Arfara, Katia. Curating the Commons: Socially Engaged Public Art, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2025.

Curating the Commons opens with a murder. On 20 September 2013, I called a meeting of members of Athens-based migrant and refugee communities and human rights groups at the city-centre offices of the youth migrant organisation “Asante”, in order to start building trust ahead of our collaboration on the Onassis Stegi first public art project: Dries Verhoeven’s No Man’s Land. That September meeting took place as a climate of fear ravaged the city, heightened by the murder of Greek rapper Pavlos Fyssas by members of the neo-Nazi group Golden Dawn two days before. That day, we discussed the risks of a public performance such as No Man’s Land, which explicitly engages with xenophobia and highlights the urgency of that engagement. The communities had agreed to contribute to the project’s robust public program and to help the Dutch director cast the migrant guides, who would be paired with spectators on hour-long tours through the streets of downtown Athens the following May. In that meeting, we also discussed the fear of racial discrimination that migrant communities felt while simply walking in the city centre.

During rehearsals, this manifested in an unexpected way: the police arrested two of the performers in No Man’s Land for suspected illegal residency in Greece. The hostility that the performers encountered in the urban realm drastically changed the artistic parameters of the Fast Forward Festival’s first public art project. By moving outside the walls of the institution, the piece demonstrated that the perception of the public space as a commons—a collectively shared, non-racialised resource that is open and accessible to all the city’s inhabitants—had been eroded, if not completely lost.

Curating the Commons is an in-depth study of performance-centred public art projects that I curated as the artistic director of the Festival from 2014 to 2019 in Athens. Planning Dries Verhoeven’s No Man’s Land for the inaugural edition of the festival shaped my curatorial vision and helped me build relationships with partner organisations that would be integral to all six editions. The story demonstrates just some of the social issues with which I engaged as I curated the festival’s site-specific projects across Athens and the surrounding areas, at a time when the city was the epicentre of the sociopolitical, economic, and migration crises in the Global South.

My scholarly background always informs my curatorship enabling me to slow down and focus on research-driven, collaborative artistic processes. I envisioned the name of the Fast Forward Festival as a contradiction. I wanted to signify “the direct, urgent manner in which it reflects upon sociopolitical issues”, even as the festival “slows down the velocity of cultural production and invites artists to take their time to investigate, explore, reflect” (Arfara 2019). I believe that we can make time for reflection even in urgent situations. I contend that a slow curating that results from embodied relationships among the artist, participants, city inhabitants, other-than-human species, and space itself can generate alternative social relations in inclusive, relational ways that defy visible and invisible spatial enclosures in the urban fabric.

As I emphasise in the book’s introduction, I try to avoid using the term “Greek crisis”, as it territorialises a global phenomenon, attributing responsibility and blame to the country as a whole. I align myself with scholars who consider the alliance of Greece with Southern epistemologies to be particularly enriching ground for the production of new knowledge in the arts and academia. The Global South is understood in this book as a process rather than a fixed geographical entity, one that calls for reimagining the North/South divide. Situating Greece within the Global South can create new possibilities for artistic interconnections across geopolitical formations. Originating from Europe, Asia, and Africa, the artists in the book investigate events that aligned Greece with the Global South, such as precarity and povertisation, the ongoing refugee reception crisis, and damaged ecosystems. In July 2015, while the refugee reception crisis was unfolding in the Aegean islands, German conservative lawmakers proposed that Greece sell ancient heritage as part of its bailout deal. Images of the Parthenon flooded the global media. Curating the Commons stands against the background of this rhetoric that locked Greece into the image of a fragile state of economic dependence and moral inferiority.

I wrote this book because of this polarised social and political atmosphere as a call to rethink enclosures and publicly address the question: Who has the right to the city? Philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s radical quest to claim “the right to the city” through the creative appropriation of urban spaces by local communities catalysed my understanding of the city. For Lefebvre, a humanist neo-Marxist suspicious of the state’s role in neo-capitalism, “the right to the city is like a cry and a demand”, “a transformed and renewed right to urban life” for all those who inhabit the city, independent of ethnicity, nationality, or birth (Lefebvre 1996, 158). My book further expands this emancipatory Lefebvrian theory to include other-than-human species such as plants and animals, in order to engage the readers in an interspecies social space in which the right to the city is a demand made by all species. The driving ambition of this book is to offer new perspectives on academic and curatorial research by reclaiming public space as common space, shaped by the entangled relationships among the city’s more-than-human inhabitants.  

This book reveals the complexity of curating in public space for readers who may not have experienced the Fast Forward Festival firsthand. In the six chapters of the book, I examine research-based public projects by Akira Takayama (Piraeus/Heterotopia), Hikaru Fujii (Piraeus/Heterochronia), Brett Bailey (Exhibit B and Sanctuary), Thomas Bellinck (Domo de Eŭropa Historio en Ekzilo and Simple as ABC #3: The Wild Hunt), Robert Zhao Renhui (The Nature Museum), Chto Delat with Anton Kats (Park Fables), as well as X Apartments-Athens, a site-specific project which featured fifteen Greek and international artists. Acknowledging that I could not just drop artists from outside Greece into the chaotic environment of Athens without a safety net, I developed a community-specific curatorial practice that involved local dramaturges, researchers, scientists, and social workers. Selected based on the needs of each project, they collaborated with the local artists from the very early phases of their research, offering advice on the political dynamics involved.

Curating the Commons is structured around three discrete yet interconnected Lefebvrian models of nonhegemonic spatiality that allow for the combination of several time-spaces: heterotopia, third space, and palimpsest. 'Heterotopia' performs geographer David Harvey's urban commons, 'third space' activates cultural theorist Fred Moten and activist Stefano Harney's undercommons, and 'palimpsest' enacts anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's latent commons. These distinct yet relational models of spatiotemporal ordering function as the backbone for one part of the book, representing different working methods and ways of consciously engaging audiences in an expanded present that includes and renegotiates both the past and the future. Analysed through the lenses of heterotopia, third space, and palimpsest, the projects in this book expand the potential of public art and ways of storytelling. They do not replace reality, but they enable artists and audiences to perceive the city as a constellation of fluid, often underground spaces that interpenetrate and/or superimpose themselves upon one another. By doing so, they perform social spaces, which can potentially activate heterogeneous and interconnected ‘commoning’ practices, triggering deeper relationships with the city and unexpected encounters between humans and other-than-humans.

In this book, I mainly address the field of performance, focusing on its spatial aspect. I argue that public performance can apply its “soft power” to engage the audience in rethinking hegemonic politics of space. Here, I align with Lefebvre’s conception of performance as an activity that can generate consciousness and activate a historically informed, non-hierarchical spatiality. The core argument in this book, simply put, is that bottom-up artistic practices resulting from the embodied relationships among artists, communities (or social networks), and researchers at a historic moment were meant to make space for alternative socialities.

Curating the Commons aims to contribute to the broader discussion about socially engaged public art and the commons, exploring how we can continue the global effort to craft multispecies narratives in response to the crises of our time. Robert Zhao Renhui’s photograph 'We Don’t Build Nests While in Captivity', featured on the cover of the book, is emblematic of this focus on the more-than-human commons: it depicts a massive parrot’s nest he discovered at the National Garden in Athens during his field work for The Nature Museum, a pop-up installation he presented in an abandoned house at 15 Derigny Street in 2018. Each of these nests is home to several families of these exotic “pets” which often escape from their enclosures and form symbiotic communities in the urban environment. This book analyses public art as a model for symbiotic living: a space of constant negotiation that invites readers to imagine non-hegemonic discourses on history, identity, and belonging. Privileging relational processes of being in the city, the public art projects discussed here mobilise performance as a tool of deep sensing: that is, sensing with curiosity, attentiveness, openness, and care in ways that build community. In this book, the answer to the question “Who has the right to the city?” is “All of the city’s human and other-than-human inhabitants”, as they all produce social spaces in everyday life.

 

WORKS CITED

Arfara, Katia. “Inter-National Crossings”. Interview by Savas Patsalidis, Critical Stages, no. 19, June 2019.

Lefebvre, Henri. Writings on Cities, trans. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1996.