[by Ruby Van der Wekken]
Commons.fi and visiting RIPESS coordination team participated at the Pixelache 2017 Local and Decentralised Festival. For Commons.fi already having the intention to participate the Pixelache Festival, the possibility to have the RIPESS team over was a great opportunity to share on all and strengthen own objectives.
A first workshop was held on mapping, and the discussions during the session evolved majorly around the question of Why map? We went over the experiences of Commons.fi mapping on TransforMap, which has wanted to use mapping besides giving visibility to actors, also to come to for instance show the contours of that other economy when doing advocacy towards Helsinki City. This for instance Commons.fi member Helsinki Timebank has wanted to do when explicating in a number of advocacy seminars what that other economy is which is referred to when it is said Helsinki Timebank wants to be a complementary currency strengthening other economy building. Mapping can be the conscious slow building of a network which Commons.fi intention has originally been, but as was shared in the event by Luca Asperius (media portal Italiachecambia.org) mapping and making video interviews of the actors on the map can also be done in a bit more ”distant” way as a form of documentation.
Tuomo Alhojärvi (Commons.fi) curated for the festival A People’s Atlas of Helsinki! from the existing Peoples Atlas process, and so during the festival a wall of maps enfolded. On the photo Maija Lumme’s (Commons.fi) wonderful map.
A discussion was held outside the festival time at Siemenpuu on the World Social Forum process and other democracy initiatives. Finland has had a lively Finnish social forum process in Helsinki and in Tampere, with the next forum in Helsinki will be in April 2018, and the sharing on the WSF process with comrades bringing in history, experiences and updates from elsewhere was valuable. Interesting was then also to think in the current wave sweeping at least through some cities of Europe of municipalism, how then could we come to see the role of the forum in these processes of democratisation?
I myself during the beginning of the Assembly process of the festival, talked about the challenges which at the same time constitute the necessary core of the commoning around a commons through the experiences of Helsinki Timebank, about the envisioning this can be taking us to, including the engaging with the public sphere in order to come to desired change. See the video here.
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