“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
Across Europe, cultural and educational spaces are feeling real pressure right now — especially the conditions that let us learn, create, and think together across disciplines, borders, and institutions.
School of Commons is our global hybrid learning ecosystem for transdisciplinary peer learning and commons-based knowledge production. We’ve supported 157 collaborative projects since 2017, with a growing network of participants + alumn*.
Learning together creates space against disappearance — world-making, again and again.
Huge thanks to everyone who’s already co-signed the letter and reached out — looking forward to connecting more in the coming days.
You can support this work:
Co-sign the open letter.
Share widely.
Connect with us.
🔗 Link in bio
#SchoolOfCommons #CollectiveLearning #KnowledgeCommons #PeerLearning #AlternativeEducation
What is School of Commons?
School of Commons is a global, commons-based, peer-driven learning community working across disciplines and geographies.
Learning unfolds through peer facilitation, self-organisation, shared responsibility, and collective study — grounded in process, experimentation, and transdisciplinary exchange.
Open to individuals and groups, regardless of professional background, it brings people together to learn from one another across contexts.
Since 2017, this has grown into 150+ collaborative projects and a distributed community spanning six continents.
At its core, the work challenges traditional models of education — shifting away from hierarchy, closed knowledge, and competition, towards shared practice, commoning, and collective, self-organised knowledge production.
It moves within, alongside, and beyond institutional education — at a time when spaces for collective learning are increasingly fragile.
This work continues.
You can support this work:
• Read and co-sign the open letter • Share this campaign • Connect with us about partnership or funding
🔗 Link in bio
“When spaces for collective learning disappear, what is lost is not only a programme, but a shared infrastructure for thinking, organising, and imagining together.”
#SchoolOfCommons #CollectiveLearning #KnowledgeCommons #PeerLearning #AlternativeEducation
Introducing: The Text Bites Its Tongue
A project by footnotes — participants in School of Commons 2026.
footnotes consists of Eliana Kirkcaldy, Johanna Ackva, and Lotta Beckers, who have met at a crossroads of intersecting curiosities around historical and contemporary languages of desire. Looking at (mostly female*) writing on longing, the erotic, and one’s own and/or the lover’s body, they search for moments in which (hetero)normative representations of desire are disrupted, counterpointed, and stripped of their power to shape relationships and intimacy.
The Text Bites Its Tongue is a trans-disciplinary collaborative research project exploring written and spoken languages of desire — understood as a shifting field where sensuality, sexuality, intimacy, and affect intersect.
At its centre is language itself: its grammars, its attractions, its humour, and its failures — playing as much of a role as the visceral experiences it seeks to describe, and the unconscious dimensions it cannot fully grasp.
Research questions emerging through the project include:
— How can the experience of desire be transformed by commoning its languages?
— How does writing and speaking desire reveal its more-than-personal, structural, and social dimensions?
— How can we foster languages of desire as a way of searching for a more desirable world?
Learn more: /program/labs/the-text-bites-its-tongue
Image courtesy of The Text Bites Its Tongue
#schoolofcommons #soc26 #thetextbitesitstongue #footnotes #zhdk
Introducing: Peerticipatory Worldplay
A project by Rok Kranjc and Pablo Somonte Ruano — participants in School of Commons 2026.
Rok Kranjc is a researcher and artist working with games and performative methods as engines for networked post-capitalist imagination. With a background in sociology and political ecology, he collaborates across initiatives including Crypto Commons Association, Futurescraft, Aksioma, Maska Institute, and the P2P Foundation.
Pablo Somonte Ruano’s practice explores prefigurative politics, alternative economies, structural violence, and decentralized technologies, engaging with the politics of computation, language, value, time, and games.
Peerticipatory Worldplay brings together speculative design, worlding, and LARPing as tools for collective imagination and economic experimentation. The project explores how shared fictional worlds can function as “commons” — remixable, co-owned, and generative of further world-building and social practice.
Rooted in four years of collaboration across “gaming for the commons” and speculative design, the project develops a modular framework for “alternative economic worlding” — combining open-source worldbuilding, role-play, collaborative storytelling, and speculative artefacts as tools for rehearsing radical alternatives.
Research question emerging through the project:
How can speculative design, worlding, and LARPing function as hyperstitional tools to build shared, self-sustaining fiction commons for prefigurative politics and collective economic experimentation?
Upcoming:
WORLDPLAY
07.06.2026 — 13.06.2026
Commons Hub, Hirschwang an der Rax, Austria
https://worldplay.art
WORLDPLAY is an opening move for a network exploring the revolutionary potential of play: what changes when games are treated as ways of organising, not just expressing? How do those changes travel beyond a single gathering, carried through practice?
Learn more: schoolofcommons.org/program/labs/peerticipatory-worldplay
#schoolofcommons #soc26 #peerticipatoryworldplay #zhdk
Introducing @eternal_terra_ear Encrypted Geometry, Stratospheric Axes. ÉTÈ Institute Institute Manifesto 2026
A Protocol for Organizational Sovereignty and Agile Aesthetic Intelligence
Investigation: We propose to investigate the "relational friction" inherent in international technology transfers and large-scale infrastructure development, specifically focusing on the axis between diplomatic/trade-based European institutional frameworks and Global South implementation. Crucially, we extend this investigation into the "Vertical Linkage": the emerging stratospheric geopolitics of High-Altitude Platform Stations (HAPS) and orbital data constellations. We seek to map how the transition from terrestrial fiber-optics to high-altitude wireless protocols reshapes the "digital divide," moving beyond Earth-bound auditing by architecturalizing the verticality of technical governance into hyperbolic geometry. This research treats policy and stratospheric airspace rights not as static text, but as coordinate logic within a 3D volumetric system map.
Hypothesis: We believe that the current failure of "humanitarian" tech infrastructure is rooted in enforced separation. When artists, researchers, and local actors are separated from the governing code, and the physical altitudinal layers, of a project, the system becomes extractive. Our hypothesis is that Encrypted Geometrical Composition, a method of visualizing roles and orbital altitudes as spatial nodes, reveals hidden power imbalances that traditional text-based reporting obscures. In the stratosphere, where legal jurisdictions are blurred, we suspect that "Equilibrium" between ground-level agency and orbital oversight is the only honest metric for sovereign development.
As the Internet shifts to HAPS and orbital arrays, the risk of a "Neo Colonialism of the Airspace" grows. By decoding these structures through decentralized community building and agentic system design, ETE Institute seeks to create a new condition for organizational thought.
[email protected]
Sovereign manifesto @yidi.lola
audiovisual @erotiqqq
team composition: @joaquina.s@afimoh_____@komun.aes@ish.global.online
Introducing: Unwrapping The Arts
A project by Anna Campani — participant in School of Commons 2026.
Anna Campani is a Fine Arts student at Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), born in Rome, Italy. Her project emerges from two intersecting concerns: the lack of affordable materials available to students, and the significant waste generated by museums, galleries, and exhibition spaces.
Unwrapping The Arts explores how materials discarded by exhibition systems — from display structures and packaging to archival remnants and storage elements — might be recirculated into artistic practice. While often no longer needed institutionally, these materials remain viable for experimentation, prototyping, and creative production.
The project seeks to create a dialogue between cultural institutions and art students, connecting surplus materials with those who need them, and reframing waste as a shared resource.
Research questions emerging through the project include:
— How can museums, galleries, and exhibition spaces be put into dialogue with students seeking materials for their artistic practice?
— How can this relationship be made visible and actionable, creating a direct link and a form of cooperation in response to the climate crisis?
Learn more: schoolofcommons.org/program/labs/unwrapping-the-arts
Image courtesy of Unwrapping The Arts
#schoolofcommons #soc26 #annacampani #zhdk
Introducing: Mou Gan Project
A project by Chengwei Xia, Huiqiao Qiu, Shuhao Lin, Songzi Wang, Xiyun Tan, and Gu Qiu — participants in School of Commons 2026.
Mou Gan Project is a transdisciplinary collective bringing together a community leader, artists, a social science researcher, an ethnographic writer, and an environmental expert. Together, the group approaches bio-cultural practice through multiple lenses, fostering dialogue among communities navigating ecosystem degradation, the erosion of cultural memory, and governance challenges — particularly the marginalisation of local knowledge within environmental governance.
Based in Laoshi village in western Hainan Island, China, the project unfolds within a landscape where seawater meets freshwater flowing from the island’s central mountains. This meeting of salt and fresh water sustains rich biodiversity while supporting the traditional practice of sea salt production — both historically and in the present day.
Through situated research and collective inquiry, the project explores the village’s bio-cultural history as a living entanglement of ecology, foodways, beliefs, traditions, and the relationships between human and non-human entities.
Research questions emerging through the project include:
— How do residents culturally and socially shape relationships between ecological systems and community life through everyday practices?
— What collaborative actions — through art, science, storytelling, and governance — can nurture, restore, or reimagine connections between local ecologies and culture?
— How can learning from a specific local knowledge system reshape broader understandings of knowledge production and environmental governance?
Like the growth of a tamarind tree, the project understands these questions as interconnected systems: roots grounded in local context, a trunk enabling exchange, and branches extending outward toward wider governance and ecological questions beyond the village itself.
Learn more: schoolofcommons.org/program/labs/mou-gan-project
Images courtesy of Mou Gan Project
#schoolofcommons #soc26 #mouganproject #zhdk
Introducing: Alongside
A project by Mary O’Neill, Dr Paul Alexander Stewart, and Anouk Mirte Hoogendoorn — participants in School of Commons 2026.
Mary O’Neill is an artist, author, and educator whose practice engages with profound cultural experiences that often leave us mute, such as isolation and loss.
Dr Paul Alexander Stewart is a socially engaged artist and curator based in Newcastle.
Anouk Mirte Hoogendoorn is an artistic researcher working with text, textile, and performance.
Alongside explores learning not as accumulation or measurable success, but as a process of becoming. Through the propositions “The Expert Learner,” “Show Don’t Tell,” and “Convivial Parallel Play,” the project experiments with forms of learning that move beyond traditional teacher-student hierarchies and fixed models of collaboration.
The project asks how learning can emerge through proximity, parallel practice, shared attention, and mutual support — recognising that collaboration is not always consensus, and that working alongside one another may allow space for difference, fluidity, risk, uncertainty, and multiple ways of engaging.
Research questions emerging through the project include:
— How can we develop supportive and inclusive learning strategies that move beyond traditional models of expert teachers and passive students?
— What does it mean to engage in “learning as becoming” rather than learning for accumulation or measurable success?
— How can teaching become a form of being alongside learning, rather than directing it?
Rooted in relationships across generations of teaching and learning — where one member taught another, who later taught the next — the collective reflects on how forms of “being alongside” emerge over time, and how these modes of learning might be shared forward.
Learn more: schoolofcommons.org/program/labs/alongside
Image courtesy of Alongside ‘ Show don’t tell - learning alongside’
#schoolofcommons #soc26 #alongside #zhdk
Introducing: A Woman in The World (AWITW)
A project by Sabine Hagmann and Susanne Hofer — participants in School of Commons 2026.
Sabine Hagmann (she/her) is a transdisciplinary artist, educator, and activist based in Zürich. In collaboration with Susanne Hofer, she is developing A Woman in The World (AWITW). Sabine’s practice revolves around questions of who we are, how we move in and between worlds, and how we relate to others.
Susanne Hofer, born in Linz an der Donau, Austria, studied Technical Mathematics at JKU Linz before moving to Zurich at the age of 23 to study Fine Arts, Film/Video, and Transdisciplinarity at Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). After graduating from film school in 1997, she worked as a camera assistant and cinematographer for feature and documentary films.
A Woman in The World (AWITW) is an artistic practice-based research project that emerged through shared concerns within both artists’ practices: a series of interviews with women about decisions and turning points (Susanne Hofer), alongside care work and research into the multifaceted life of an older woman (Sabine Hagmann).
Research questions emerging through the project include:
— How do we involve the women we want to meet in our project?
— How can we navigate between a participatory approach and individual authorship?
— How can we develop a concept for our final road movie project?
— How can we create a community beyond individual events, and make the process and findings accessible and sustainable beyond momentary participation?
Learn more: schoolofcommons.org/program/labs/a-woman-in-the-world-awitw
Image courtesy of AWITW
#schoolofcommons #soc26 #awitw #sabinehagmann #susannehofer
Introducing: Roots and Nerves
A project by Pakhi Sen — participant in School of Commons 2026, and visual artist, educator, and illustrator based in Goa. Her practice moves across painting, comics, participatory storytelling, journaling, and visual research, exploring ecology, memory, and community. She also develops arts pedagogy with neurodiverse learners at The Owl House.
Set in Aldona, North Goa, Roots and Nerves draws from the Khazan wetlands — a unique socio-ecological landscape shaped by tidal rhythms, biodiversity, and collective stewardship.
Developed with neurodivergent learners at The Owl House, this participatory ecological arts initiative explores how sensory perception shapes our relationship to environment, and how different cognitive orientations can offer distinct ways of encountering ecology.
Through guided excursions, drawing, play, observation, and sensory repetition, participants form intimate relationships with landscape by attending closely to texture, sound, rhythm, movement, and material presence.
Research questions emerging through the project include:
— How can ecological engagement be made accessible without reducing its complexity?
— How do neurodivergent modes of perception reconfigure what it means to relate to an environment?
— What constitutes relationality across human, technological, material, and ecological domains?
Learn more: schoolofcommons.org/program/labs/roots-and-nerves
Images courtesy of Roots and Nerves
#schoolofcommons #soc26 #rootsandnerves #pakhisen #zhdk
no final answer
an ongoing unfolding
The show is also, quietly, an invitation. Salt Traces works in asynchronous ways, but also through participatory formats —workshops, reading sessions, writing circles, where the boundary between audience and author tends to dissolve.
Liminal space is the space where uncertainty, curiosity and experimentation gives birth to creation.
no final answer
an ongoing unfolding
Visit @salttraces on @studio106la
