Amy

“When spaces for collective learning disappear, what is lost is not only a programme, but a shared infrastructure for thinking, organising, and imagining together.” School of Commons has been hosted by Zürich University of the Arts since 2017. Over nine years it has grown into a global peer-learning community connecting practitioners, artists, activists, archivists, organisers, writers, architects, scientists, researchers, students, and educators across six continents. ZHdK has now decided to discontinue School of Commons in its current form. The work of School of Commons does not end here. Today we are publishing an open letter reflecting on what has been built and inviting institutions, collaborators, and supporters to help ensure this collective learning space can continue to grow. You can support this work by: • Read and co-sign the open letter
 • Share this campaign
 • Connect with us about partnership or funding 🔗 Link in bio #SchoolOfCommons
#CollectiveLearning
#KnowledgeCommons
#PeerLearning
#AlternativeEducation

A huge and heartfelt appreciation goes to the School of Commons 2025 cohort for their dedication and care in contributing to this publication. Over the past 10 months, we connected through meetups, workshops, residencies, collaborations, and more. This publication reflects the generosity, curiosity, and collaboration of each contributor, exploring the methods, practices, and terms that together shape the individual, collective, and entwined forms of research and practice that form the foundation of SoC 2025. For the 2025 edition, the cohort brought the theme of Exquisite Commons to life by taking the foundations of the ISSUES structure and evolving it into a new process of self-organization. This shift from a linear to a more connective approach created new pathways between the collective theme and individual project contributions — and for the first time, the publication exists across digital, broadcast, and print formats. Collective glossary terms, projects, and contributions include: Common (d)estructuras * El puente_lab (Juan Sandoval & Alejandro Vasquez Salinas) * Mariangela Aponte Núñez ARCHIIIVE * Alisa Probylova * Kateryna Vavrynchuk * Oleksandra Tsapko Broudou School * Sara Bouzgarrou * Cyrine Ghrissi * Aziza Gorgi * Mary Sarsam * Emily Sarsam CHIMERA: A Somatic Practice of Multiplicity * Lou Croff Blake * Madelyn Byrd Tentacular archive * Belén Arellano Cañizares * Giuliana Marmo * Stefan Ralevic * AWOL Colour, an inclusive visual language for climate communication * Yue Wu * Liliana Scapucci Remove, Keep, Define, Arrange. * Klara Branting Paulsell TANTDILE Xperimenta Lab * Jere Ikongio Mentoring as Practice * Nora Sobbe Notes on practicing family * caro bodensteiner Radio-Dreaming into the Electromagnetic Commons * Shortwave Collective Tensile Paradise Field Manual * Layla Fassa * Guillermo Martínez de Velasco Sitting on a chair (a manual on sitting) * Ula Liagaitė Seeds for Survival at the Edge of the Desert * LIOS Labs 📖 Explore the contributions and collective editorial, including an intertextual dialogue on the Exquisite Commons: ➡️ schoolofcommons.org/making-public/issues/2025

ISSUES 2025: Exquisite Commons Digital, Print & Broadcast Publication Launch Event
 🗓 Sunday, 8 February 🕓 11:00–13:00 CET 🌐 Public / Online 🔗 Zoom link in bio Join us for the digital launch of ISSUES, the annual peer-led digital publication marking the collective milestone of each School of Commons (SoC) program cycle, which this year assembles under the collective theme: Exquisite Commons. The event will feature live activations by the publication’s contributors, and ISSUES Steering Committee*, centred around the collaborative offerings of the publication and broader insights into the SoC 2025 cohort’s contributions, projects, and research. 📌 11:00–11:15 Welcome & introduction by editor, @amygow 11:15–11:55 Deep listening session of the Broadcast Publication 12:00–12:15 Open dialogue & reflections with ISSUES Steering Committee 12:15–12:30 Introduction to the Digital Print Publication 12:30–12:40 Print Publication reveal + reflections on self-publishing 12:40–13:00 Collective activity: The Carrier-Bag Theory of Self-Publishing A note on participation: The first hour focuses on the broadcast format. Find a quiet space, grab headphones, take a walk, or lay down — this is deep listening time. Stay for the full session to join the final collective activity exploring alternative modes of distribution. 💫 Who’s it for: Anyone interested in collaborative research, experimental publishing, and connecting with the SoC network. A note on participation: The first hour of the launch focuses on the Broadcast Publication, so participants are invited to lie down, take a walk, or step away from the screen to relax and listen. A quiet space and quality headphones are recommended for the best experience. Attendees are also encouraged to stay for the full 120 minutes, as the final activity, The carrier-bag theory of self-publishing, involves a collective exercise in experimenting with alternative modes of distribution to join the vessel in the sky. ISSUES 2025 Steering Committee: @arellobelen • @flusterbrew3 • @__b.r.i.c.k.s__ • @laylaajoon • @chan_lue ✨ Slide: Collective Glossary #SchoolOfCommons #ISSUES2025

SoC Assembly 2026: Making a Vessel in the Sky
 🗓 Thursday 5 – Sunday 8 February 2026
🌐 Public / Online / CET 🔗 Zoom link in bio The SoC Assembly 2026 is taking shape — not as a fixed structure, but as a living ecology of encounters, practices, and shared work. If ‘Tensile Structures’ names the condition, ‘Making a Vessel in the Sky’ names the response: collectivity brought into being through shared belief, care, and coordination. Not as something fixed or inherited, but as something we actively make — through relation rather than certainty, through practice rather than monument. Across the Assembly, learning unfolds as a living commons — through projects, publications, gatherings, rituals, infrastructures, and shared spaces. Knowledge moves as something held in common, shaped by care, proximity, translation, memory, and more-than-human relations. This is not a structure you enter.
It is a structure you help form.
 Not a framework to stand on —
but a vessel we keep building, together. You don’t arrive at it.
You step into it.
And in doing so, you become part of its making. 👉 Programme overview in slides
🔗 Visit our website for the full programme #SchoolOfCommons #SoCAssembly2026 #MakingAVesselInTheSky #TensileStructures

New Substack post: ‘Reading, and being read, in community’. A longer-form text on carving out pathways for allowing others ‘in’ and myself ‘out’, in order to be read (literally, physically, emotionally) in writing, body, and mind. Read here: /p/reading-and-being-read-in-community Image: Louise Bourgeois, Self Portrait

With delight and a little trepidation, I’m excited to share that as part of the upcoming @radio.worm 25 Hour Radio Relay this Saturday 24th and Sunday 25th January, I will be live performing, together with an accompanying soundscape from @andy.norstrom an adapted first chapter of ‘Communing with the Dark’*, an experimental novel-in-(very-slow)-progress, I have been, and am currently working on.  ‘Communing with the Dark’ is set on an unnamed island, mostly inside a stranger’s home. It explores emotional transference through maternal family lines, physical, psychological, and spiritual blockages, and the roles that nature, (emotional and physical) distance, landscape, and the otherworldly can play in the processes of non-linear healing.  In preparation, Andy and I have been taking some small, local water-related field trips to catch snippets of sound and inspiration. We are excited to share the result with you this Sunday 25th during our 01.30-02.00 timeslot of the broadcast.  Hoping all late night/early birds and fellow insomniacs can join or listen in! *Working title, and indebted phrasal borrowing from Claire-Louise Bennett, Checkout 19 _______ 25 Hour Radio Relay! Radio WORM transforms radio broadcasting into an “experimental variety shop” for 25 hours of live audio. The relay features a continuous lineup of radiomakers, creatives, and Rotterdammers from all walks of life, passing the baton from one show to the next. Last year’s relay was a big success: people came down and connected with new sounds, perspectives, and fellow humans. This year, we are in our big performance space, UBIK, giving you plenty of room to sit, listen, and immerse yourself in the wide range of sound that experimental radio can offer. Expect everything from live radio plays, game shows, acoustic performances, noise sets, interviews, poetry and spoken word, improv choirs, sermons, sound art, dawn choruses, audio essays, to homemade instrument jams, all performed live for both the audience and radio listeners. 24+25 January 2026 - It’s FREE: so pop by!

Calling current and upcoming cohorts, alumn* — We warmly invite you to a School of Commons Town Hall, where we’ll share an update on SoC’s current situation and gather to collectively shape our next steps. For nearly a decade, School of Commons has existed because people like you believed in mutualism, peer learning, experimentation, and accessible knowledge. This moment asks us, once again, to practice these commitments together. During the Town Hall, we will collectively co-write and co-sign an Open Letter, ensuring voices from across the SoC network are heard and included, while also identifying pathways forward. We need your support. Alongside your presence, we also ask for your help in reaching SoC alumn* across your networks, so this invitation circulates as widely as possible. Whether you join to listen, share, write, or simply be present — your participation matters. 📅 Tuesday, 20 January 2026
🕕 18:00–20:00 CET
📍 Online (Zoom) 🔗 Full details and programme overview — link in bio #schoolofcommons #townhall

Anyone who knows me knows I am always, always late to a party. Now I get to be late to two, hehe. Substack ✅ and an end of year reading list 9 days into January ✅. So here goes introducing Off Margin on Substack… Off Margin will continue on @radio.worm across 2026 to explore text that moves off the page. But it is also now cloning itself (sort of) onto Substack where I will be (hopefully) sharing all manner of writing, as part of this growing and expanded practice I am painstakingly honing. Off Margin (Substack) will focus on a multitude of reading and writing lives, and texts that move both off and back on (uh oh) the page. To kick off, I wrote about the role reading and writing has had in my life across the past year and how this has completely transformed my approach to them both as interconnected, active practices that are far more intuiative, embodied, and experiential than I previously gave them credit for. I’m talking about waiting room and insomnia companions, temporal passages, portals to place and space, self-flagilating vulnerability sticks, holistic soothing balms, and much more. Also, as part of a vow to move away from strictly ‘consuming’ books and move into a space of engagement (which can also, sometimes, feel very vulnerable!) this first post is a way of paying homage to all the people, places and books who knowingly, but mostly unknowingly, shaped my reading and writing life in 2025. I hope those who this speaks to will enjoy reading! Link to post here: /pub/offmargin/p/life-reading-life-writing?r=4wa8x&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true Subscribe to Off Margin Substack here: /offmargin

Serpent’s tail 🐍

Serpent’s head 🐍

About other kind of building communities without insisting on citizenship - Gracie Mae Bradly and Amy Gown in conversation abou “Against borders”.

The start of the conversation with Gracie Mae Bradley about her book Against Borders in which Bradley invites us “to dream of a reconfigured world where the borders between nation states no longer control and define us.” (Quote Stella Dadzie). So happy that Guiding Voices asked to host this conversation.