An art lover enters a museum. It is not his first visit, yet each time still feels exceptional. In Europe, public museums are still rare, and his profession as a physician leaves him little time to devote to his most cherished pastime. He sits on a bench before the painting he has chosen to study and remains there for a long while, silent, observing. Over the years, he has developed a personal discipline of attention, a technique of memory that allows him to preserve in his mind what he will soon have to leave behind. There is something cruel about the passion for art: once you step away from a work, you can rely only on your memories or on imperfect reproductions engraved and printed in black and white by some copyist.
 
After a while, he takes out his notebook and begins to draw; not the whole scene, but the details of the bodies depicted in the painting: the conch and lobe of the ears, the outline of the nails, the shape of the feet. At first, he had taken up this exercise out of professional habit, guided by the anatomical curiosity of a man accustomed to observing the diversity of human bodies. Over time, however, by copying and recopying these particular features, he has arrived at a singular conviction: to recognise the hand of a painter, one should not look so much at the overall style or the palette—which can be imitated—but at those details executed almost absentmindedly, with a quick gesture, less constrained by convention and closer to the artist’s individuality. It is a method of recognition akin to that used in clinical medicine, which must often rely on the fragmentation of symptoms in order to infer the underlying disease.
 
We are in the nineteenth century. The man seated before the painting is named Giovanni Morelli and he does not yet know that, a few decades later, the method he is slowly developing will influence not only the history of art but other fields of knowledge as well. Sigmund Freud himself would later recognise something strangely familiar in the approach of this great connoisseur and would write: “Psychoanalysis proceeds in the same way: it attaches particular importance to what appears insignificant, to the refuse and debris of observation, in order to discover secret or concealed things.” Indeed, in psychoanalytic practice, truth does not reveal itself in the most coherent and carefully organised speeches, but in the deviations: a slip of the tongue, an apparently secondary detail, a contradiction in the narrative. The analyst attends to what seems marginal, because it is precisely in these fissures that something may emerge that escapes conscious control.
 
A few centuries earlier, in Venice, a tale of Persian origin is printed: The Three Princes of Serendip. The story recounts the journey of three young princes who encounter a man distraught over the loss of his camel. Before he even has time to explain, the three princes begin asking him a series of astonishingly precise questions. Was the camel, they ask, perhaps blind in one eye? Was it, by chance, lame? Did it carry butter on one side and honey on the other? And had it not been ridden by a pregnant woman?
 
Troubled by such precision, the man concludes that the three must have stolen the animal and openly accuses them. Cornered, the princes explain that not only have they not stolen it, but they have never even seen it. Along the road, they say, they simply noticed certain details: the grass had been grazed only on the poorer side of the path, suggesting that the animal could see out of only one eye. One of the tracks, dragged through the sand, indicated an injured leg. Farther along, the insects gathering revealed that butter had leaked from one side of the load, attracting ants, while honey dripping from the other side had drawn flies. Finally, near the spot where someone had stopped to urinate, handprints could be seen in the soil: a sign that the person who stood up had needed to push themselves up with both hands—something that might happen to a pregnant woman.

Drawing: © Anaëlle Clot

Finally, one last and very long leap back in time. A person walks slowly across a muddy plain under a light rain. They are not looking into the distance, as someone trying to orient themselves in the landscape might do; their gaze remains fixed on the ground. At first glance, the terrain appears uniform. But it takes only a moment of bending down and paying close attention to realise that it is anything but: the brown surface is dotted with fresh, deep footprints leading toward a grove of birch trees. Here and there, blades of grass lie flattened, tufts of hair cling to the low branches of bushes. A little farther on, a few still-warm droppings slowly dissolve into the mud. An animal passed through here not long ago. It walked with a heavy step, perhaps tired from the hunt and the meal that followed. Perhaps it is now hiding in the grove, where among the trees there is a pond to drink from and thickets in which to take shelter. Night will soon fall. It would be wiser to keep one’s distance.

What unites these episodes scattered across time—episodes to which the historian Carlo Ginzburg alludes in his essay Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm—is the same mental operation. In each case, someone finds themselves confronted with a reality that cannot be observed directly and must be reconstructed from clues: a minor detail in a painting, something that catches the eye along the edge of a road, a slip of the tongue in a conversation, footprints in the mud. The event itself is no longer present, yet it has left behind a series of scattered signs. The work of knowledge consists precisely in connecting them, patiently, until plausible patterns begin to emerge, much like a detective in a crime novel.

Drawing on examples such as these, Ginzburg proposed recognising the existence of a particular form of knowledge that cuts across very different disciplines, which he called the “evidential paradigm”. It is a way of knowing that proceeds less through general laws or abstract demonstrations than through the interpretation of clues—tiny, marginal signs that, if observed with sufficient attention, allow one to trace back to a broader reality. In this kind of knowledge, what appears individual or singular is not a residue to be eliminated in order to reach a more stable generalisation. On the contrary, it is the very point from which knowledge—situated knowledge—takes its momentum. This amounts to a genuine epistemological revolution: to consider the unrepeatable as the very condition that makes interpretation possible overturns a long tradition of scientific thought that sought, instead, to ground knowledge in the elimination of the particular.

In the 1970s, it was precisely around this intuition that what came to be called microhistory began to develop in Europe. Figures such as Ginzburg, Giovanni Levi and Carlo Poni proposed complementing the great structural syntheses of historical scholarship with close attention to marginal subjects: the community of a village, a judicial trial, the trajectory of a particular individual. The term micro does not so much refer to the size of the object of study as to a change in the scale of observation: looking closely makes it possible to perceive tensions, practices and forms of experience that remain invisible when the historical landscape is observed from too great a distance. As Giovanni Levi writes, it is a “search for truth related to the conflictual and active way in which people act in the world”, a search that proceeds through knowledge of the individual without renouncing precision or scientific ambition. This way of looking closely, of paying attention to details and situated experiences, resonates strongly with the way we work within least. When we carry out investigations in a territory in order to imagine co-creative artistic projects, we often adopt a similar approach: we focus on the micro scale—practices, narratives, uses—and place great value on lived experience, which complements and sometimes shifts theoretical frameworks.

The evidential paradigm also highlights a broader tension in the history of science. Since the early modern period, many disciplines have sought to ground their legitimacy in the use of quantitative instruments, in the ability to measure, to count and to establish statistical regularities. Yet there are domains of knowledge, such as the human sciences, where understanding cannot dispense with a confrontation with the singular case, with what cannot be reduced to a numerical series. The symptom of a patient, the handwriting of a manuscript, an archival testimony, these are not simply data among others. They are individual signs that demand interpretation, that escape any attempt at measurement and that carry a profound significance.

The evidential paradigm may appear to be a merely refined epistemological problem, but it is in fact a method that highlights the importance of experience and that, quite coherently, has its roots in a practice: hunting—the reading of traces left on the ground, the deduction of an invisible presence from signs scattered across the landscape. Some scholars have indeed suggested that a first form of narrative thinking may have emerged within hunting societies: the cognitive capacity, which we share with other animals, to connect dispersed signs into a coherent sequence of events. Footprints embody the paradox of a presence that is no longer there yet can be reconstructed from the traces it has left behind. Perhaps it is from this experience that a more general capacity arose: the ability to think in symbols and signs. Through many transformations, this capacity leads to art, to speech, to writing and to history itself: this very page where I, who wrote a few days ago, and you, who are reading at this moment, coexist—and from which someone, many years from now, may perhaps infer something about the beginning of the twenty-first century.

“As walking, talking, and gesticulating creatures, human beings generate lines wherever they go.” This simple yet incisive observation opens Lines: A Brief History, an essay in which anthropologist Tim Ingold lays the groundwork for what he calls a “comparative anthropology of the line.” The book sets out to trace the presence and purpose of lines across a vast range of human activities, revealing how—through varied historical, cultural and geographical lenses—they disclose the ways in which human beings have imagined, enacted and reshaped their modes of life and thought over time.

Ingold’s reflection is grounded in an anthropological approach that places lived practice at its heart. True to this spirit, he invites readers to undertake a small experiment: to imagine — or better still, to draw — a long, meandering line across a sheet of paper, without any specific aim, a line he likens to being “out for a walk.” He then proposes to reproduce this same line not through the fluid continuity of gesture, but by translating it into a series of evenly spaced dots, that are then joined together. The resulting image may appear much the same, yet the embodied experience of producing it could hardly be more different. One is a gesture surrendered to the fluidity of movement; the other, a deliberate act of juxtaposition and connection, demanding a distinct temporality, attention and corporeality. It is in this lived difference—prior even to any formal one—that Ingold’s contrast between wayfaring and transport comes most sharply into view.

These two ways of drawing a line correspond to two ways of moving through the world and of experiencing space: on the one hand, the itinerant journey, or wayfaring; on the other, the directed motion of transport. In the first, the traveller is not compelled by the need to reach a predetermined destination, for the path itself — potentially infinite — holds the very meaning of movement. This is not to suggest aimless wandering. As hunter-gatherer groups demonstrate, one may travel with attentiveness rather than intent: guided by landmarks, attuned to the fruits to be gathered, the traces leading to new resources, the unexpected opportunities along the way, and even the pauses for rest that form an integral part of the journey. In this view, paths are not mere lines connecting two points; they are gradually shaped, becoming corridors of inscription—lived spaces continually rewritten by those who traverse them.

Transport, by contrast, is defined from the outset by a fixed destination and by the aim of moving people or goods “in such a way as to leave their basic natures unaffected.” What matters here is not the lived experience of the journey, nor any attentiveness to what unfolds along the way, but rather the efficiency of transfer from one place to another — so that any personal transformation that travel might provoke is systematically excluded. Intermediate stages, in this logic, are not moments of pause, observation or reinterpretation, but mere functional intervals, measured in terms of technical activity or completion. Where the wayfarer is always somewhere — rooted in a relationship of presence with the environment they inhabit — the passenger in transport, when neither at the point of departure nor at the point of arrival, is nowhere: suspended in transit, stripped of situated experience. Ingold aptly summarises this condition, calling it “the dissolution of the intimate bond that, in wayfaring, couples locomotion and perception.”

This distinction also finds expression in spatial metaphors. The wayfarer, moving along, weaves an irregular mesh that overlaps and intertwines with other lines, forming a fabric that embodies a way of dwelling in the world. Transport, by contrast, conjures a network of interconnected points, in which paths are reduced to functional segments linking predetermined nodes — reflecting less an experience of dwelling than a logic of occupation. These two perspectives are not simply variations on a theme; they reveal profoundly different conceptions of the relationship between movement and space.

Drawing: Anaëlle Clot.

Likewise, representations of space bear the imprint of this distinction. When we sketch a map to give someone directions, what appears on paper is never a mere objective transposition, but the outcome of lived experience — enriched by our stories, memories and the gestures that accompany our explanations. Each mark bears witness to a journey already taken, traced along a “path of observation.” In this sense, lines are not simple graphic signs but traces of movement—the very essence of the sketch, for they both orient and evoke a tangible relationship with the terrain. By contrast, on a modern map, the line loses its narrative and experiential charge, assuming instead a symbolic and normative role: it signifies roads, railways and physical or administrative boundaries, embodying “an appropriation of the space surrounding the points that the lines connect or (…) that they enclose.” The result is a form of cartographic knowledge that does not emerge from the embodied experience of movement, but is constructed by linking distant, abstract points—fragmenting experience and silencing the stories it might tell. It is not knowledge that moves, but knowledge assembled: functional to a system of occupation and control rather than to a process of dwelling and observation. This way of representing space also permeates urban design, structured by limits, predefined routes and thresholds — features that the everyday practices of inhabitants continually subvert or reinterpret.

At this juncture, Ingold makes a decisive turn in his argument. Beneath the different ways of moving through and representing space, he discerns two distinct ways of conceiving knowledge. He shows that our understanding of knowing is inseparable from the gestures and trajectories through which we relate to the world: every form of knowledge, whether explicit or implicit, is grounded in a way of moving, walking or orienting oneself. In contemporary Western societies, the conception of movement as linear, goal-oriented and efficient has gradually shaped a corresponding form of knowledge — one constructed through the linking of fixed points, through processes of organisation, classification and articulation. This is knowledge built by juxtaposition, privileging stability and measurement over the fluidity and contingency of lived experience. To know, in this view, is to accumulate data and to establish abstract relations among discrete elements — a logic of control and planning.

Conversely, conceiving movement as a continuous and open journey invites us to reimagine knowledge as a living process, formed in direct contact with the world, within the temporality of gesture and the reciprocity of perception. Knowing no longer means dominating or representing from without but dwelling within an environment: allowing oneself to be moved by its rhythms and to respond to its invitations. In this light, knowledge emerges as a practice of attention and participation—a dynamic entanglement of perception, memory and invention. It becomes a path of thought which, like the wayfarer’s journey, does not seek a final destination but continually renews itself through its very unfolding.

In this sense, representations of space are not neutral images of the world, but genuine cognitive and relational models: they both mirror and shape particular ways of thinking and living. Contemporary maps and diagrams, by reducing space to a network of functional connections, express a form of knowledge that separates the observer from the world, imposing an external and overarching point of view. Yet the experience of dwelling — woven from everyday gestures, diversions and encounters — reveals an opposing logic: not one of distance, but of proximity; not one of occupation, but of involvement.

The notion of a “pure transport” — a movement linking two points without leaving any trace of transformation — is, for Ingold, an illusion, much like the belief in neutral, disembodied knowledge. One cannot know without being involved, just as one cannot traverse a space without altering it or being altered in return. For Ingold, to know is always to inhabit the world: to engage with it through practice, attention and gesture, weaving with the living a fabric of correspondences and shared stories. It is within this reciprocity, rather than within abstraction, that what he calls the “ecology of life” takes shape: a form of knowledge that does not merely connect points, but follows the very lines of the living, opening itself to the continuity and unpredictability of the inhabited world.

Antonella Vitale is an architect who has spent part of her career designing refugee camps. Today, talking about displaced people and temporary spaces is not only a way of addressing humanitarian crises, it also implies a broader reflection about what it means to live and cohabit in a world marked by instability and climate change. The experience gained in these contexts shows that it is possible to meet basic housing needs even with limited resources, by directly involving communities and experimenting with more flexible and appropriate solutions. In refugee camps, co-creation and adaptation strategies emerge that can inspire a more general approach to architectural design. At a time of ecological emergency and forced migration, understanding how to ensure dignified living conditions in precarious situations means questioning the vulnerabilities of our own cities and rethinking the ways in which communities can be involved in the construction of living spaces.

What is the link between ecological emergency and migration?
Environmental problems, such as the scarcity of natural resources, desertification, and ecological disasters, are often closely linked to conflict and migration. The construction of refugee camps also brings its own challenges. For example, a side effect of their presence is deforestation, as displaced people need wood for cooking and, in some cases, their settlements expand. It’s important to remember that these people often live in tents for years and build temporary structures of their own accord.

How long are we talking about?
The average time spent in a camp is 17 years. That’s why humanitarian culture has evolved over time: in the past, we simply provided food, water, and temporary accommodation. Today, the aim is to offer as normal a life as possible. Rather than providing temporary accommodation, the idea is to house displaced people with local residents or in reallocated structures, if the local authorities allow it. Refugee camps do not facilitate integration because they create ghettos; they are now seen as a last resort.

What type of facilities are generally available to these populations?
Tents and containers are among the most expensive options in non-European contexts, if only for transport. Tents, in particular, are very precarious and uncomfortable, and depending on the climate, might only last six months. In addition, camps are often set up on land that hasn’t been built on, and there’s usually a good reason why: it could be prone to flooding, too hot, or impossible to cultivate. In general, it remains crucial to move as quickly as possible from the emergency response phase to a transitional phase, and then on to greater stability.

Have you had any experiences of this kind in your work?
During my assignment in Mozambique, I was involved in extending a refugee camp to accommodate an additional 5,000 people. I took over the project after the departure of my predecessor, who had encountered a number of management difficulties. One of the main problems was the fires lit by the camp residents in protest. When I arrived, the situation was complex, and the safety rules were very strict: I had to respect a time limit in the camp and return to my base before sunset. It was one of my first experiences, and I found myself faced with a major challenge, with no clear guidelines on how to proceed, and few resources.

What approach did you take?
I chose to maximise my time in the camp by starting to interact with the different communities. The camp was home to groups from the Great Lakes region of Africa, people marked by deep-rooted tribal conflict. I tried to understand their situation and involve them in the decision-making process, giving them the task of pointing out problems and essential needs. If I hadn’t done this, there would probably have been opposition, because unwittingly, for example, we would have exacerbated enmities between clans by intervening in stories we couldn’t understand, and fuelling tensions.

What strategies did you use to involve the camp residents?
The key moment was the launch of the design and planning phase. I let the residents tell me their needs, aspirations, and preferences for the layout of the homes. For me, the most important thing was to respect the number of people to be housed, while the distribution of the spaces was up to them. This approach had a very positive impact on the feasibility of the project. My constant presence in the camp also helped to deconstruct the prejudice that international aid workers are distant, locked away in their air-conditioned offices or jeeps. By showing that I was willing to listen, I fostered a climate of trust.

How did you overcome the language barrier?
To facilitate communication and mutual understanding, I chose to display the project drawings in visible places in the camp. This aroused the curiosity of the residents, who approached me for information in order to take an active part in meetings. Thanks to this method, we were able to better define the distribution of living spaces according to the real needs of the community. In the end, the key element of this experience was not the technical aspect, but the ability to listen and respond to people’s needs, initiating a process of co-creation that made the project more effective.

Drawing: © Anaëlle Clot.

How did you intervene in public spaces?
The camp included empty areas that served as natural gathering points, such as those around the water pumps, often located under large trees. One of these points was close to the therapeutic feeding centre for children under five and not far from the school. I analysed these existing synergies and integrated them into the creation of a sports field, strategically positioned to encourage physical activity and movement.
In addition, in this area I introduced a more structured communication system, using a tree as a display point for comments, suggestions, and complaints from the community. Although there was more criticism than praise, this system established a clear and direct channel of communication. My aim was to facilitate discussions between the operators and the community, gathering useful feedback to improve the management of the camp. When there’s participation, co-creation or at least an exchange of ideas, people are willing to get involved, especially if it has to do with buildings or the use of space.

How much freedom was there for self-designing buildings?
In Mozambique, we involved people in the construction of houses using local materials: reeds, earth, and straw. Each family was provided with the same quantity of materials, and they could then decide how to use them by appropriating the project. The idea was to move on from tents to very simple but permanent houses, in line with Mozambican standards. It’s also important to bear this in mind: when offering an emergency solution to a population from outside the country, you mustn’t go beyond what the most disadvantaged members of local society have, so as not to fuel tensions.

Are there other levels of co-creation that are desirable in such a context?
Before leaving their country of origin, displaced people had a trade, occupations, and passions. Mapping these skills is an asset that can be exploited to the full, firstly to integrate these people into the world of work and make them self-sufficient, and secondly to contribute to aid programmes for displaced people. Since resources are limited, taking advantage of local skills is a great opportunity. It’s not always easy, it takes time, and you have to meet people, but it’s of enormous benefit to the community, which feels respected rather than marginalised.

Are there any spontaneous practices in the public space that help to foster cohesion?
Food is an important tool of cultural identity, especially in contexts of great disorientation. The opportunity to grow traditional foods not only provides a means of subsistence but also enables people to maintain a link with their culture of origin and share it with the local population. This practice creates opportunities for cultural exchange, for example through small food outlets where camp residents can share their cuisine. It can also facilitate the exchange of agricultural or culinary techniques useful to both the refugee and host communities.

What is the relationship between emergency and planning?
Emergency and planning are almost antagonistic, because in an emergency situation, by definition, there is no time or opportunity to plan. However, we mustn’t fall into the trap of continuous emergency either, as that would be naïve, costly, and politically dangerous. In an emergency, many rules have to be waived. Legislation requires time, strict processes, and co-creation, but it is also the only way forward.

What can we learn from housing in emergency contexts?
In emergency contexts, we learn that delaying action progressively reduces the options available, until none are left. Today’s multiple crises, including climate change, teach us that it is essential to act in time, even in Europe, where, despite resources, cities are not ready to face current and future environmental challenges.
In some parts of the world, climate crisis is gradually rendering entire regions uninhabitable. The problem is not just rising temperatures, but the disappearance of vital resources, forcing people to migrate. However, global attention is more often focused on protecting against migratory flows than on long-term interventions to prevent crises.

The gardener, hands immersed in the soil and in constant contact with plants, might seem to have an idyllic job in the face of urban hassles. But, according to Karel Čapek, nothing could be further from the truth. In his book The Gardener’s Year (1929), Čapek describes the gardener’s problems and tribulations in the face of frost, drought, and the overweening ambitions of small urban gardens. His wonderfully written tale, imbued with irony, offers a reflection on the complexity of human nature, not without a touch of humour and levity. Below is a short extract from the book.

We say that spring is the time for germination; really the time for germination is autumn. While we only look at nature it is fairly true to say that autumn is the end of the year; but still more true it is that autumn is the beginning of the year. It is a popular opinion that in autumn leaves fall off, and I really cannot deny it; I assert only that in a certain deeper sense autumn is the time when in fact the leaves bud. Leaves wither because winter begins; but they also wither because spring is already beginning, because new buds are being made, as tiny as percussion caps out of which the spring will crack. It is an optical illusion that trees and bushes are naked in autumn; they are, in fact, sprinkled over with everything that will unpack and unroll in spring. It is only an optical illusion that my flowers die in autumn-; for in reality they are born. We say that nature rests, yet she is working like mad. She has only shut up shop and pulled the shutters down; but behind them she is unpacking new goods, and the shelves are becoming so full that they bend under the load. This is the real spring; what is not done now will not be done in April. The future is not in front of us, for it is here already in the shape of a germ; already it is with us; and what is not with us will not be even in the future. We don’t see germs because they are under the earth; we don’t know the future because it is within us. Sometimes we seem to smell of decay, encumbered by the faded remains of the past; but if only we could see how many fat and white shoots are pushing forward in the old tilled soil, which is called the present day; how many seeds germinate in secret; how many old plants draw themselves together and concentrate into a living bud, which one day will burst into flowering life—if we could only see that secret swarming of the future within us, we should say that our melancholy and distrust is silly and absurd, and that the best thing of all is to be a living man—that is, a man who grows.

Image: Natália Trejbalová, Few Thoughts on Floating Spores (detail), 2023.
Courtesy of the artist and Šopa Gallery, Košice. Photo: Tibor Czitó.

Swiss philosopher Yves Citton’s areas of research range from literature to media theory and political philosophy. We met him as part of our Faire Commun project to discuss a central theme of our research: the commons. Below is a transcript of part of his talk.

I’d like to introduce the “commons” by trying to qualify a certain image – which isn’t wrong, but quite partial – of the commons as pre-existing human appropriation. According to folklore, the Earth and its goods were shared by all animals and all featherless bipeds like ourselves. Then, according to Rousseau’s second discourse, human appropriation became the source of all evils.
This means that the commons are given as they are by nature. It’s true that the air we breathe, for example, wasn’t created by humans so that they wouldn’t die of asphyxiation: on Earth there is air, and we humans benefit from it. It’s a certain layer of the commons that we enjoy naturally, even if we don’t know exactly what nature means.

We can also say that air and water are quite similar commons. On Earth, there’s salt and fresh water, which is drinkable. But if you think about the reality of water today, the water we drink is more or less natural water. We know that it can contain chlorine, that it flows through pipes. Hence, to my mind, water isn’t at all a natural commons. It’s the result of an infrastructure, which can be public, private, or associative; it can be democratic or subject to capitalism. It’s mediated by the community or public institutions. In order to distinguish between public and private commons, I’d call this case public – a government has intervened, made regulations, and financed the pipes.

It’s still a commons, but one that has been constructed by humans, legislation, and political processes. Most of the time, when we talk about the commons today, these elements are inevitably involved. Even forests no longer look like they did before humans brought domesticated species and technologies into them. So I think it’s more realistic to say that the commons include a human artificialisation and preservation dimension. We don’t necessarily need to take care of the air – it’s enough not to pollute it – but we do need to preserve water, pipes, and infrastructures.

It’s interesting to consider another, slightly different model of the commons, i.e. language. Language didn’t precede humans, there was no French language 300,000 years ago; it isn’t an institution, nor an infrastructure regulated by a state that cares for and maintains it. French resides both within and between us. To my mind, it’s the most bizarre and extraordinary model of the commons, existing only because we own it: if all the people who speak French disappeared, there’d be no more French. (That’s without taking into account books written in French, which would remain of course). Knowing where a commons lies, whether it’s artificial or public, is no easy task. For me, what language highlights about the commons is the fact that it can exist without official regulation. The Académie française did not create the French language. Language is reproduced through culture and through children talking to their parents. It’s a commons: it’s neither totally public nor totally private.

Image: Mattia Pajè, Il mondo ha superato se stesso (again), 2020

The French language, air and water are elements that are necessary to our survival, and we’re grateful that they’re available to us: we can define them as positive commons. Conversely, there are negative commons, which are a continuation and a reversal of the latter. Researchers Alexandre Monnin, Diego Landivar, and Emmanuel Bonnet use the term “negative commons” to refer to nuclear waste, to cite only the most telling example. Whether a nuclear power station has public or private status doesn’t change the fact that the resulting waste becomes a collective problem for hundreds of thousands of years to come. It’s clear that nuclear waste is a commons, just as plastic and the climate are. Indeed, the climate, like water, is becoming an element that needs to be maintained if it’s to remain liveable. Some negative commons are therefore blending in with commons that were traditionally seen as positive. These negative commons pose a major problem: they feed our lives (the nuclear power station feeds my computer, which allows me to communicate) but they harm our living environments. Feeding and harming are seen as two sides of the same coin, at the same time. Nuclear energy provides me with electricity but harms future generations through the production of radioactivity.

If we develop this idea further, we can see finance as a good example of a negative commons: finance feeds our investments and the state budget but pollutes our environments by pushing to maximise profits at the expense of environmental considerations. How do we get out of this? How can we dismantle finance? It’s even more interesting to ask whether universities are not a negative commons: knowledge is developed, and research carried out, but the way universities operate can be toxic, with some teachers taking advantage of their power over their students, for example. There’s also bureaucracy that prevents us from doing good work at the same time as framing and structuring that work. There are toxic elements that need to be dismantled, but it’s not easy because they feed us. The intellectual exercise of projecting a negative commons hypothesis onto different subjects is therefore quite revealing.

There’s also the concept of undercommons, a term defined by Afro-American poet and philosopher Fred Moten and activist and researcher Stefano Harney. This term is based on the political ideas of the Black Radical Tradition in the United States. The over-representation of black people, particularly black men, in prisons in the United States today is dramatic, and there’s a continuity between slavery a few centuries ago and racial domination in this country today. The people who emerged from the slave holds were never considered as individuals in their own right. They therefore had to develop other modes of sociality, alternatives to the individualistic socialisation of the homo economicus, the small businessman, the white bourgeois. The communities that were threatened with lynching until a few decades ago and are now victims of police violence, live in conditions of marginalisation or at least do not enjoy the privileges that you and I, as white people in Switzerland or France, have been able to enjoy. These people have therefore developed an alternative, underground form of socialisation: a somewhat paralegal or semi-legal form of solidarity, since US law is made by white people for white people. Instead of seeing this form of solidarity as illegal, it might be seen as a different form of solidarity, outside the law, but one that is worthy of consideration and study. It enables ways of living that feed the commons, even if they’re less visible. And it could prove crucial for all of us: the infrastructures that sustain our luxuries and our forms of economic and social individualisation, as we know them today, may not last indefinitely. It would therefore be in our interests to familiarise ourselves with this form of “survival solidarity”. And of course, before doing so, it’s important to denounce and fight against the persistent oppression that weighs on marginalised populations.

I had the opportunity to work with Dominique Quessada, who came up with the idea of writing the term “commun” (commons in French) as “comme-un” (literally “as one”): his idea being that the commons belongs to everyone and to no one at the same time. The very fact of talking about the commons perhaps presupposes that the term is established, that there are people who see it as a real possibility, and that behind the dissolution of identity and property, the commons is something in which everyone can participate: it’s a plural, it’s neither mine nor yours. Above all, to write it “comme-un” suggests that the unity (of a certain people, of a community) that is often thought of as inherent to the commons is perhaps no more than “acting-as-if we were one”. Faced with the commons, we act “as one”, but we remain diverse, different, and sometimes antagonistic to one another.

Behind the commons there are always two concepts. First of all, there is the principle of unity: who are those who speak of a “commons”? On what do they base themselves? In reality, they can only defend a commons because they’re already united. Secondly, the commons is always a collective fiction: calling something a “commons” means that it is considered as such and thus develops characteristics of a commons. A public park is a public park because it is declared to be one. Thanks to this label, it’s possible to do things in this park that would otherwise have been impossible. But this remains a temporary fiction: a change of regime, a sale, an occupation of the site can always happen. In short, writing “comme-un”, or “as-one”, with a hyphen means asking two questions. Firstly, what is this unity, however heterogeneous, that allows us to say that there is a commons? Secondly, what is the fictional element, the dynamic that allows us to forge a concept that doesn’t exist? The imaginary dimension of the commons always remains central to its defence.

Covering nearly 10% of the Earth’s surface and weighing 130.000.000.000.000 tons—more than the entire ocean biomass—they revolutionised how we understand life and evolution. Few would probably bet on this unique yet discrete species: lichens.

Four hundred and ten million years ago, lichens were already there and seem to have contributed, through their erosive capacity, to the formation of the Earth’s soil. The earliest traces of lichens were found in the Rhynie fossil deposit in Scotland, dating back to the Lower Devonian period—that of the earliest stage of landmass colonisation by living beings. Their resilience has been tested in various experiments: they can survive space travel without harm; withstand a dose of radiation twelve thousand times greater than what would be lethal to a human being; survive immersion in liquid nitrogen at -195°C; and live in extremely hot or cold desert areas. Lichens are so resistant they can even live for millennia: an Arctic specimen of “map lichen” has been dated 8,600 years, the world’s oldest discovered living organism.

Lichens have long been considered plants, and even today many interpret them as a sort of moss, but thanks to the technical evolution of microscopes in the 19th century, a new discovery emerged. Lichen was not a single organism, but instead consisted of a system composed of two different living things, a fungus and an alga, united to the point of remaining essentially indistinguishable. Few know that the now familiar word symbiosis was coined precisely to refer to this strange structure of lichen. Today we understand that lichens are not simply formed by a fungus and an alga. There is, in fact, an internal variability of beings involved in the symbiotic mechanism, frequently including other fungi, bacteria and yeasts. We are not dealing with a single living organism but an entire biome.

Symbiosis’ theory was long opposed, as it undermined the taxonomic structure of the entire kingdom of the living as Charles Darwin had described it in On the Origin of Species: a “tree-like” system consisting of progressive branches. The idea that two “branches” (and, moreover, belonging to different kingdoms) could intersect called everything into question. Significantly, the fact that symbiosis functioned as a mutually beneficial cooperation overturned the idea of the evolutionary process as based on competition and conflict.

Symbiosis is far from being a minority condition on our planet: 90% of plants, for example, are characterised by mycorrhiza, a particular type of symbiotic association between a fungus and the roots of a plant. Of these, 80% would not survive if deprived of the association with the fungus. Many mammalian species, including humans, live in symbiosis with their microbiome: a collection of microorganisms that live in the digestive tract and enable the assimilation of nutrients. This is a very ancient and specific symbiotic relationship: in humans, the genetic difference in the microbiome between one person and another is greater even than their cellular genetic difference. Yet the evolutionary success of symbiotic relationships is not limited to these incredible data: it is the basis for the emergence of life as we know it, in a process described by biologist Lynn Margulis as symbiogenesis.

Symbiogenesis posits that the first cells on Earth resulted from symbiotic relationships between bacteria, which developed into the organelles responsible for cellular functioning. Specifically, chloroplasts—the organelles capable of performing photosynthesis—originated from cyanobacteria, while mitochondria—the organelles responsible for cellular metabolism—originated from bacteria capable of metabolising oxygen. Life, it seems, evolved from a series of symbiotic encounters, and despite numerous catastrophic changes in the planet’s geology, atmosphere and ecosystems across deep time, has been flowing uninterruptedly for almost four billion years.

Several scientists tend to interpret symbiosis in lichens as a form of parasitism on the part of the fungus because it would gain more from the relationship than the other participants. To which naturalist David George Haskell, in his book The Forest Unseen, replies, “Like a farmer tending her apple trees and her field of corn, a lichen is a melding of lives. Once individuality dissolves, the scorecard of victors and victims makes little sense. Is corn oppressed? Does the farmer’s dependence on corn make her a victim? These questions are premised on a separation that does not exist.” Multi-species cooperation is the basis of life on our planet. From lichens to single-celled organisms to our daily lives, biology tells of a living world for which solitude is not a viable option. Lynn Margulis described symbiosis as a form of “intimacy among strangers”: what lies at the core of life, evolution and adaptation.

Learning from mould

Physarum polycephalum is a bizarre organism of the slime mould type. It consists of a membrane within which several nuclei float, which is why it is considered an “acellular” being—neither monocellular nor multicellular. Despite its simple structure, it has some outstanding features: Physarum polycephalum can solve complex problems and move through space by expanding into “tentacles,” making it an exciting subject for scientific experiments.

The travelling salesman problem is the best known: it’s a computational problem that aims to optimise travel in a web of possible paths. Using a map, scientists at Hokkaido University placed a flake of oat, on which Physarum feeds, on the main junctions of Tokyo’s public transportation system. Left free to move around the map, Physarum expanded its tentacles, which, to the general amazement, quickly reproduced the actual public transport routes. The mechanism is very efficient: the tentacles stretch out in search of food; if they do not find any, they secrete a substance that will signal not to pursue that same route.

We are used to thinking of intelligence as embodied, centralised, and representation-based: Physarum teaches us that this is not always the case and that even the simplest organism can suggest new ways of thinking, acting and collaborating.