Johannes Reisigl

System: Rural Commons Assembly
Date: 2019 till present

The Rural Commons Assembly is an emerging trans-local alliance and iterative platform across the Alpine region. Founded in 2021, it brings together more than ten small-scale art and socio-cultural organisations from four countries who are situated in peripheral, mostly rural areas. They all work with and in response to the places they inhabit. Each organisation confronts social, political, economic and ecological complexities through site-specific engagement and fosters cooperative and imaginative livelihood practices on a local scale. The contributing organisations are complemented by individual creative practitioners as well as researchers affiliated with universities in the related regions.

The mission of RCA is to create safer spaces for encounters between contributing organisations and individuals to mobilise situated knowledge, explore each other's diverse practices, learn from first hand experiences and foster new collaborations on the margins. It aims to facilitate mutual empowerment through exchange on the beauties and hardships of situated cultural work in mountain areas. At the same time, aiming to create wider recognition for contributors and their field of practice both towards local constituencies and regional actors in order to support their site-specific engagement and inspire response-able ways of relating to the land and those that inhabit it. 

Doing so, the RCA runs several formal and informal, public and private activities engaging its contributors and the general public. These activities are nomadic annual assemblies, a website and online archive, public workshops, excursions, peer-feedback, shared programming activities and collaborative projects.  The Rural Commons Assembly is the result of several research trips, funded by a working grant from Land Tirol - Abteilung Kultur, which I have undertaken across the Alps between 2019 and 2021 to meet peripheral cultural organisation that work in response to the places they inhabit.

More info: www.ruralcommonsassembly.com

Texts:
- Johannes Reisigl, “Rural Commons Assembly: Art, Culture and Trans-Alpine Cooperation”, published in IG Kultur Magazin, 1.22. Klima Kultur Arbeit 
- Johannes Reisigl, “Something Utterly Common”, self-published

Public presentations:
- Rural Commons & Community Economies: A Practice and Theory Exchange, (symposium), at La Foresta
- Dis Da Lavur, (symposium) at Somalgors74
- Sustainable Development in the Alps (seminar), at ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences
- It Will be What We Make of It (workshop), at New European Bauhaus of the Mountains, Free University of Bolzano

Media:
- MagiC Carpets Landed (catalogue), edited by Benedetta Carpi de Resmini, published by Quodlibet

Roles: Initiator, Curator, Organiser, Facilitator

Images: Verena Nagl