School of Commons 2025
Peer Learning Program (2025-2026)
“school of commons (SoC) is a global community-based initiative dedicated to peer learning, and the study and development of self-organized knowledge production—through commons-based methods and practices. hosted at the zürich university of the arts (ZHdK) but the program takes place mostly online.”
Collaborator Madelyn Byrd and I were accepted into the School of Commons 2025 cohort as the duo CHIMERA. As a part of the cohort, we spent most of 2025 participating in regular 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, our cohort imagined 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.
CHIMERA contributed an essay that encapsulates our artistic 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. The work is the most recent in our running collaborative series, in which we tie queering practices to ecological thinking and environmentalism, reframing queerness as a state of being and doing that extends far beyond gender.
To create our ‘somatic practice of multiplicity,’ we devised practical methods of chimerizing. Through attuning to three areas of particular activation within our bodies, we practiced zooming in to these parts, characterizing them, and moving/soundng with each of them — letting each body part share its own style, speed, personality, and voice. Using fabric to add mass and weight, we emphasized each of these parts to give them a movement ‘solo.’ The photo documentation of this research shows this costuming paired with movement.
Toward the beginning of our research, we shared an early version during the cohort meetup in Zürich, CH in July 2025. We collaborated with dancer and actor Ula Liagaitė to develop a movement workshop on group chimerizing, which we shared with our peers.
The program for the 2025 cohort concluded with an online, weekend-long event to present the projects developed during the year. CHIMERA delivered a final presentation of our research, including a mini-workshop in which we translated our body-scanning and body-mapping method for group practice.
Excerpt:
“We draw inspiration from the Chimera’s ability to be ‘more than.’ More than one self, more than one creature, more than human. Our embodied knowledge of multiplicity is a chimerical experience, moving through daily life as a coordinated system of parts, personalities, feelings. But what might be learned from a deepened concentration on these chimerical qualities? Through our somatic research on chimerizing, we propose exercises – which may be practiced by anyone – to tune into our cooperative parts. By feeling with different identifiable inner elements, we attempt to more intimately know what sub-bodies hide within us. We move with these parts, letting each take a turn in guiding the whole. And we may zoom out one degree to become one part in a cooperative system with other bodies – both human and non-human.”
Movement for knee
Movement for wrist
Movement for clavicle
Movement for hand
ISSUES 2025: EXQUISITE COMMONS
In addition to the research and contribution as CHIMERA, I was 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 in Berlin, DE. This book, with an edition of 210 copies, was entirely collated and bound by the ISSUES Steering Committee at We make it in February 2026.
Credits:
Artistic Research by Lou Croff Blake & Madelyn Byrd
Photography by Lou Croff Blake & Madelyn Byrd
Book editing, design, and production by Klara Branting Paulsell, Layla Fassa, Lou Croff Blake, Bélen Arellano Cañizares, Chantelle Lue, and Amy Gowen
Book printing by We make it.
Book distribution and co-publishing by HumDrumPress.