Practices of more-than-human assembly

2026–2027

ZK/U BerlinSiemensstr. 27, 10551, Berlin, Germany

The Convivial Commons Assemblies are conceived as a situated inquiry into collective decision making at the ZK/U – Center for Art and Urbanistics. Operating at the intersection of artistic research, institutional practice, and technological mediation, they ask how governance structures within cultural institutions can be reconfigured.

At the core of the format is the proposition of a “Freundeskreis” as a hybrid governance structure—one that extends beyond exclusively human participation and considers non-human actors as operative agents within processes of deliberation, evaluation, and decision-making.

Rather than presenting fixed models, the Assemblies function as iterative working environments in which forms of participation, responsibility, and collective organisation are continuously tested and negotiated. Democracy is approached not as a stable framework but as an ongoing, situated practice shaped by friction, negotiation, and co-production.

A central component is the Convivial Commons Congress, an installation that processes proposals through environmental sensing, contextual data, and algorithmic interpretation. By introducing more-than-human inputs into decision-making procedures, the system acts as an additional layer of governance, expanding the field of agency and challenging anthropocentric assumptions.

The Assemblies are part of an ongoing process of institutional transformation at ZK/U and are developed within the framework of EMCCINNO.