Contents Published in Great Britain in 2015 by The School of Architecture University of Sheffield Copyright © The University of Sheffield All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electrical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN: 978-0-9929705-4-3 Montagna Viva, The Living Mountain: Conversing with an experiment in making (the local) in common Fabio Franz & Bianca Elzenbaumer Brave New Alps (Sheffield School of Architecture & Leeds College of Art) In our mountains we construct on that which remains of a culture of solidarity and love for the soil, in order to experiment with new forms of economy, agriculture and culture. We do so by digging into local memory but also by opening up to the memories and knowledges of other peoples. Montagna Viva Fig. 1. “Riprendiamoci il parco di Monchio” (“Let’s take back Monchio’s park”), 2009 – the first popular action carried out by Montagna Viva. Image courtesy: Montagna Viva. In April 2015, we travelled to a village in the Northern Apennines in Italy to visit the citizen-led initiative Montagna Viva.1 This two-day excursion was part of an ongoing series of exchanges we have been cultivating with initiatives experimenting with the commons, radical education and practical making, whilst also developing (as Brave New Alps) a project 425 dealing with the question of how to foster non-capitalist spaces in the rural area of the Southern Alps where we both grew up.2 These exchanges are driven by a yearning to create alliances that strengthen and inspire everyone involved. For us, these alliances can also help counteract the sense of isolation – and possible worthlessness – that may arise when activating cultural projects for progressive social change outside centralising and catalysing metropolitan nodes. While enacting this yearning for connectedness and dialogue, we inscribe ourselves in a feminist knowledge politics that is about working out shared meanings and creating transversal conversations as a “mapping gesture” (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2002), which charts operational points for orientation and further conversation. In this sense, by writing this text, we want to open up our conversation with Montagna Viva for others to join in and to (hopefully) find elements that energise, nurture and trigger multiform experimentation in a diversity of contexts. Situating Montagna Viva Montagna Viva - Associazione per il fare in comune (“The Living Mountain - Association for making in common”) is an Italian association that is active in and around Monchio since 2009. Monchio, a rural village with 300 inhabitants, is located in the Northern Apennines, about one hour car drive from Modena, in the region of Emilia Romagna. Montagna Viva was founded by a group of friends and neighbours living in the village, following the initiative of Dagmar Diesner, a German migrant rights activist and video maker, and Massimo De Angelis, an Italian political economist and autonomist Marxist theorist who has written extensively on the commons. At the time the association was born, the couple and their two small children had only recently relocated from London to Monchio, this being the village where Massimo (brought up in Milan) would spend many of his summers in his family’s holiday home. Situating Dagmar and Massimo Dagmar and Massimo are both highly educated, with a very broad set of interests, who at a certain point decided to pull out from their urban life and the mostly urban-based struggles they were involved in, in order to radicate their lives and their activist practice in a place that stands in stark antithesis to London. For us, it is interesting to reflect on how they managed to transform their new everyday environment into a testing ground for communal speculations and experimental interventions, and where to activate in practice a profound interest for the commons and pratices of commoning. Having previously lived, studied and worked in a global context and been involved in the alter-globalisation movement, migrants rights struggles, the European Social Forum, and anti-GMO protests, moving to Monchio, Dagmar and Massimo brought with them the desire 426 to contribute their knowledges and experiences to the wellbeing of the village and its surrounding area. Moreover, they brought with them an attitude, which, rather than focussing narrowly on the problems that affect the everyday of this small locality without inquiring where these come from, they recognised the importance of addressing the multiple connections that tie peripheral places such as Monchio to the global context that they act and evolve within. Thus, Massimo and Dagmar brought with them the need to find and create meaningful relationships between their new everyday experience and the phenomena and struggles taking place in other parts of the world. A descriptive account of the association’s activities In its early days, Montagna Viva was called Monchio Vive (“Monchio Lives”) and was constituted by an informal self-organised group of citizens, who first gathered around the initiative Riprendiamoci il Parco di Monchio (Let’s take back Monchio’s Park, 2009). Under the motto “They told us to get by and so we get by”, this initiative aimed at repairing, cleaning and revitalising the municipal public park, which had become semi-derelict because – as members of the group were told – the municipality did not have the money to look after it. On that occasion, a large number of inhabitants gathered at the park, bringing their skills, tools and materials, but also food, drinks and music. In just one day, the group managed to completely restore the park and its features in a joyful and convivial, almost party-like atmosphere. Encouraged by the success of the initiative, a few months later, some members of the newly formed group proposed to occupy Monchio’s elementary school, at the time being threatened with foreclosure as a consequence of the cuts to public spending and the small number of children attending the school. This proposal of occupation included taking over the teaching activity, thus activating the knowledges and skills held by the various parents. Being conceived more as a quick act of resistance with an eye to set in motion the local media machine – almost in the style of Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo, the famous mayor of Marinaleda, the small communist utopian village in Andalucía 3 – however the planned occupation was not carried out, but members of the group are sure that the idea of this direct action reached the local politicians by word of mouth as indeed, six years later, the school is still open. These initial proactive and somewhat mischievous activities were followed by the constitution of the association Montagna Viva and with more imaginative initiatives and actions, including two children’s parties; the collective writing and performing of several theatrical plays based on globalisation and food (Fig. 2), GMOs, and the Nazi fascist massacre of partisans in Lama di Monchio and surrounding villages in 1944; and several 427 events under the title Noi ed il mondo (Us and the world, 2011) (Fig. 3), which brought attention to concerns such as climate change, migration and the oppression of women. Moreover, Montagna Viva joined in with already established activities such as a variety of village celebrations, the local scarecrow competition and nativity scene exhibition, but always taking a critical anti-capitalist stance and expressing this through the objects produced for these events. Another important highlight to note was that in 2011 Montagna Viva established the community garden La Cuccagna (The Abundance) (Fig. 6 and 7), which is ongoing and is linked to several other initiatives such as restoring an old fountain (Fig. 4 and 5) and campaigns around water as a common good. Fig. 2. A scene from the theatrical production “Il nostro Pane quotidiano” (“Our daily bread”), 2010. Image courtesy: Montagna Viva. Fig. 3. “Donne del mondo: tra crisi e beni comuni” (“Women of the world: between crises and the commons”), a public event with Silvia Federici as part of the series “Noi ed il mondo” (“Us and the world”), 2011. Image courtesy: Montagna Viva. Fig. 4. Restoration of the old lavatory in Lama di Monchio, 2012. Image courtesy: Montagna Viva. Fig. 5. Inauguration of the restored lavatory, 2012. Image courtesy: Montagna Viva. 428 Fig. 6. The members of the association working on the communal garden, 2011. Image courtesy: Montagna Viva. Fig. 7. The communal garden in its current form, 2013. Image courtesy: Montagna Viva. Relating the local to the global and vice-versa As these actions and initiatives show, the people involved in Montagna Viva are moved by the desire to face and transform, in a slow and collaborative manner, different problems that affect the village, the territory it is part of, and the wider global context localities like this act within. Indeed, what the association considers as its arena of speculation and intervention4 goes well beyond the uniqueness of the local with its specific problems, and is instead made of those points in which the local and the global intersect – where current multiform global environmental, social and economic crises impact on the local environment, society and economy. The evident symptoms of the global violently bursting into the local are not tackled uncritically by Montagna Viva, which instead sees them and the activities organised to ‘do something about them’ as important occasions to address the way globalised capitalism works, and to pose the question of how we can become more aware of its mechanisms in order to understand how globalisation plays out in our daily lives and what we can do to imagine alternatives to it. The local therefore moves from being a passive victim towards a terrain for imaginative experimentation. Like this, questions around the agency held by the local in moulding these impacts, but also around its responsibilities towards other localities and peoples in the process of constituting the global become very relevant5. Here, our considerations are very much influenced by Doreen Massey’s argument in her text “Geographies of responsibility” (Massey, 2004). By drawing on the work of Arturo Escobar and Ash Amin, she shows how any locality is not always necessarily only a victim of 429 the global forces and dynamics it is exposed to, and how some places are less victims of the global than others. Though Monchio is for instance less likely in the position to influence the global than a metropolis such as London – with the flows of capital it directs, the policies it implements, and the social movements acting in it – it is undeniable that the local economy and the lifestyle of people living in Monchio have very obvious effects on other places and peoples on Earth. Importantly, Massey draws on the work of J.K. Gibson-Graham to address the agency that the local has in the way that it models global forces coming from outside to specific local circumstances. Re-imagining capital and the global happens on a local level, as every place and its people have a varying degree of agency in ‘interpreting’ globalisation – welcomingly embracing it, resisting it and fending it off, or building alternatives to it (Massey, 2004). If this, however, has the power to determine how globalisation acts itself out in other places, it depends on many factors. Making in common, making the commons As the website of the association states, “Making in common is our philosophy to face the big problems of the crises we are going through and that are the effect of a world that is unjust, unequal and dominated by the making of profits. (...) Making in common is the means this association uses. This, however, is not in a technocratic and bureaucratic way, but with the kind of associative spirit we adopt when we get together to do a project that makes the best in us come out (Montagna Viva, 2015b).” Like this, the communal act of making constitutes a methodological framework, a vector that entices and brings people together.6 On one hand this represents a fertile ground from which to start learning about and addressing together the causes of the problems provoked by the global-local interplay. On the other hand it is a means to make, to build community as “a web of direct relations among subjects whose repetitive engagement and feedback processes allow them, through conflict and/or cooperation, to define the norms of their interaction on the basis of other values than those of capital (De Angelis, 2007, p. 65)” and, therefore, to make the commons.7 The commons and the practice of commoning, as a material and social dimension that empowers people to nurture other values and ways of relating than the narrow ones embodied and reproduced by capital (De Angelis, 2007, p. 192), indeed constitute one of the theoretical frameworks informing the activities of Montagna Viva. What we find interesting here, is the fact that Massimo and Dagmar are amongst the people who have coconstructed this framework, which today serves as a reference point for many who work towards progressive social change, and that they direct their actions and experimentation within Montagna Viva and in accordance with it. However, the understanding of these concepts by the other members of the association is arguably very different and less complex, which certainly does not mean that they do not relate to these ideas and the ways 430 of doing them. Indeed, all the members of the group do constantly common in the way they run the association, take decisions, plan activities, negotiate what and how to cultivate in the garden, etc. But possibly they are not aware of the long-term potentials and challenges that are connected to experimenting with these ideas, and of the strategies and tactics that are deployed in other initiatives and projects revolving around the commons in order to deal with the tensions and conflicts that may arise along the way. As in every situation of collectivity, Montagna Viva also has had tensions running through it and gets stuck at certain points where activities do not work out as planned. In dealing with these tensions and blockages in constructive ways, we had a sense that it is important to get everyone involved enthusiastic about adopting an ethos of continuous research and experimentation. Acting with such an ethos opens up the possibility of changing one’s mind, trying something out and evaluating it within the group, changing direction and taking risks. So one big question that arises is how to create an association of inquiring minds and hands that want to explore how things can be done differently. For example, if we speak about commemorating the massacre of WWII, how can a sense of excitement be created about challenging what such a commemoration is, and what politics it proposes and what transformative relevance it can have today? On a theoretical level, for example on the texts on Montagna Viva’s website, this spirit of research and diversification of possibilities for each activity is spelled out, but in practice not everyone embraces it, which in turn creates frustrations and tensions as the imaginaries about what the various initiatives of the association should be vary quite strongly from person to person within Montagna Viva. In fact, at Montagna Viva, taking each initiative and decision through several iterations – also over several years – is a key component in working through contested and contentious issues. Producing commonality in the everyday to overcome divisions created by capital is the formula the group follows. We are convinced that a shared spirit of experimentation and speculation, through which to liberate ourselves from the narrow mental constructs of our everyday, is a vital element to actuate what Montagna Viva strives to achieve: departing from practical activities of making in common and a deep engagement with the surroundings achieve a greater understanding of the locality and what binds it to the global and thus foster people’s power to intervene in it. While this is happening, it seems important to us to also link this ethos of experimentation to the transformation of our subjectivities in order to create and inhabit different possibilities for the future. 431 Opening up imaginaries In terms of opening up imaginaries for desirable futures, we feel that one of the strengths of Montagna Viva is its openness in terms of possibilities. Although problems of contemporary economic, social and environmental crises are points of reference, they are not used as terms that dictate every choice that is being made or that sees future disruptions as something inevitable that we urgently must get prepared for. In this sense, Montagna Viva refrains from “holding the future together” (Brown et al., 2012) through an affective governance that mobilises environmental, social and economic crises and disruptions as tools that dictate urgent action in the present. What Montagna Viva is instead working towards is oriented around a nourishing interpretation of buen vivir, where resilience is not a discursive disciplinary device placed before the process. It is rather adopting an approach where the openness and desire for creating new (and expanding existing) commons allow for diversity and joy, which form a basis that fosters many other beneficial dynamics, such as a movement towards social and environmental resilience. Finally, Montagna Viva seems to us to be formulating what we might frame as the question of the right to the rural. In a world where the majority of people live in cities and where the rural is framed as a space of backwardness and immobility, on which city dwellers on one hand project romantic ideas of the rural life while on the other hand relying on its productivity and capacity to absorb waste to sustain them, projects such as Montagna Viva experiment with the agency of people living in rural areas in shaping their environment, a dynamic and progressive culture, the personal relations developing within them and its connections to the urban and the global. Acknowledgements We want to thank the anonymous reviewer for valuable comments on this paper. We also want to thank Dagmar Diesner, Massimo De Angelis and Jenny Pickerill for discussing the extended version of this text and Richard Crow for being a patient proofreader. 432 References Brown, G., Kraftl, P., Pickerill, J., Upton, C., 2012. Holding the future together: towards a theorisation of the spaces and times of transition. Environ. Plan. A 44, 1607–1623. doi:10.1068/a44608. De Angelis, M., 2007. The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capital. Pluto Press, London. Gibson-Graham, J.K., 2006. A postcapitalist politics. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis/London. Hancox, D., 2013. The Village Against the World, 1st Edition edition. ed. Verso Books, London: New York. Massey, D., 2004. Geographies of Responsibility. Geogr. Ann. Ser. B Hum. Geogr. 86, 5–18. doi:10.1111/j.04353684.2004.00150.x. Montagna Viva, 2015a. La Cuccagna – orto comunitario della montagna [WWW Document]. Mont. Viva. URL https://montagnaviva.wordpress.com/cosa-facciamo/la-cuccagna-orto-comunitario-della-montagna/ (accessed 5.5.15). Montagna Viva, 2015b. Montagna Viva [WWW Document]. Mont. Viva. URL https://montagnaviva.wordpress.com/ (accessed 5.5.15). Petti, A., Hilal, S., Weizman, E., 2010. Intro [WWW Document]. arenaofspeculation.org. URL http://arenaofspeculation.org/intro/ (accessed 5.5.15). Puig de la Bellacasa, M., 2002. Feminist knowledge politics in situated zones: a different hi/story of knowledge construction [WWW Document]. URL http://www.women.it/cyberarchive/files/puig.htm. Notes 1 https://montagnaviva.wordpress.com. 2 COMUNfARE. Exploring popular design and making in common to foster non-capitalist spaces in the Vallagarina district, Northern Italy is being developed in the framework of a practice-led PhD at the School of Architecture of the University of Sheffield. 3 See the detailed account on Marinaleda by Dan Hancox in “The Village against the world” (Hancox, 2013). 4 The term ‘arena of speculation’ was coined in 2008 by Alessandro Petti, Sandi Hilal and Eyal Weizman in the framework of Decolonizing Architecture (now DAAR – Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency), referring to an “intellectual space of critical debate on the spatial futures of Israel-Palestine” (Petti et al., 2010). We here borrow this concept and expand on it, adding the more practical dimension of intervention, which is foundational for Montagna Viva in the sense that the association wants to bridge the gap between theory, study and action in order to effectively change the fabric of its surroundings by intervening in it. 5 For example, this part of Italy is known for its production of Parmigiano Reggiano cheese and balsamic vinegar, two specialities produced locally but that can be found in many supermarkets and restaurants around the world. The production of these commodities en masse relies on destructive industrial farming and agriculture, and on the transport, distribution and marketing systems of the globalised capitalist system. 6 Here, as in the abovementioned initiatives Montagna Viva is directly engaged in, ‘making’ is intended in quite a broad sense, encompassing activities like planning, designing, repairing, building, working the land, building and sharing knowledge, performing, etc. 433