Homepage

This publication is anchored in the spirit of a miniseries, or perhaps a pamphlet series. Three volumes, mainly in digital format, include networks of content linked to the Commonwealth project. Through this content, we approach our contexts, ideas, and feelings (many of these contradictory) in various ways and from multiple latitudes that are at times almost impossible to reconcile. The only possible way to work has led us to unravel the semantic content of the “common good,” “commonwealth,” “common debt,” and other permutations from their mix of meanings. Instead of thinking about the utopia of putting something together, we work from the reality that things break and that it is not bad to operate from the cracks. The broken and the interrupted as a positive value. This art project is manifested through such various components as an exhibition, editorial content, and public programs. The sections dedicated to participating artists, mainly from the exhibition at the Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU, not only share documentation of the works in the exhibition but are also approaches to the ideas that fueled them. These materials do not seek to explain the project in a totalizing way; they are an array of multiple approaches to and from it. We have included the fragmentation and changes of direction that have occurred since the beginning of the crisis caused by the pandemic as well as the irresponsible responses to the pandemic exacerbated by our capitalist contexts, racist attacks by the police in the US, and public reaction to these various catastrophes. In the case of Puerto Rico, we keep in perspective the 2019 summer uprising, the unusual seismic activity that has hit the southern section of the island since the beginning of the year, and the fact that at the moment of writing this note we are in the middle of hurricane season. Also, we do not hide the uncertainty related to the next elections in both the US and Puerto Rico. Many things have happened since we started talking, and many more will continue to happen. This project is an invitation to work together, to keep up the dialogue despite our unstable contexts, and to allow art and the thoughts it provokes to sustain themselves as necessary tools from the present. One aspect of our collaboration included the formation of conceptual tools, which are represented in each issue in some way. We organized these tools into three main conceptual categories: Collectivity, Spatial Economies, and Historical Agency. We found these categories useful to think through the artist commissions and the public programs that followed. As a result, the publication is also structured around these principles, creating tracks for the content to follow. This first issue has contributions by three participating artists: Mónica Rodríguez, Sharon Hayes, and Duron Chavis (with Quilian Riano). These provide context, not explanations to their respective Commonwealth projects. There is a journalistic note focusing on Richmond’s Confederate monuments by Brian Palmer. Since the three organizations started to work together a series of working concepts were developed as our orientation tools. Here we present them as a series of icons produced by Lorraine Rodríguez. Also included is a comic strip by Jimena Lloreda.

This issue of the Commonwealth digital publication raises and continues many of the core questions that have animated our conversations about the project from its beginning: how do we begin to define “commonwealth”? How do we acknowledge the historic inequities of our commonwealths without being bound by them as we pursue more equitable futures? When do we reform our systems, and when do we create new, alternate models for pursuing the common good? To add to the range of lenses on and approaches to these questions, we solicited—in addition to Commonwealth’s artistic commissions—journalistic reports, historical case studies, and scholarly essays and dialogues from writers in all three of our commonwealths. Like the artworks, these writings approach the central themes of common wealth, common debt, and the productive tensions that arise in the pursuit of common good from a wide spectrum of methodologies and social contexts. The writings in this issue also speak to the range of methods used to create space for common good and collectively held wealth, encompassing activism, mutual aid, and community organizing. Sometimes these collectives pursued goals of developing separate, self-determined spaces and models outside of those of their predominant capitalist and political systems, and sometimes they demanded reforms from within them. Our hope is to share these narratives as pieces of a larger methodology of questioning, soliciting new perspectives, and respecting differences in positions and context. This second issue of the publication features three contextualizing contributions from artists who participated in Commonwealth: Firelei Báez, Alicia Díaz (with poems by Patricia Herrera), and Nelson Rivera (written by nibia pastrana santiago). This issue also includes two historical case studies: one by Kalela Williams on the founding of the Black-owned United Bank of Philadelphia and one from Mabel Rodríguez Centeno on writer and singer-songwriter Rita Indiana’s new album, Mandinga Times; its accompanying video, After School; and their many resonant intersections with Puerto Rico’s queer, decolonial histories. This issue’s journalist report by Sojourner Ahebee centers on the mutual aid networks that have developed across the West Philadelphia Promise Zone neighborhoods during the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. An essay by anthropologist Yarimar Bonilla reflects on the social and political ramifications of Puerto Rico’s recent history of compounding crises. A new comic strip by Jimena Lloreda is also included. Finally, the conceptual tools first presented in Issue #1 have been transformed into an online game, allowing visitors to group and recombine them. Our hope is that these tools will serve as prompts for further dialogue and new perspectives on the central questions of this project.