Life Always Escapes
(2009)
How to live together? How can we find ways to survive beyond the systems that try to control and regulate life? Are there ways to exceed the market system? In Life Always Escapes, the Common, as one of the only alternative property models left in the UK, provides a model for working and living together not based on accepted notion of production and exchange of goods. A Common is a piece of land owned by one or several persons, but over which other people can exercise certain traditional rights, “to take or use some portion of that which another man’s soil naturally produces”. Common land is not public, but has a unique legal status based on the rights of use: it is land to be used ‘in common’. The right to what the land naturally produces is the right to its surplus value, in the shape of the branch of a tree fallen to the ground, which does not belong to the tree anymore, nor to the owner of the land on which it grows, and can be picked up and used -but not sold.
A ‘common room’ was made out of modest materials and wood waste, to house readings and research about the commons. The installation is an ad-hoc construction of traditional museum displays made with mostly found materials, with a cabinet housing a collection of postcards of the Commons from the first half of the century, which seem to relate more to a history of english landscape painting -and leisure- than to a working land towards sustenance and survival. Walking through the remaining local commons, a small group of people exercized their rights of Estover -to collect or take wood- gathering firewood to bring back to heat the gallery and the exhibition with. To this purpose, the common room contained a fully functioning wood burning stove that will be regularly lit when it gets cold during the autumn. The stove was inserted in the architecture of the gallery building as an additional system towards comfort. The heat dispersed through the gallery, and with it the surplus value of the Commons.
Installation views:
Generosity Is the New Political, Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridgeshire, 2009
