I reread the notes I had almost urgently jotted down in the new notebook I had started using on the day I visited Marwa Arsanios’ exhibition. The words still resonate with the energy of that moment: “Activate diverse strategies to communalise the land. End private and colonialist land ownership. From warfare to art, from occupying disputed spaces through agroecology to creating laws that help to communalise the use and ownership of the soil.”
Rereading them, I realised they were more than just notes; they were a kind of heartbeat. I left that room with the certainty – almost unnerved by the clarity of it – that the root cause of almost all conflicts and many of the wounds that pervade our present is encapsulated in that ancient and persistent struggle: the fight for land. The fundamental need for a place where communal life can flourish. The yearning for a space that can be inhabited, cared for and managed collectively. Because deep down, perhaps everything boils down to that: the possibility of putting down roots without asking permission, of sustaining life alongside others on land that belongs to no one, yet can belong to everyone.
In Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, Karl Marx warned that nature does not produce on the one side owners of money or commodities, and on the other men possessing nothing but their own labour-power. This division does not stem from any eternal law or immutable natural order; it is the scar of a historical process, the result of successive economic revolutions and the gradual extinction of older forms of production and communal life. It is in the evolution of land ownership – and other property – and, more precisely, in the expropriation of the commons and the persecution of the social structures that underpin them, where the victory of capitalism can be seen. The commons – shared land, communal forests and mountains, local waters, etc. – have for centuries been the battleground of a system that has privatised what was once a collective bond and sustenance.
Capitalism did not emerge as a simple evolution, but as a disruption that dismantled societies structured around communal ownership and cooperative labour, many of which were linked by vast exchange networks. Before colonisation, cooperation was the norm from the shores of the Indian Ocean to the Andean highlands: one need only recall the ayllus in Bolivia and Peru, or the African communal forms that still resonate in the 21st century. In Europe, too, societies were sustained by the collective use of land and communal practices that, in their daily conflict with feudal power, experimented with models of collaboration that were unprecedented, such as those promoted by heretical movements – Cathars, Waldensians – who imagined alternative ways of inhabiting the commons.
It is no coincidence that, in order to impose itself, capitalism had to implement devastating violence: persecution, the disciplining of bodies and the extermination of thousands of women during the centuries of witch-hunts. As Silvia Federici argues inPatriarchy of the Wage: Notes on Marx, Gender, and Feminism: “Far from being a carrier of progress, the development of capitalism was a counterrevolution that subverted the rise of new forms of communalism produced in the struggle, as well as those existing on the feudal manors on the basis of the shared use of the commons.”
In Marwa Arsanios’ exhibition, the audiovisual pieces do more than document; they propose. Each one opens a fissure in the dominant idea of ownership and tries out other possible ways of inhabiting the land from conflict zones.
The first video unfolds with a slow, almost geological cadence. The camera lingers on mountains, the texture of the soil, the breathing of the landscape. A female voiceover permeates the images. At times, it seems as if the mountain itself is speaking, as if the truth were sprouting from the rock. The message is simple yet radical: we could live and inhabit in other ways, because this land belongs to everyone and no one.
In Kurdistan, where the possibility of self-determination remains a pending issue, the land is not a theoretical abstraction, but an open wound. Marwa explained to us how “the soil, the land and the landscape are elements lying at the heart of Kurdish ideology”, and the weight of historical suffering is palpable in this first piece, where territory is memory and, above all, a field of dispute.
The exhibition’s first two works have something of a pedagogical gesture about them without resorting to the classic documentary format. While the first piece articulates the worldview of the Autonomous Kurdish Women’s Movement through the landscape, the second piece provides a face and voice to that theory. As the artist explained, we hear from women who have chosen to “live differently, although very consciously, producing another kind of habitat”.
The second piece is set in Jinwar, a village built and inhabited by women in Syrian Kurdistan. In Kurmanji, jinwar means “women’s land”, and the project is inspired by Jineolojî, the science of women formulated by Abdullah Öcalan, which envisages a society free from patriarchy. Since 2018, women and children have lived there communally, organising around agroecological practices and forms of self-management. Thirty houses, arable land, a school, a farm and a bakery comprise this oasis, functioning as both a refuge and a political statement.
Jinwar is located in northeastern Syria, in the region known as Rojava, near areas occupied by the Erdoğan government. In this volatile territory, Turkish-backed armed groups have repeatedly attacked towns and villages, forcing further displacement and prolonging a cycle of violence that has continued since the emergence of the self-proclaimed Islamic State. Against this backdrop, the Jinwar experience assumes a special significance: it is a utopia that is being built amidst conflict rather than waiting for better times.
With the support of local authorities and humanitarian organisations, a group of women began rebuilding the village with the aim of creating a safe space. But the project extends beyond protection. Jinwar aims to demonstrate that life can be organised without a central figure of power. The assemblies are open; the decisions are collective. There is no single leader, but rather a daily democratic practice that tries out on a small scale another model of society. In Jinwar, this utopia is being built in spite of – or perhaps as a response to – armed conflict and the struggle for land. It is a deliberate anomaly: a community that here and now embodies the equality it proclaims. Perhaps this is most insistent lesson of the exhibition: struggle consists not only of creating the conditions that allow for utopia, but also of embodying them. Not postponing utopia, but practising it. Transforming political desire into a present way of life, as an almost speculative practice or a prefigurative politics.
At Tipi Kooperatiba, we have spent more than a decade trying to open small fissures in the way the public and the commons are managed. Rather than making grand pronouncements, we talk about concrete processes. From urbanism and local governance, we work towards bringing together locals and agents in the territory so that they can discuss, negotiate and decide what they need and how to organise the resources to make it happen. The question is simple yet at the same time profoundly political: who decides what belongs to everyone?
In the exhibition La tierra no será poseída (The Land Shall Not Be Owned), I found an echo of this endeavour above all else. A common thread that connects with a line of work that we have been trying to address for years: public-community collaboration.
Public-community collaboration is not merely a slogan, but an institutional framework that seeks to democratise the management, and in some cases the ownership, of goods and resources. Although it takes various forms, it shares a common principle: cooperation between organised civil society – communities, associations and cooperatives – and public administration to jointly govern and manage common services and goods. The aim is not to replace the state or delegate everything to the community, but rather to build a partnership that prioritises the common good.
This formula, partly inherited from communal systems that have functioned for centuries in various parts of the world, is currently experiencing a resurgence. Many of these experiences have emerged in response to the ecological and social crisis, as well as the need to try out institutional frameworks that are more compatible with environmental limits. Various municipalities and territories are experimenting with democratic innovations to cooperatively manage essential areas such as water, energy, housing, care, food and urban spaces.
From the agri-food sector to energy communities and services such as housing and care, public-community collaboration demonstrates that collective resources can be managed outside strictly market-driven logic. And not merely as an ethical alternative, but as an effective model that generates social, environmental and even economic impacts that are essential in the present and strategic for the future.
There are plenty of concrete examples of this way of doing politics close to home. In Hernani, the Hernani Burujabe project has become a laboratory of local sovereignty. Its premise is clear: to plan and manage those areas strategic to life – housing, energy, care, etc. – from the municipality, and to do so through sectoral working groups where the public sector, the economic-cooperative fabric and organised citizens come together. It is in this shared space that projects are designed, resources are allocated and the economic orientation of each sector is decided. The aim is not only to coordinate actors, but also to redistribute power. As these dynamics take hold, the municipality gains sovereignty over the inertia of the “free” market and promotes cooperatives that directly address the needs of its inhabitants. Here, sovereignty is not an abstract concept, but rather an everyday administrative practice.
In Galicia, communal forms persist, rooted in centuries of history. Community-owned mountains and parish-managed water systems remain vibrant structures of rural self-governance. The Comunidade de Montes de Couso, in the province of Vigo, is one of the most paradigmatic examples of the more than 3,000 mountain communities in Galicia today. After community management of the mountain was reinstated in 1984, it embarked on a firm commitment to multifunctionality in 2008: sustainable forestry production, cultural dynamisation, and environmental and social projects. All profits are reinvested in the territory, and not only in economic terms. In recent years, the community has collaborated with cultural organisations and artists to collectively rethink the type of mountain they desire and require. In this way, the commons cease to be a legal relic of the past to become a space for political imagination. Through assemblies, reforestation efforts and cultural projects, the mountain has once again become what is has always been: a place where the community recognises and organises itself.
The public-community model provides a genuine framework for the democratic reappropriation of the commons, opening the door to an alternative economic policy based on collective sovereignty over basic resources.
The political scientist Elinor Ostrom, winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics, provided a solid empirical basis for this intuition. In Governing the Commons, she examined community management experiences in a variety of contexts, such as Switzerland, Japan, Spain, Turkey, the Philippines, Canada and Sri Lanka. Her conclusion questioned the dogma that only privatisation or centralised state control ensures good management. When user communities can design their own rules, establish monitoring and control mechanisms, and participate in transparent governance structures, the management of common resources – fisheries, aquifers, pastures or forests – can be not only sustainable, but also more effective.
The values underlying public-community collaboration are clear: prioritising the common good over economic profit and striving for social justice through collective action. In a context of war, climate emergency and growing inequality, rethinking the governance of basic goods and services is no longer a theoretical option. It is a political imperative.
Communities holding out in disputed territories and public-community collaboration practices trying out new forms of governance share the same intuition: land – and with it, the goods that sustain life – can no longer be treated as a commodity. If conflict over land has characterised the history of capitalism, it could also signal the beginning of its transformation. Perhaps the challenge of our time lies in this: transforming the defence of the commons into a political project, daily practice and a shared horizon, into making every institutional fissure of every organised community not a heroic exception, but rather a tangible harbinger of another way of living together.