Yin Aiwen reading the community dynamic with Les Petites Choses Production. Photo: © Yumin Hunag 11 Sep 2025
17:00 - 18:00
Website Launch: Alchemy of Commons
Join us on the 11 September for the launch of the website, Alchemy of Commons, a project by artist and researcher, Yin Aiwen. As research fellow of Digital Commons 2024 – realised in collaboration with Framer Framed and the Documenta Institute – Yin explored the intersection of art and commons through the lens of digitally assisted governance. By conceptualising art institutions as digital commons villages, Yin’s research challenges conventional notions of productivity and advocates for a more equitable distribution of resources and opportunities.
The desire for collective action and commons-making for social transformation has always been strong in the arts. Social movements come in waves, collectives change and transform with its ebbs and flow. Against the torrent, communities are the ones continuously applying pressure, demanding changes and taking up the baton after the tides. In a contemporary environment that puts emphasis on spectacles and attention, we often associate the intention and value of a movement with the necessary success and longevity of a collective. How then, do we navigate the transformation needed to sustain a movement?
The processural nature of community-building journey serves as the undercurrent that generates collective strategies to mobilise change. But how much do we actually know about a community/collective? Have we ever honestly reflected on what we create, experience, or regret in our communal life? Alchemy of Commons is both a research, a game and a growing set of toolkits that invite practitioners, collectives and organisations to reimagine and unravel the intricate craft and intriguing chemistry of community-making.
In this launch event of the project website, Yin Aiwen introduces the main findings of Alchemy of Commons, the “ontology of community”. Followed by an interactive “astrology reading” of selected cases, Yin gets into a conversation about the challenges to sustain collectivity in a turbulent environment, with programme director of AFIELD Abi Tariq and Framer Framed researchers Emily S.J. Lee and Dewi Sofia. Sign up here.
Alchemy of Commons website. Image courtesy of Yin Aiwen.
This event is in English. Admission is free.
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This event may be photographed and filmed. Kindly let us know in advance if you prefer not to have your picture taken. For seated programmes, places are always made available for wheelchair users. Please speak to the host before the programme begins.
Framer Framed is supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science; Amsterdam Fund for the Arts; Municipality of Amsterdam; and VriendenLoterij Fonds.
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- AFIELD
Links
Art economy / Digital commons & democracy / Politics and technology /
Network
Dewi Sofia
Creative and scholar
Yin Aiwen
Designer, artist and theorist
