Culture – Democracy, in partnership with PointCulture, La Maison in Brussels and Radio Panik, organized a day of workshops, meetings open to all in order to seize these reflections and to pursue them in a context of sharing knowledge specific to the practices of common. Artfactories/other parts contributed well.
Considered as a specific way of managing a resource, as a political principle offering an alternative to capitalism or as a whole of citizen activities based on participation, the commons question the dominant models. Today, all over the world, many activists, artists, cultural operators, culturals, developers, lawyers, residents or associations who implement the principles of common, bringing a new way of working, a new way of living together, a new way of doing business. Following the publication of the Journal of Culture – Democracy No. 45 – "Friches" dossier and the Nine Essentials for Thinking Culture in Common(s), Culture – Democracy, in partnership with PointCulture, La Maison in Brussels and Radio Panik, organized a day of workshops, meetings open to all in order to seize these reflections and pursue them in a context of sharing knowledge specific to common practices. Artfactories/other parts contributed well. Jules Desgoutte, co-coordinator of Af/Ap, led a workshop: "Between the work of the common and the practice of spaces, the relationship to the work in the intermediate places."
Intermediate spaces differ from both third-places and squats by the emphasis placed on the relationship to the work. This naturally led these experiences to become part of the cultural sector, and to identify their practices as artistic practices. Yet these are first of all space practices, and as such they belong to the large family of space occupations. Their experiments are therefore deployed on three levels: art, urban, political. Since this hybridity, these practices question the divisions of work at work in the professional sector of art as well as the great partition between Nature and Culture. They do so not only as places, but as environments, because these environments form as common environments, as close as possible to the notions of third-landscape at Gilles Clément or commoning at Elinor Ostrom.
Culture and Democracy has published the proceedings of the meeting in Notebooks No. 8. After a general introduction to several voices, the meeting of 7 June was divided into two stages: a time in workshops and a time in plenary, represented in this issue of the Cahiers by two "parts". For the "returns on workshops" reproduced in these pages (volet 1), each facilitator was invited to deliver an account that is based both on his own proposal to leave and on the exchanges and restitutions that followed the workshops. These contributions therefore do not offer verbatim but give back in essence, in an augmented version, the proposals and discussions that took place at the meeting.