Category: news

June 19 2025, Nova Iskra Dorćol, Belgrade, Serbia

Culture as a Common Good is not an abstract concept — it entails models of managing cultural resources based on collaboration, shared responsibility, and the inclusion of communities that use and shape those resources. This approach can help rebuild trust in institutions and create more lasting connections between audiences and cultural organizations.

It is also necessary to rely on existing experiences and practices. In Serbia and the region, there are both traditional and contemporary initiatives already functioning according to the principles of the commons — from shared spaces to participatory artistic and curatorial practices. It is important to strengthen these practices and make them visible.

New methods and abilities are essential for participatory governance. Cultural institutions and organizations must develop capacities for participation, joint decision-making, and horizontal organization. This includes education, but also a willingness to change how they operate “from within.”

Recognizing and valuing different perspectives. It is crucial to include not only cultural professionals but also citizens, artists, activists, and everyone involved in cultural processes, so that approaches can be relevant and sustainable. During the panel-workshop itself, participants concluded that the most important step in opening institutions to communities is defining shared values — values the community can stand behind. All other activities are grounded in these foundations.

Opening up heritage institutions and contemporary artistic production to communities through collaborative governance, financing, and cultural production improves the institutions themselves and offers them protection in times of political and financial uncertainty.

Participants:

Ivan Manojlović, Project Manager, Nova Iskra
Dr Katarina Živanović, Museologist, Europa Nostra Serbia
Dr Iva Čukić, Architect and Urban Planner, Ministry of Space
Marija Dragišić, Conservation Researcher, Republic Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments
Ana Pinter, Director and Theatre Pedagogue, Tri Groša
Miljana Milojković, Producer

Photo Credits: Minja Pavlović

GLAMMONS workshop discusses policy frameworks for cultural commoning in the GLAM sector

On Friday 27 June, the GLAMMONS project hosted a policy-focused workshop at TU Berlin. The workshop brought together researchers, cultural practitioners, and policymakers to collectively imagine the future of commons-based governance in the GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) and cultural heritage sectors.

This event was a significant milestone in developing the GLAMMONS project, which seeks to increase the visibility, recognition, and long-term support of community-led cultural initiatives throughout Europe. In a collaborative setting, participants explored how public infrastructures, funding instruments and legal frameworks might be rethought to better accommodate non-institutional, collectively governed cultural practices.

Particular emphasis was placed on policy development at the municipal level, where many commons-oriented cultural initiatives are anchored in local contexts and depend on enabling frameworks, infrastructures, and partnerships to sustain their work. The workshop emphasised the role of city governments in creating favourable conditions for these initiatives and underscored the necessity of flexible, long-term mechanisms that are tailored to local circumstances.

At the heart of the discussions was a shared conviction that commons-based cultural initiatives represent an expanded, future-oriented understanding of cultural heritage. Their work closely aligns with key contemporary European cultural policy priorities, such as participation, diversity and civic engagement, as set out in frameworks like the EU Work Plan for Culture 2023–2026 and the Council of Europe’s Faro Convention. These initiatives also align with the direction set by UNESCO, particularly through the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, which prioritises practices, expressions and knowledge systems rooted in communities.

These international frameworks are increasingly calling for a shift away from centralised, state-curated understandings of cultural heritage, and towards more collaborative and decentralised approaches. Commons-based GLAM initiatives put these principles into practice. Through inclusive participation, recognition of marginalised perspectives, and creation of shared cultural spaces, they contribute significantly to the democratisation of cultural memory and meaning-making. Their practices are negotiated, caring and collective, embodying an inclusive, post-hegemonic notion of culture grounded in everyday life.

Nevertheless, the workshop also highlighted a number of structural challenges that these initiatives continue to face:

• a lack of visibility in cultural policy research and official statistics, due to insufficient data collection and inadequate monitoring systems
• the absence of legal recognition for commons-based organisational models (e.g. community-governed cultural institutions)
• barriers to accessing existing funding schemes, often due to inflexible legal or administrative requirements
• high administrative burdens associated with funding applications, which place a disproportionate strain on small-scale initiatives
• a lack of long-term and infrastructural support for commons-based cultural work;
• limited connectivity between commons initiatives and formal public institutions, such as museums, libraries, and archives
• insecure access to physical spaces, with many initiatives reliant on temporary or precarious arrangements;
• insufficient knowledge exchange and a lack of transferable good practice models across different contexts
• and a lack of platforms and mechanisms for ‘intercommoning’ – sustained cooperation and mutual learning among commons-based initiatives.

Designed as a space for co-creation and critical reflection, the workshop enabled participants to test and refine preliminary policy recommendations based on the project’s ongoing research. Discussions emphasised the need to move beyond extractive and competitive cultural policy models towards frameworks that support shared governance, care-based cultural labour, and territorially rooted cultural ecosystems.

Insights from the workshop will inform the forthcoming GLAMMONS policy briefs, due to be published in autumn 2025.

At a time when cultural and creative organizations are going through a deep transformation, due to social changes, the digital revolution, the decline of public trust, the ever-present commercialization and privatization of cultural content, as well as the pressures of unsustainable development, the question arises: how to redefine them and re-strengthen their social function in relation to the communities of which they are an integral part?

This is an opportunity to bring together experts from the field of creative sectors, hub managers, cultural heritage, contemporary creativity, representatives of the civil sector and members of initiatives in the field of culture to jointly explore new models of cultural management – those based on openness, power sharing and joint responsibility.

The focus of the conversation will be the concept of culture as a commons – not as a theoretical ideal, but as a practical framework for thinking and designing more participatory and inclusive organizations.

This discussion opens up space for specific questions:

• How to develop models that involve sharing responsibility and management practices with the community?
• What are the obstacles in institutional transformation and how to overcome them?
• How can we build sustainable relationships of trust in our communities or between audiences and organisations?

What skills do we need for co-management and collaborative practices in cultural production and how do we get them?

This workshop will introduce Hub managers to some commons’ models for sustainable financing, tools for participatory governance, inclusive cultural collaboration, among other relevant topics. It provides insights for public and private sectors, for commons oriented projects and practical hands on material. In the end, it should also offer a roadmap for implementation for each individual case. 

Sign up for the workshop here.

We’re excited to share that a panel dedicated to Cultural Commons (Panel 5.4) will be part of Knowledge Commons at the XX Biennial Conference of the International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC), taking place from 16–20 June 2025 in Bloomington, Indiana and online.

The panel has been proposed and will be co-chaired by Valeria Morea, Erwin Dekker, and Carolina Dalla Chiesa, and will focus on state-of-the-art research on the cultural and creative industries from an institutional perspective.

We’re proud to highlight two contributions from the GLAMMONS network:

• 16 June, 10:00–12:00 (Massachusetts time):
  Matilde Ferrero will present “Informal artistic practices as cultural commons”

• 17 June, 10:00–12:00 (Massachusetts time):
  Lyudmila Petrova, Ph.D. (CREARE Social) and Marilena Vecco will present “What is cultural in cultural commons”

Both presentations will take place online.

Learn more about the conference themes and how to register here. 

On May 8th, 2025, our partners Creare Social and BSB organized a training and open day in Turin together with Sciences Po. The event aimed to explore the latest research for GLAMMONS, bringing together researchers, young scholars and practitioners. They were hosted in one of the cultural spaces that best represents the city’s ecosystem of cultural commons: the Off Topic. On behalf of CREARE Social, Lyudmila Petrova and Arjo Klamer shared their expertise on the topic.

The day was opened by Marilena Vecco (Burgundy School of Business and Sciences) who invited the participants to an engaging conversation on different findings and tools of GLAMMONS. Further, Marilena Vecco presented the GLAMMONS to the audience and discussed how co-curation practices—particularly those supported through forms of patronage—as a central strategy for commons-based innovation and collective governance. These approaches actively involve communities, foster meaningful relationships, and contribute to wider processes of social development. Enrico Bertacchini, who, although not a member of the GLAMMONS project, but a key researcher on cultural commons from the Turin University reflected on the independent cultural scene in Turin and Italy, framing it through the lens of the commons. His analysis focused on how these spaces emerge in response to urban transformations and, in turn, shape those processes. He identified four typologies of independent cultural spaces, highlighting their relational fluidity and the often non-reciprocal, temporary nature of their collaborations.

Arjo Klamer (CREARE Social) offered an intervention on value – how it is generated, shared and managed in commons practices. Commons, he argued, are intentionally open, fluid, and even chaotic. Their actions and motivations do not always conform to external frameworks or political agendas. For example, when commons-based initiatives occupy an abandoned urban space, their presence is not necessarily driven by a goal of urban regeneration, but simply by the fact that the space is available and meaningful to them. This narrative introduces a new perspective that he defines as personal economy. Building on this, Lyudmila Petrova (CREARE Social) presented findings from research developed within the GLAMMONS framework and introduced some of the tools developed during the three years of the HorizonEurope supported project. More particularly, she introduced the Quality Evaluator and its application to various commons orientated case studies  In this context, the value-based approach (VBA) helps to examine how commons-based practices emerge, evolve, and adapt. The VBA identifies personal, social, societal, and transcendent values as core elements that shape the commons. These values shift over time and context, influencing how commons-based initiatives balance sustainability, autonomy, and adaptability, as the analysis of seven case studies has revealed.

During different interactions, the audience engaged in inspiring conversations about the importance of support to the grass roots initiatives and commons-orientated organisations across Europe.

On Thursday 08 May, a workshop titled “The State of the Cultural Commons”  will take place at Off Topic, Turin, from 9:30 AM to 2:00 PM. The event will present recent findings from the Glammons project, focusing on cultural commons and participatory practices.

Research conducted by BSB and CREARE will be featured, offering an overview of the current state of the arts in this field and exploring its implications for cultural organisations, civil society, research communities, and citizens.

This workshop forms part of the broader Glammons initiative, which investigates how shared cultural resources and collaborative practices can inform more inclusive and sustainable cultural policy and practice.

For more information and to find out about the program click here.

On Tuesday 15 April, Lyudmila Petrova (Creare NL) is presenting at Philea – Philanthropy European Association webinar on “The Heart of Culture: Measuring Value Beyond Statistics”.

Why do arts and culture matter? With the artistic and cultural fields coming under increasing scrutiny comes the need to spell out and justify the value of arts and culture. The 2024 State of Culture report demonstrates how the “intrinsic” value remains challenging to articulate in policy terms yet the instrumentalisation of culture, recognised as a driver for non-cultural issues, is a major growing trend across European and national policies.

“As cultural policy is tuned to serve multiple external goals, cultural activities and practices have come under the quantitative measurement” – State of Culture. Artists and cultural institutions are increasingly pressured by funders to demonstrate their achievements at the conclusion of a project, which fails to capture the long-term effects of arts and culture.

How is philanthropy tackling the challenge of recognising the value of arts and culture beyond quantitative data? Are funders contributing to expressing art’s impact in numbers? What are the practices in terms of monitoring, evaluation and learning that foundations can implement to avoid instrumentalising the field and putting their partners in the complex position to predict and calculate the transformative effect of their work?

She presents the value-based approach methodology and its application in the GLAMMONS.

State of the Arts of Glammons Workshop

BSB and CREARE present the State of the Arts of Glammons, workshop and training session, an event dedicated to exploring the latest research and developments in the field of commons-orintated  GLAMs (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums). 

Date: May 8, 2025
Time: 9:30 AM – 2:00 PM
Location: OFF Topic, Turin. 

This event aims to engage civil society, communities of practices, and research communities in discussions on the current state of values assessment, participatory and self-governance practices as well as skills development of GLAMs. Participants will gain valuable insights into the key findings of the EU project Glammons (glammons.eu), presented and debated by leading experts in the field.

Organized by:
Burgundy School of Business (France) and CREARE Social (The Netherlands)
In cooperation with OFF Topic.