agreement than about remaining in relation despite disagreement, fatigue, and changing capacities. It asks how collective life continues once difference inevitably emerges.
Under these conditions, people are encouraged to network constantly while genuine interdependence becomes increasingly difficult to sustain. The institution celebrates collaboration aesthetically while preserving systems that isolate materially.
As Dorothee Richter argues, curatorial practice is always shaped by the politics of display, participation, and knowledge production. [2] Community-making cannot be separated from the structures through which participation itself is organised, authorized, and distributed.
Everyone is connected, exhausted, and these conditions reshape intimacy itself. I notice how frequently relationships within the cultural sector became organised around productivity. Conversations drift quickly toward opportunities, collaborations, applications, and outcomes. Even friendship began absorbing professional logic. Availability becomes transactional, and the body learns scarcity socially. Who feels able to ask for help, apologises before expressing need?
bell hooks insists that love must be understood as practice rather than sentiment. [3] I am drawn back to this because care is easiest to declare and hardest to sustain. Communing asks for repetition rather than performance. It asks who continues showing up once the exhibition has closed, once funding has ended, once enthusiasm has faded.
Community cannot exist only during moments of visibility or crisis. It must survive ordinary time as well. This is difficult because capitalism rewards methods of self-sufficiency relentlessly. Independence becomes aspirational. Need becomes embarrassing, dependency reframed as failure.
Yet, as Judith Butler reminds us, vulnerability and dependency are not expectations of social life, but conditions of it. [4] The fantasy of independence obscures how thoroughly survival depends upon others. Eva Feder Kittay similarly argues that dependency is not an exception to human life, but one of its defining conditions. Rather than organising society around ideals of independence, she proposes an ethics grounded in inevitable relations of care. [5] This shifts dependency from individual deficit towards collective responsibility.
Queer, crip, feminist, and decolonial practices have long understood this. They remind us that interdependence is not weakness, it’s infrastructural.
I think about how all the unofficial systems have sustained me more reliably than institutions.
Friends who translate inaccessible information.
Someone checking whether I arrived home safely.
Collective venting that transformed isolation into recognition.
Someone noticed exhaustion before I could admit it myself.
Dean Spade describes mutual aid as the work communities undertake when institutions fail to meet people’s needs. [6] I recognise something similar in these moments. They rarely appear in institutional descriptions of cultural production, yet they often determine whether participation becomes survivable at all.
Perhaps communing begins there.
In noticing one another carefully, before the crisis, without requiring performance.
Joan Tronto argues that care is not simply an emotion, but a political practice involving attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness. [7] Institutions frequently reduce care to procedure, transforming relational responsibility into policy compliance. Procedural care matters, but it cannot replace the ongoing labour of attending to one another.
This resonates with what Carmen Morsch describes as the transformative potential of gallery education. A practice that does not simply transmit knowledge, but unsettles institutional authority itself. [8] Yet this remains difficult because exhibitions often continue to position institutions as knowing and audiences as receiving.
Meaning arrives already organized, interpreted, and authorised.
Re-communing asks what happens when cultural practice shifts away from authoritative transmission and towards collective enquiry instead.
Deborah Riding’s writing on not-knowing is relevant here. Not-knowing is often treated as a deficit. Something requiring correction. Yet uncertainty can also be productive. It allows multiple perspectives to remain present without immediate resolution. [9]
Communing does not seek certainty; it seeks openness. This feels especially important because community is often romantic within artistic and activist spaces. As though shared politics automatically eliminates harm. But communities can reproduce exclusion too. Informal hierarchies emerge, emotional labour is not evenly distributed, and access needs conflict.
Communing, therefore, cannot mean idealising collectivity; it means learning how to remain in relation differently. How to negotiate conflict without disposability and how to sustain complexity without collapse.
The question of the commons is important here.
Dorothee Richter asks whether curatorial commons can exist under contemporary institutional conditions. [10] This question matters because collectivity is never neutral. The spaces through which community is organised shape who becomes visible, who participates comfortably, whose labour remains unseen, and whose needs are anticipated.
Communing involves power, structure, and decision about whose participation matters. This is why disability justice is so central to my understanding of community. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha writes about access intimacy: the feeling of being understood without continually having to explain yourself. [11] Over time, many people experience profound exhaustion from translating themselves repeatedly into administratively legible terms.
Explaining access requirements, fatigue, communication needs, and limits. Again, and again, and again.
Communing asks a different question: what becomes possible when understanding is shared rather than continually negotiated?
Accessibility is often misunderstood as a technical adjustment, but fundamentally it’s relational. It concerns whether people feel anticipated within a collective space. Whether participation requires continual self-erasure. Whether bodies can exist without constantly performing normative productivity.
María Puig de la Bellacasa understands care as both affective and material labour. [12] Care is never simply an ethical intention; it requires ongoing maintenance, time, resources, and attention. This reminds me that communing cannot survive on goodwill alone. It depends upon infrastructures capable of supporting collective life.
I have been thinking about time, specifically about how difficult sustained relationships become under conditions of chronic urgency. Emails, deadlines, applications, events, social obligations. The cultural sector fragments attention continuously. Under these conditions, care becomes reactive rather than sustaining.
People reach out only during visible crises because everyone is already operating beyond capacity.
Communing requires temporal restructuring. Time for misunderstanding, repair, gathering, and rest. This is politically significant because capitalism repeatedly reduces relationships to utility. Even radical spaces can reproduce these dynamics when exhaustion becomes normalised.
I think about all the times I remained socially present while emotionally disappearing. Attending events despite depletion because absence felt professionally dangerous. Performing engagement while withdrawing internally. Institutions reward attendance more easily than vulnerability.
Yet communing requires vulnerability precisely because collective life depends upon mutual recognisability beyond performance. Audre Lorde writes that difference should not merely be tolerated, but recognised as a source of creative responsibility. [13] This is central to re-communing because the community cannot depend upon sameness.
Accessible collectivity requires structures capable of holding different capacities, temporalities, and communication. Without treating variation as an inconvenience. It requires flexibility to be embedded structurally rather than offered exceptionally.
Ivan Illich describes conviviality as the capacity for people to shape their lives together through relationships that remain cooperative rather than managerial. [14] This feels close to what I continue searching for in cultural practices: spaces where participation is not organised through efficiency or institutional authority but through mutual capacity.
The most meaningful communal experiences I have had were often the least formally organised. People sitting together after events had ended, shared silences, collective exhaustion spoken honestly.
Moments where professionalism loosened enough for dependency to become visible.
Perhaps institutions struggle to value maintenance because maintenance appears repetitive. Building community sounds exciting; maintaining community sounds ordinary. Yet communing is repetitive by necessity. Returning to one another, checking needs, adjusting expectations. Not glamorous work, but essential.
The Care Collective argues that care must become an organising principle rather than an emergency response. [15] I keep returning to this because community is often celebrated symbolically while neglected materially.
The myth of the singular creative subject depends upon forgetting this.
Re-communing interrupts forgetting, not by romanticising togetherness, but by acknowledging interdependence honestly.
Maybe this is where re-communing begins.
Not in agreement, not in branding, or proximity, but in the slow practice of remaining accountable to one another. Returning, repairing, and redistributing care before a crisis demands it. Building forms of collective life capable of surviving the institutions that rarely know how to sustain them.
NOTES:
[1] Collins Dictionary, s.v. ‘Allmende’, Collins German-English Dictionary, https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/german-english/allmende [accessed 10 June 2026].
[2] Dorothee Richter, 'Curatorial Commons? A Paradigm Shift', OnCurating, 24 (2014)
[3] bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (New York: William Morrow, 2000)
[4] Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004).
[5] Eva Feder Kittay, Love's Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency (New York: Routledge, 1999).
[6] Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next), rev. edn (London: Verso, 2020).
[7] Joan C. Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (New York: Routledge, 1993)
[8] Mörsch, Carmen, At a Crossroads of Four Discourses: Documenta 12 Gallery Education in Between Affirmation, Reproduction, Deconstruction and Transformation (Zurich: Institute for Art Education, Zurich University of the Arts, 2009)
[9] Riding, Deborah, 'Curating Spaces for Not-Knowing', Tate Papers, 33 (2020)
[10] Richter, Dorothee, 'Curatorial Commons? A Paradigm Shift', OnCurating, 24 (2014)
[11] Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018)
[12] María Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
[13] Lorde, Audre, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 2007)
[14] Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (London: Marion Boyars, 1973).
[15] The Care Collective, The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence (London: Verso, 2020).