The Laboratory for the Urban Commons is happy to kick start 2024 together with our new guest research artist* Dora Garcia and LUC’s co-founding member, Massimiliano (Mao) Mollona.

On Friday January 12th we are inviting artists, collectives and cultural workers to an open afternoon workshop which will develop as an exchange of practices. Dora and Mao will present some projects that have a most direct relation to the notion of the commons and the collective and would like the participants in the workshop to share their practice with them and the others. The aim of the workshop is to create a common ground and exchange knowledges terminologies and concepts. 

Following the workshop, Dora and Mao  will be present the lecture performance, Production and reproduction - artists at work. Love Labour Art Work. TAKE 2.

Mollona and García have been in conversation together about the notions of art commons for about a year aiming at gathering and articulating knowledge together about this elusive subject. As a teacher and as an artist Dora is mainly interested in what the notion of commons means for artistic practice and art education while Mao as an anthropologist speaks from his research on labour organization and politics. They get very much together on the intersections of artistic labour with reproductive labour and the idea of love as a political tool wondering on how art institutions - museum school - could be made anew through this reflection. Dora and Mao will continue sketching their ‘new unartist manifesto’ reflecting on the political economy of our times with the desire to return periodically in Athens and inform their processes with local cultural producers.

*The conversation/performance of Dora García and Mao Mollona takes place in conjunction with Neo Cosmos ongoing pilot artistic research programme which focuses on practices that are concerned with the redistribution of power, wealth and resources in the field of art and the wider sociοpolitical condition. 

Location: Neo Cosmos project space, Εfstratiou Pissa 51, 117 45, Neos Kosmos

Workshop: 14.00- 16.00

Performance Lecture: 19.00 

Note: It would be helpful to send us an email or message to let us know you are coming and any potential technical support you might need with the material you are sharing with us.

Biographies: 

Dora García is an artist now based in Oslo. sculpts and arranges knowledge as a material in its own right. Using extensive documentary research, she delves into complex topics such as the history of the irrational, subconscious mind, and forges links with the great names in literature––including Walser, Artaud, and Joyce. The oeuvre of Dora García folds up into writing, film, installation, and performance, as is centred around stories which she organises and stages, conjuring situations designed to engage the visitor and trigger unique, introspective experiences. She has presented solo exhibitions at MUSAC in León, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid (MNCARS, 2005, 2022), MACBA in Barcelona, SMAK in Ghent, GfZK in Leipzig, Kunsthalle Bern, Mattatoio Roma and M HKA Antwerp, among others. She has also participated in numerous biennials: Manifesta 2 (1998), Istanbul (2003), Sydney (2008), Lyon (2009), São Paulo (2010), Gwangju (2010), Venice (2011, 2013, 2015) and documenta 13 (2012). In 2021, she received the National Prize for Visual Arts awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Culture and Sport.

Massimiliano (Mao) Mollona is an anthropologist, writer and filmmaker based at the Department of the Arts (DAR) at the University of Bologna and specialising on economic and political anthropology and the anthropology of art. His projects focus on extractivism, class and labour struggles, militant cinema, and art/commons. He is one of the founding members of the Institute of Radical Imagination (IRI) and of the Laboratory for the Urban Commons (Athens).