Glossary of Common Knowledge, vol. II publication

The Glossary of Common Knowledge (GCK), unlike an encyclopaedia, makes no attempt to unite all the world’s knowledge in a single totalising system, or to assemble a variety of viewpoints under the roof of tolerance and inclusion. What makes the glossary different from similar efforts is that it does not make just one list of terms but is instead concerned with multiple lists. Each of its terms is always associated in different ways with terms from other lists and other contexts. Families of terms are thus created, and these families are the core of the glossary. Every term in the GCK has its own story, and every story has a narrator(s), a narrator who is uttering their own situated knowledge.

The terms by more than fifty narrators presented in the second volume of the Glossary of Common Knowledge were discussed and written between 2019 and 2022 during seminar meetings (at the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Valand Academy, and Van Abbemuseum) to bring together diverse knowledges from the museums as well as the global family of artists, thinkers and curators. They sought to find common knowledge to speak about less visible stories in contemporary art and to address systems that govern our ways of thinking in art and beyond. The project has been ongoing since 2014, and it was conceived and curated by Zdenka Badovinac, Bojana Piškur and Jesús Carrillo in the context of L’Internationale confederation of museums as a method of addressing the so-called referential fields.

The first series of discussions was published in 2018. For the second edition, we repeated the same referential fields to re-examine how the conditions in our cultural landscape have changed in the drastic raptures of pandemic, war, climate catastrophes, a conservative turn and political upheavals. One of the most visible shifts in this volume compared to the previous edition is a need to address the growing urgency of climate change—with terms such as Air travel, Being ecological, Earth, Ecofeminism, New extractivism, and Rewilding, and to stress the anthropogenic colonial origin of the cataclysmic events, moreover, to entangle this continuous crisis through troubled thinking, for example in Disappointment, Choice, Shipwrecks, Southern constellation, The crowd of the dead or After, and propose not to resign but to Raise fists, Revolt, use Emancipatory propaganda and make a firm Anti-fascist stand. This volume is also signified by the COVID-19 pandemic and the implications it had on escalating power struggles and injustices. Many speak of fragility while pointing to the structural violence of the existing social, political and economic context in terms such as Care is conflictual, Direct action, Decommodification, Empathy, Hapticality, Interdependance, Lucid interval, Performance of care, Solidarity, Vulnerability and so on.

Curated by Zdenka Badovinac, Jesús Carrillo, Ida Hiršenfelder, Bojana Piškur / Edited by Ida Hiršenfelder / Published by Moderna galerija, Ljubljana, 2022.

Contributors of terms: Zdenka Badovinac, María Berríos, Miha Blažič (N’toko), Sara Buraya Boned, Jesús Carrillo, Sebastian Cichocki, Fatma Çolakoğlu, Nicolás Cuello, Jakub Depczyński, Kike España, Pauliina Feodoroff, Maddalena Fragnito, Elisa Fuenzalida, Nancy Garín Guzmán, Deniz Gül, Jennifer Hayashida, Ida Hiršenfelder, Alistair Hudson, Maria Iñigo Clavo, Goran Injac, Vladan Joler, Yuji Kawasima, Gal Kirn, Ram Krishna Ranjan, Vali Mahlouji, Sophie Mak-Schram, Javiera Manzi A., Diego Marchante “Genderhacker”, Pablo Martínez, Miran Mohar, Meriç Öner, Bojana Piškur, Theo Prodromidis, Tjaša Pureber, Rasha Salti, Anja Isabel Schneider, Natalia Sielewicz, Antoine Silvestre, Maja Smrekar, Jonas Staal, Bogna Stefańska, Kuba Szreder, Steven ten Thije, Abhijan Toto, Fran MM Cabeza de Vaca, Chương-Đài Võ, Mick Wilson, Onur Yıldız, Joanna Zielińska, Yolande Zola Zoli van der Heide, Joanna Zielińska

The Glossary of Common Knowledge, Vol. II is part of the larger Our Many Europes project (2018–22), organised by the museum confederation L’Internationale and its partners, and co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.