ISSUES 2025: Exquisite Commons

As a part of the School of Commons 2025 cohort, I spent most of 2025 participating in group online meetings, self-organized curriculum, artistic research, and a self-publishing process. The publication that houses the individual and collective work of our cohort is ISSUES 2025: Exquisite Commons. Inspired by the exquisite corpse exercise, we see our projects as anatomical parts of a composite body. This book, like our cohort, is defined by our diversity, yet united by our common values and our shared experiences.

Collaborator Madelyn Byrd and I, as the duo Chimera, contributed an essay on our research, A Somatic Practice of Multiplicity. This research included somatic-based listening, movement, sound, and costuming to explore the felt-sense of each containing inner systems of selves, of being a ‘body-ody-ody’ that is home to our multitudes.

I was also a member of the ISSUES Steering Committee, with cohort peers Klara Branting Paulsell, Layla Fassa, and Bélen Arellano Cañizares. We undertook the copy editing, design, and logistics of translating the digital publication with School of Commons to a printed book, in collaboration with HumDrumPress and risograph printer We make it. This book, with an edition of 210 copies, was entirely collated and bound by the ISSUES Steering Committee in Berlin, DE.