Fading Grounds / Grounding Commoning
Collective urban intervention at Summer Academy Salzburg, led by Biennale Urbana, 2026
With: Giulia Mazzorin, Andrea Curtoni, Margaux Fievet, Daria Germagenova, Laurenz Henkel, Vincent Enrique Hernandez, Marie Janeczek, Elizabeth Karpova, Evgeniia Kharichkina, Meriem Lahlou, Egor Maksimov, Sahar Seyed Sadr, Lucia Schmid
What happens when common ground is not something we find, but something we make together?
During the workshop, we moved collectively inside and outside the Hohensalzburg Fortress, through streets, fields, water, paths and temporary spaces. Rather than searching for a stable definition of the common, we approached it through shared actions: walking, carrying, building, drawing, cooking, eating, resting and playing.
Materials travelled with us and continuously changed their roles. Fabric became shelter, architecture, shade, boundary and collective body. As we moved, we carried our growing archive with us: objects, drawings, traces and fragments produced along the way. The archive was never closed. Through encounters and interactions with people outside the group, new contributions entered it, allowing it to change together with our movement.
The places we passed through were not simply backgrounds; they affected how we moved, gathered and related to one another.
Each day, we also cooked and ate together. This ordinary repetition became another form of commoning: sharing ingredients, labour, time, space and care.
Fading Grounds describes a condition of transition: something may be losing its definition while something else has not yet taken form. Between the two lies a space where relations can emerge before their forms are settled. Rather than trying to resolve this uncertainty, we inhabited it.
The common was perhaps not any single object, place or structure we produced. It appeared temporarily in the relations between bodies, materials, landscapes, encounters and actions, or simply moving somewhere together.
Photography: Gaia Tovaglia, Andrea Curtoni, Mira Turba
