Unlearning to Build Tomorrow’s Commons

What would it mean to begin not from what we know, but from what we must unlearn?

That is the provocation that runs through Annette Krauss’s long-term work on unlearning – through her projects, through her earlier book Unlearning Exercises: Art Organizations as Sites for Unlearning, and now in this new collection, Unlearning Routines of the Impossible. These books are not manuals so much as they are scaffolds for thinking and acting differently. They emerge directly from Krauss’s collaborations, many of them rooted in the Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, a site where artistic practice, pedagogy, and institutional experiment intersect. Casco becomes not simply a container for art but a testing ground for the very question of how we might unlearn institutional habits, reorient resources, and hold open the possibility of commons.

Unlearning here is not an abstract gesture. It is about undoing the sedimentations that prevent cooperation: the ingrained routines of whiteness, property, hierarchy, and “common sense” that quietly reproduce themselves even in spaces committed to transformation. As Nancy Jouwe reminds us, these blockages are not only structural; they are lived, felt, and often reinforced through the lure of quick fixes that promise change without the discomfort of deeper work.

So the question is not only: what can we learn in order to create commons? It is also: what must we unlearn in order to make that possible at all?

Arts institutions have often provided fertile ground for such experiments. They can stage situations, slow down time, and create openings for collaborative risk-taking. But as Annette and her collaborators emphasize, these spaces are never neutral. They carry their own institutional contradictions, ties to funding structures, and inherited exclusions. Which is why unlearning becomes both an outward-facing and an inward-facing practice: undoing societal routines while also working through the institution itself, its front stage and back office, its hidden curricula. Yet the task does not stop there. What happens when we carry these practices into non-art spaces – into politics, classrooms, libraries, workplaces? There, unlearning is tested against new rhythms and constraints. The question of translation becomes crucial: what carries across, and what must shift? Unlearning routines cannot be universal templates; they require sensitivity to context, to histories of struggle, and to the uneven distribution of vulnerability and power.

In this sense, unlearning is both method and ethic. It is not about quick solutions or blueprints. Rather, it is about inhabiting contradictions, resisting the pressure for smooth answers. Spivak calls this “learning to live with contradictory instructions” – a practice that is not paralyzing but generative, a ground for new solidarities. And perhaps most importantly, unlearning is about cooperation. Not the seamless cooperation invoked in policy documents, but the difficult, ongoing work of building trust across difference. It requires attending to the blockages that fracture community: racism, coloniality, patriarchy, property relations. These must be named, unlearned, and transformed if commons are to be built. So as we begin this panel, I want to invite us to think of unlearning not as loss, but as resource. A resource for building commons, for refusing inherited separations between public and private, art and life, knowledge and care. A resource for making cracks in the routines of the possible – and from those cracks, rehearsing together the impossible.

We might also pause to consider this conversation in relation to our own context here at Essex, marked by the announced closure of the Art Exchange and campus gallery. These kinds of closures are too often justified under the language of financial necessity, but what they really signal is the erosion of precisely the kinds of spaces that make unlearning possible: spaces where art can act as a testing ground, where forms of knowledge and cooperation not immediately convertible into profit can be rehearsed. In conditions of mounting financial difficulty for universities, such spaces become even more vital. They remind us that the work of unlearning and commoning is not a luxury or an add-on, but a condition for imagining and practicing other ways of being together.

To open this up, we’ll first hear short interventions from Giovanni Marmont and Camila Vergara, each offering their own angle on these questions of unlearning and commoning. After their contributions, we’ll move into a wider discussion together with Annette Krauss and Marianna Takou from Casco Art Institute, where we can deepen the conversation around these themes and what they might mean for building commons in different contexts.

Note: these are notes for an introduction and framing for the event "Unlearning to Build Tomorrow’s Commons," held on Thursday September 25th, 2025.