Macao and the Struggle for Cultural Commons in Milan
* Article: Macao before and beyond social media: the creation of the unexpected as a mobilisation logic. By Alberto Cossu and Maria Francesca Murru.
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Description
Macao is a cultural project, artistic and political initiative, and place(s) in Milan, interesting for its innovative mobilisations and discourse, and its methods of producing and rewarding cultural creation. This essay analyzes its innovative practices.
1.
"Some of the main pillars of what will become the political discourse of Macao:
1) political action as action with the aim of liberating the transformative capacity of society
2) common good, as opposed to public good, constituted through the political action of violation, divestiture, appropriation and restitution
3) emancipation, not as appropriation of common good but as collectivization of "capacities invested on the scene of dissent"
4) public spaces whose property and management should be given to those that actively and culturally inhabit them."
2.
"In line with the founders’ desire to oppose the neoliberal logic of cultural events, Macao’s first major public act deployed a new meaning of an “event”, as an opportunity for change, insurgence of the unpredictable and irruption of new generative forces in society. “The event is not the solution to predetermined problems, it is rather the opening of new possibilities that pose new questions and solicit the imagination of new replies” (Lazzarato, 2005, p. 13). Bringing back to life the inanimate space of the Galfa Tower created the conditions in which it was possible to start and develop a political discourse on the social role of art and on cultural expression, on the value and the practice of the commons."
Discussion
Rewarding and sharing cultural productions in the Macao centre
Emmanuele Braga explains the attempts of the associated cultural producers at Macao to practice fair rewards for their individual and common contributions to the project.
1) Internal distribution of the CommonCoin for contributions to the centers and its events
2) Setting aside part of external income to fund a basic income for the core of active contributors
3) participation in the Faircoin / Faircoop ecosystem and its Bank of the Commons:
Emmanuele Brago, in "xxx":
"Macao is a centre for art and research, presently based in an occupied building in Milan, Italy. It was born out of a mobilisation in 2012, within the cultural sector of creative industries and art workers. Macao started to collaborate with Freecoin and D-cent in order to design a platform conceived to share means of production and co-production in the art/creative/cultural field. This collaboration is rooted in the network of occupied art spaces that emerged during the political mobilisation of the past five years. Macao is currently proposing to design a crypto-currency (Commoncoin) with very specific features.
The primary and radical question in this process was: can we use an algorithmic, decentralised and peer-to-peer technology rooted on a process of political decision making? Can we base an algorithmic machine on a shared and community-based political value?
The future we imagine is made of decentralised technological infrastructures, distributed and based on algorithms; these are governed by democratic discussions and decisional processes, put into place by communities that share values and ideas. In other words: in a plausible future in which algorithms control our economical, relational and spatial behaviours, the real challenge is to find a way to question them without creating democratic deficit as a collateral effect."