A short introduction -from 2016 - to our 40-year research plan in the Vallagarina valley.

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COMUNfARE – Cultivating non-capitalist spaces in
the Vallagarina district through popular design and
making (economies) in common (2014-PRESENT)
COMUNfARE is an attempt to respond to the question
of how we can contribute with our work to foster
progressive social change in the area we come from and
where we want to live and work.
After having practiced for years internationally around
a variety of eco-social themes, in this situated practice-
based research project we concentrate on the multi-
layered context of the Vallagarina district, Northern Italy.
Here, we study, question, comment on, and intervene
into the assemblage of socio-environmental dynamics,
economies, power relations, and cultural panoramas that
are embedded in and constitute the district.
More specifically, the aim of COMUNfARE is to support
and encourage the constitution, cultivation and expansion
of non-capitalist commons. These form the conditions
necessary to promote social justice, sustainability and
happy lives for all by empowering people to nurture other
values, value practices and ways of relating to each other
and to nature than the narrow ones reproduced by capital.
In order to achieve this aim, with COMUNfARE we
consider the economy as our main arena for speculations
and practical design interventions. Here, the economy is
seen as a zone of cohabitation of different economic forms
rather than as a singular space dominated by capitalism.
By focussing our attention on the economic forms that
are inhabiting the many spatial and social discontinuities
in the logic of capital, we want to explore how local
economies can be transformed by entering in dialogue
with and building on those practices that in the here and
COMUN ARE
COMUN ARE

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now are already enacting other economic forms and with
them a prefigurative “politics of possibility”.
Therefore, by putting in conversation the framework
of the commons with that of community economies, the
research wants to explore in practice how the desire
enacted by people in different places, sectors and ways to
diversify and expand the economy through a variety of
non-capitalist economic practices can represent a ‘vector’
to foster the construction, cultivation and expansion of
non-capitalist commons.
COMUNfARE – CIRCOLO DEL SUOLO (2015-PRESENT)
As a first practical engagement with the socio-economic
context of the Vallagarina district and its inhabitants, the
Circolo del Suolo (Soil Club) is an ongoing series of activities
dedicated to the exploration of the different forms of
commons that already exist in this area, and of the people
who are currently reinventing the relationship between
‘local’ and ‘global’ in the here and now through a diversity
of virtuous non-capitalist economic practices.
Inspired by the principles of popular education, the
Circolo evolves through convivial roundtable discussions,
conferences, readings, workshops, walks, visits to local
initiatives, participant observations and publishing
activities.
Through the Circolo we want to acquire a detailed
image of who is presently engaged in building economic
‘alternatives’ in the district; to weave ourselves into a
local ecology of commons-fostering practitioners, with
whom to build alliances and co-construct meaningful
future initiatives; to foster the creation of new relations

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amongst these practitioners; and to publish and circulate
locally practical and theoretical knowledge about the
commons and community economies.
COMUNfARE – GUIDA DEL SUOLO (2015-PRESENT)
The Guida del Suolo (Soil Guide) is a series of publications
that help us spread the knowledges shared and generated
during the activities of the Circolo beyond its spatially and
temporally limited activities.
Transcribed and edited roundtable contributions
are mixed with texts of ours, images and diagrams, and
translated theoretical texts.
Thus, with the Guida we also intend to provide the
inhabitants of the district with hints and access points
that enable them to get a sense of the theoretical and
conceptual underpinnings of the research COMUNfARE.

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