Play to Heal: On Resourcing Sustainable Activism in the Arts

Technology Is Institutional and the Institutional Is Technological. But What Else?

“Who created this traumatizing game?”

Lori suddenly turned to me and asked this question with red eyes. In the game we were playing, Lori’s role was to be lawyer who had spent her entire life fighting for environmental justice, aiming to improve the living conditions of her community. Just when her community had saved enough funds to do so, her personal life collapsed—due to years of exhaustion and neglected health issues. Eventually, the community decided to exhaust the funds to save her instead, but she was far too unwell to return to work. When all the game participants realized what had happened, they fell into silence, and that’s when Lori asked me this.

This was the end of a session of Liquid Dependencies: What Does a Decentralized Caring Society Look Like?1 This role-playing game simulates a near-future society that has implemented the ReUnion Network, a speculative welfare system for chosen families and mutual aid networks.2 The network is an actionable proposal, not a fantasy, although it has not yet been implemented outside the game system. In the game, ten participants and five hosts live together in a fictional society that supports new kinship relations institutionally and financially.3 Participants are assigned characters who they bring to life based on their own experiences. For five hours, they live through the vicissitudes of twenty to thirty years of their characters’ lifetimes, personally and collectively. What holds them together are the long-term, mutual, caring relationships they cultivate with each other through the support of the ReUnion Network.

The ReUnion Network and the Liquid Dependencies game are linked by commitment-based currency called Mutual Coin. A Mutual Coin is made up of two personal tokens, which are identity-bound, nontransferable, unconditionally issued tokens that represent an individual’s unique value in society. When two people commit to a long-term relationship, as a minimal viable definition of “family,” they can combine their respective personal tokens and create a Mutual Coin that they can spend together. Because relational decision-making is always involved in the creation and spending of the coin, the technological affordance cultivates relational thinking in every interaction, transforming the moment of consumption into a moment of care. The design of the coin attempts to address the perennial feminist dilemma around care: the struggle to find ways to value care rather than alienate it. However, technologies always work in tandem with institutional apparatuses to fully render new ideologies into the governance of everyday life. As such, the ReUnion Network also encompasses a strategic layer of institutional apparatuses, including civic law and municipal policy, to assist in rerouting the chain of value towards long-term mutual aid relationships and new kinships. By offering an infrastructure that organizes society through long-term peer-to-peer relationships, in tandem with traditional kinship relations such as friends and family, the initiative attempts to envision the social layer of a decentralized society.

Left: the “residents” of the ReUnion society pull their Mutual Coins together for collective projects; 

Right: the economic model of ReUnion Network, explaining how the Mutual Coin circulates in each stage of relationship and stimulates a translocal economy; courtesy Yin Aiwen

The ReUnion Network is a socioeconomic master plan. Liquid Dependencies, on the other hand, serves as a social simulation venue to test out the master plan in condensed space-time, in order to research the social consequences of a new socioeconomic infrastructure. Both the game and the system are heavily indebted to a decade of socio-technological thinking. In the 2010s, a design-at-large niche inspired by McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” gained popularity: from the idea that “the city is the message” (Keller Easterling), to the notion of “code as law” (Ben Cerveny), to “the stack” as a planetary computer (Benjamin H. Bratton).4 This generation of thinking on the ethos of design took a continental (Cerveny), global (Easterling), and planetary (Bratton) perspective on the sprawling socio-technical architectures that operate in multiple material dimensions. These writers attempted to redesign the “software” of society from an infrastructural perspective.

This line of thought shed new light on simulations, role-plays, and rehearsals as methods in the broad realm of socially engaged art and speculative design. Young artists, designers, and researchers have employed simulation games, fictional documentaries, dystopic science fiction, and investigative architectures to experiment with infrastructural ideas. Others have taken their ambitions to fields beyond art, such as business (K-Hole, Diakron),5 ownership models (FOAM, DOMA, Dayra),6 policy innovation (Foundation for Public Code, Dark Matters Lab),7 and institutional and organizational practices (Bureau of Care, Lumbung, creative institutionalism).8 Through manifestos, forecasting reports, white papers, diagrams, digital interfaces, crypto tokens, smart contracts, layer protocols, and practices of decentralized autonomous organization, these practitioners recognize the social and institutional potentials of these unconventional instruments and take advantage of them for their artistic visions and activism. Like many of these initiatives, we began by looking at arts communities, but quickly expanded our realm of research beyond the arts. Much of our work bridges art and nonart contexts.

This cluster of practices can be summarized as proactive projects that build on the idea that “the technological is institutional and the institution is technological.” This idea assumes that infrastructures carry deep ideological messages, which influence people’s behavior and organize society in a nuanced cybernetic manner. Institutions, as byproducts of modernity, are always technological; the technological has in turn been a de facto institution of everyday life in a society heavily wired by network technologies. Interactions and exchanges are mediated through digital infrastructures and interface languages; computer code allows and disallows certain types of inputs, algorithms generate renderings of the world, and databases make selective archives of human biases.

The personal front of ReUnion Network app and the organizational bodies involved in the system. Courtesy by Yin Aiwen.

Alongside this techno-institutional ethos, simulations, gaming, and world-building have regained popularity for testing new cybernetic ambitions. Liquid Dependencies, as the simulation of the ReUnion Network, underscores how social position and life stages impact the compatibility and limits of mutual aid relationships. To investigate this, we designed a character database—spanning ages, classes, and life conditions—and a wide range of personal and societal plots that resemble everyday life today.9 We wanted to find out whether people would behave differently within a system that promotes care, even as they find most of their life encounters in the game to be awfully familiar.

Launched at the 13th Shanghai Biennale in 2021, Liquid Dependencies has since held over fifty sessions in various cities in Europe and China, bringing more than five hundred people into the fictional world and out again. While we see an overwhelming similarity in behavioral changes in people across cultures and local contexts (we adapt our database to every new city we travel to), there are always one or two sessions that stick out and tell us that infrastructure is not everything.

Playing session in Shanghai Biennale; Players drawing individual events, revealing their upcoming fate. Photographer: Yannan Pan.

In the Amsterdam session, Lori, the endearing environmental lawyer character, fell into an abyss of burnout, which led to a collective collapse. At the end of this game session, some characters regretted not paying enough attention to each other, while others disassociated due to communal grief after pleading for collective action for change.10 This session happened to include many activists from different fields, so it accidentally became a group portrait of activists. One activist put their personal life on the bargaining table in an effort to realize their goal for society; another more privileged activist reproached people for obsessing over their personal lives, yet completely disregarded individual suffering. Some participants who practiced everyday activism had a hard time believing that bigger-scale change was possible.

Marked by poverty, precarious labor, and unhelpful governance, Lori’s society faced bleak outcomes despite its collective effort and the power of the care-driven system that has been proven by hundreds of game participants. The session presents a nuanced problem: Why did a group of people who are well aware of the flaws and limits of society, and who have ambitious goals, become so self-limiting and problematic in their collective pursuit?

Activist Trauma: The Life and Death of a Community

Since creating Liquid Dependencies, we have become involved in discussions around self-organized communities. In 2023 we decided to escalate our informal explorations on self-organized communities in the arts and adjacent fields, so we converged our efforts with the project Alchemy of Commons, a larger inquiry into an alternative art economy that could adequately support socially engaged art.11 We initially assumed that the problem behind the current art economy was prioritizing individuals and project-bound production over collective and long-term transformation. During preparation work for Alchemy of Commons, we realized that an alternative art economy could not “simply” be a proper funding mechanism for long-term collective work. Designing something better would require a proper ontological understanding of how a collective (or a community)12 exists and functions—yet we found that even collectives and communities themselves have a hard time comprehending what they are.

The idea of “community” is especially confusing because the term has become a euphemism applied to things as varied as mass movements, professional networks, and platform users. Deciding that our speculative future funding should be given to be a group of people engaged in a long-term pursuit—namely an intentional community, an activist/artivist group, or a self-organized community—we sought to determine the “essence,” the needs, and the struggles of such communities. We started our journey with ethnographic research on the “co-op plan” of the Dinghaiqiao Mutual-aid Society, a self-organized community that grew out of an artist-led initiative.13 We also examined communities in China, Europe, and the US. As we looked at groups across a range of cultural and political conditions, membership demographics, realms of activity, strategic directions, and forms of organization, we couldn’t help but notice certain prevalent “scripts”: burnout due to self-exploitation, disputes over money and the distribution of labor, unequal relationships among members, and disagreements over ideology and practice. Members of these groups tended to blame community fallouts on major events, specific individuals, or interpersonal conflicts, as if the community would have not ended in chaos and resentment if the alleged culprit didn’t exist.

After more than two hundred hours of interviews and discussions, we came to realize that people who make long-term investments in collective action often come from a place of trauma. They have felt isolated by their environment, or discontented with the values of their environment, or have been impacted by social injustice themselves. Whether or not they have undergone some form of political education, people are more likely to involve themselves in types of activism that resonate with their personal experience or their narratives of injustice. They turn to collective action for self-realization or healing. But these personal motives often get buried, either by the individuals themselves or their peers, because they can be perceived as selfish and therefore illegitimate. At the same time, the intellectualized discourse around social justice rewards the appearance of impersonal and selfless behavior. This situation creates a nearly cynical collective life in which activists who believe in “the personal is political” fail to do justice to their (and their peers’) personal needs in communal spaces.

Anarchist Andrew X calls this “the theology of suffering,” in which “self-sacrificing politicos stunt their own lives and their own will to live, [which] generates a bitterness and antipathy to life which is then turned outwards to wither everything else.”14 In real life, unresolved personal trauma and the need for self-realization are always at work in the fury of activist life. Often activism takes place within a traumatizing environment, or is a site of retraumatization. The self-sacrificing tendency of activists not only creates shame around communicating needs, concerns, and discomfort to others in the group, but also tends to dismiss struggles within communities. Activists pursuing the betterment of society are sometimes unable to figure out how to better their own micro-societies. Self-organized communities struggle to avoid perpetuating the same repressive structures they seek to dismantle.

In the community dynamics we have observed, we can’t help but notice that the “Karpman drama triangle” is persistently at play. Developed by psychiatrist Stephen B. Karpman, this model captures the entrenched dynamic among three roles that people tend to adopt in interpersonal conflicts: the victim, the rescuer, and the prosecutor.15 It helps explain why some people find themselves unable to break free from cycles of conflict. The model can be applied to activists, who tend to take the position of rescuers advocating for victims of social injustice while viewing their opponents as prosecutors—a dynamic that gives insight into why many activists also unintentionally perpetuate conflicts in their communities.

Crucially, the Karpman drama triangle suggests that the victim, the rescuer, and the prosecutor are interchangeable roles, and implies that one role encapsulates the scripts of the other two. At times, activists who see themselves as rescuers can also fall victim to systematic violence. They can prosecute their peers for their inadequate actions towards change, or for reproducing oppression within their communities. We saw this dynamic in the Liquid Dependencies session in Amsterdam, when Lori the rescuer exhausted herself to save her perceived victim, the endangered community, and became a victim herself. She turned to prosecuting us, the game designers, for her tragedy.

When members of activist groups accuse their fellow activists of replicating the same oppressive system they are fighting against, the accusers have often been traumatized by the oppressive system. They wish to rewrite their scripts of the oppressed by joining a community that can show them otherwise. The people who are accused feel obligated to meet this demand, but when they fail they experience shame and resentment, becoming victims themselves. The problem is that activists are part of the society they seek to diverge from, so they lack positive experiences and sufficient know-how of alternatives. For example, how can one understand how noncapitalist money would work when one has lived one’s entire life under capitalism? One can only figure out bit by bit with one’s peers, but the drama triangle will take its toll every step of the way.

To escape the drama triangle, the rescuer must permit themself self-care, the victim must take ownership of their vulnerability, and the prosecutor must set boundaries. For the drama triangle to fall apart, it only takes one of the three roles to reject the script—then the collective can begin to see a real pathway to change. However, people usually develop their attachment to the script over a lifetime, so it requires a deep healing journey to see the world in a different way.

Perhaps influenced by such insights, new strands of activism such as healing justice, restorative justice, and transformative justice have emerged in recent years. Informed by liberation psychology, care ethics, ecofeminism, and decolonial practices, healing justice seeks to make change while also practicing self-care and communal healing.16 This ethos has inspired recent socially engaged art that foregrounds solidarity, interdependency, and friendship as fundamental parts of activism.17 After decades on the margins this artistic approach has gained mainstream attention, featuring in major art festivals such as Documenta 15 and the Yokohama Triennale 2024. Behind the scenes, though, the socially engaged art collectives we spoke to still experience a tension between messy internal processes and external expectations of solidarity, which are inevitably escalated by the production pressure of exhibition-making. In a previous essay I wrote:

When a community aims to present a utopian practice for exhibition, they feel a heightened need to portray flawless cohesion during that specific period of time. However, the production of an exhibition itself is often the most challenging and conflict-inducing moment. Community members may easily feel ignored and instrumentalized when the issue cannot be addressed due to the stress of the presentation. Furthermore, those who raise concerns may be accused of being self-centered and narrow-minded in the midst of a “significant moment” for the community. The spectatorship leads to a shifting community focus from the process of “utopian activity” to representing static utopian blueprints. Unfortunately, this kind of context shift, or cognitive twist is extremely subtle and hard to detect as the art economy generally does not provide functioning spaces that can be excused from the obligation to be seen.18

This tension between the need to portray a harmonious group image and the need to address internal conflict is not specific to art collectives. Change-makers in a variety of sectors struggle to prove their professionalism and fund-ability to stakeholders while also developing legitimate practices in the field. The former requires a portfolio of good performance, while the latter requires a commitment to staying with the trouble.

Under the pressure to secure funding, the activists-at-large sometimes feel compelled to shift focus from communal healing to manufacturing a public image, conflating collective change with institutional recognition. Although seeking social justice first emerges as a personal calling of the activists themselves, many communities feel the urge to turn themselves into public platforms and aid others in healing. The public-oriented impulses of intentional communities tend to gloss over the internal healing process, assuming that personal trauma will automatically be resolved if injustices in society are addressed.

The Question of Funding

Under the European Funding Model19 and the pervasiveness of investment logic, funding bodies stress “the public interest” and “future returns” to justify their investments, no matter how abstract and arbitrary these notions may be. At the same time, the art economy has its own cultural currency and feedback loops that can hardly respond to these priorities. The problem is that terms like “public interest” and “future returns” are understood differently by artists, the so-called public, and policymakers—yet these terms persistently serve as tokens of legitimacy.

Does an open call function well as a mechanism to support socially engaged practices, or is it simply an institutional performance of accessibility? When we spoke to funders—both private and public—we found uncertainty and anxiety about whether they are funding the right projects, particularly when most selection committees have limited knowledge or access to the sociocultural contexts in which the prospective projects are rooted. Most of the time, a grant organization can only maintain a semblance of impartiality by assembling a diverse committee, or by giving the committee an advisory role, with other officials responsible for the actual funding decision. If a grant organization has the resources, it can take additional steps such as consulting local sources, commissioning local research, and implementing participatory grantmaking. However, even with these extra steps, it remains a challenge to determine which practices from a variety of contexts deserve recognition and reward for their social and artistic value. Most of the time, the selection process becomes a debate over impressions, speculation, and quasi-curatorial impulses.

European Funding Model. Courtesy Yin Aiwen.

Meanwhile, out in the field, communities crumble as they attempt to respond to clueless curatorial practices and arbitrary funding protocols. Although money and exposure are not everything in communal practices, they draw most of the attention. In the light (or shadow) of social media, artists and activists can succumb to the pressure to be publicly presentable and get lost in attention fever. A community’s internal strength can be reduced to the “infrastructure” for publicly appealing presentations.

These problems are exacerbated in the arts. In a previous text called “The Solidarity Trinity: Or What Happens to Solidarity in the Arts,” we highlighted how art residencies, institutional commissions, and international exhibitions can jeopardize the solidarity of a collective.20 (The “Solidary Trinity” consists of labor, space, and relationships, which, we argue, are inseparable aspects of communal solidarity.) Competitive selection processes that compare collectives from adjacent socioeconomic environments—discounting the fact that these collectives might be mutually supportive—lead to context-less decisions. In our research we found several instances where competitive opportunities precipitated an ecosystem collapse among local artivist communities. Although these collapses stemmed from chronic problems within these communities, it’s crucial to acknowledge how external opportunities—shaped as they are by curatorial practices, funding mechanisms, and grant protocols—can act as the first domino, or the last straw, of a total collapse.

The question then becomes: How do we imagine an art economy that can support the processual nature and healing needs of communities? If such an economy were implemented, how would the relationships among these actors change? Inspired by decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) and NFTs, our project Alchemy of Commons initially envisioned a funding mechanism that supported maintenance-as-ownership.21 We imagined a process-driven DAO for growing communal participation and collective governance. We hoped to implement a commoning process for the arts by underscoring the importance of maintenance labor in artistic value creation.

But we put aside this approach to commoning when we realized that the current art economy offers little incentive for artists to commit to long-term engagement with communities, as such efforts do not easily translate into professional cachet. Nor does the economy reward artists who share ownership or authorship through collective maintenance.22 In such an unrewarding environment, artists who commit to long-term change and communal collaboration effectively take the activist approach, making personal investments to pursue the social change they desire even though there is no promise of financial or other returns.

This is a systematic inadequacy. To address it, we returned to the methodologies of the ReUnion Network and Liquid Dependencies, attempting to use gamification and speculative technological proposals to explore an alternative art economy for socially engaged art. Our first step was to model these invisible personal investments and unspoken expectations on the part of socially engaged artists, activists, and practitioners in similar situations. No socially engaged artwork, or any other form of change-making, can exist without their commitment.

Alchemy of Commons is also a role-playing game designed to model the multilayered forces that shape the life of a community. It serves as a playable archive for people to relive and recreate a community’s history. In the game, each player begins with a personal script and a player dashboard that shows their assigned character’s life situation. The dashboard also shows the personal “allowances” they can invest in the life of their community; we named these “Available Time,” “Personal Well-being,” and “Financial Opportunities.” As the characters pool their allowances to improve the status of the community, these investments are returned to the individual as “experience points” that contribute to their “Sense of Belonging” (to feel accepted), “Sense of Achievement” (to feel they are capable), and “Sense of Personal Growth” (to discover their potential independent of prevailing social values). These three senses signify the initial motivation of each individual, showing the give-and-take that goes on under the surface of collective life.

Each character has a different configuration of these three senses, based on their personal history and life situation: the less one feels they belong, the more experience points are required to obtain a token for a Sense of Belonging. Similarly, if one has an acquired competence, they need fewer experience points to obtain a Sense of Achievement token. Players can decide where to apply their experience points, which reveals different personal values and strategies for fulfillment. The process of gaining a Sense of Belonging, a Sense of Achievement, and a Sense of Growth is also the process through which one develops a “community feeling” and becomes a “commoner” of society.23

We found gaming language wonderful for capturing the invisible and the undervalued. A quantifying language that might otherwise be criticized as reductive and competitive can actually advance personal and communal healing, in contrast to the overwhelming meritocratic tendency of activism. By turning personal motivation (the three senses) and limitation (the personal allowances) into “resources” that sustain a community, the game structurally addresses the legitimacy and urgency of self-care and individual healing in collective life. It demands that the players shift their perspective. If done right, a simulation game can become a site of healing and a form of activism.

The Ontology of a Community: A Healing Ouroboros

Using all of our observations and fieldwork, we created “The Ontology of Community,” a series of diagrams for interpreting the life of a collective. Also nicknamed “Community Astrology,” it demonstrates the ideal community-building journey and generates collective strategies to mobilize change. It consists of six axes: Space, Relationship, Labor, Economy, Ideology, and Healing. Each axis expresses the internal and external aspects of its titular theme, creating cyclical paths that demonstrate the normative progression of a community. By putting a psychological spin on community relations, the chart functions as a situated framework that can be applied to communities across regions, socioeconomic situations, cultural contexts, personal-political dynamics, and spatial conditions. For instance, rather than delimiting the collective space as physical or digital, residential or event-based, we use the categories “safe” and “open.” These are more inclusive categories for describing a community’s approach to its collective space.

The normative journey of a community begins with a Safe Space where people can bring together their personal experiences of Social (In)Justice and form trustworthy Internal Relationships through the daily Maintenance Labor that sustains the “Solidarity Trinity.” When a basis for solidarity is formed, the group often feels comfortable enough to discuss money and resource distribution. In other words, a Communal Economy can take shape. (Safe Space, Internal Relationships, Maintenance Labor, and Communal Economy are the four aspects of community Self-Organization.) Ethical Organization, which is often expressed through protocols, codes of conduct, and organizational structures, accommodates the communal experience and grounds the ideology the group advocates. Based on our research, when an organization is formed through collective experience and is able to respond to new experiences, community members are likely to find a Sense of Belonging and reach the point of Individual Nurturing.

The Ontology of Community; courtesy by Yin Aiwen

When a collective finds solace in its Internal World, in theory it feels ready to face the outside and make itself an Open Space. This is when the Ontology of Community enters the External World. By opening themselves to the External World, community members meet like-minded individuals who find their work important and meaningful. These individuals make up a support network, or as we call it, a “wetlands” for the community. These wetlands nurture the community with emotional and material support and sustain the community’s purpose even when there is a lack of funding and public exposure.Up until that point, the community successfully fulfills Immediate Transformation, the second phase of the community journey. With a strong Wetland Health, the community will be motivated to take up Productive Labor and open the next phase, Scalable Impact. In this last phase, a community should be able to do most of what funders and institutions expect: engage and transform the General Economy, seize Allying Opportunities, and generate effective strategies to achieve Social Justice. In a more just society, more Safe Space can be cultivated. In this ideal pathway, a community serves as a healing ouroboros, generating an infinite spiral for a better society.

Left: the three phases of a community; Right: the internal world and the external world of a community; courtesy Yin Aiwen

In our messy life on earth, however, no community can develop in such a perfect linear manner. Self-organized communities often begin by pursuing a few goals, such as those on the Economy or Ideology axis, while also laying the groundwork for others. Uneven attention to the twelve aspects of community-building is perfectly normal, but a consistent disparity between them can lead to community fatigue, or can create latent resentments that are waiting to explode. Simply put, a group’s stronger aspects won’t be able to prop up its weaker aspects for long, without generating exhaustion and resentment. The most sustainable approach is to maintain a balance between all of the aspects of community-building, so collective members won’t burn out.

What are the implications of these findings for funders and institutions that wish to support collectives? The more ambitious a collective, the stronger the internal work its must commit to. For instance, to organize in a decentralized way (Ethical Organization), a community should ask itself: Does it have a Safe Space to discuss its concerns? Are its Internal Relationships supportive? Does it know how to maintain the community on a day-to-day level (Maintenance Labor)? Is it open to sensible discussions about money and has it reached a consensus on its value framework (Communal Economy)? If these questions are not addressed, discussions about building the organization can feel artificial and groundless; this risks letting concepts dictate collective practice and can lead to a repressive community. Communities can use the “normative journey” we propose to examine whether they have the right conditions to thrive. The diagram also shows that the “higher” the goal of a funder, an organization, or a collective, the less likely it can be realized: not because these goals cannot be reached, but because most project-oriented commissions don’t support all the work that goes into the previous sections of the chart.

The chart reveals the significance of collective self-care for the sustainability of a collective mission. While a community has control over its Internal World, the External World is susceptible to unforeseen influences from a shifting social ethos. Seizing Allying Opportunities requires strategic and creative initiative from the community. Yet its opportunities are also impacted by social trends and evolving norms that the community may have limited influence over. Furthermore, variables in the External World can easily pose challenges to internal variables; a shifting ethos can even bring the demise of a community. In the post #MeToo era, for instance, previously acceptable organizational practices might no longer be considered appropriate, and groups may feel an urgency to reorganize despite not having the relevant experience. Imagine a community run predominately by cis men that feels the pressure to become a gender-inclusive organization, but lacks the appropriate Self-Organization experience to create such an organizational framework. This could make the effort feel inauthentic from the outside and repressive from the inside.

Survival workshop with a community for mapping their current “ontology”. Photographer: Anna Liv Bolther.

There is general lack of resources and support systems for communities to go through these self-revolutionizing journeys. Such journeys are seen as a private responsibility rather than as a community’s contribution to society. Given the polarizing political situation today, we must realize that the transformation of society needs more nuanced work than strident advocacy and the showcasing of radical, ungrounded ideas. Supporting communities to reflect, explore, and transform—allowing them to explore different forms of Ethical Organization—enables them to make major contributions to society. Take the fictional cis-men community again. For this group to undergo a sustainable transformation, it need to engage in self-reflection and modify its practices. It may need to shift how Maintenance Labor is distributed by changing Internal Relationships. It may need to organize its Safe Space differently (e.g., by inviting other types of bodies to be present) before rushing into new codes of conducts. However clumsy, messy, and lengthy these processes may be, the group’s experience of succeeding or failing is an important contribution to the betterment of society. We believe that this is the most important “function” of a community: to be a site of healing and practice by living the alternatives rather than merely performing them.

It Takes a Village to Sustain a Community

What do these findings tell us about a future art ecosystem for socially engaged art and communal practices? First, let’s dive deeper into the chart. After the Ontology of Community morphed into a form that resembles an astrology chart, we took a leap of faith and applied astrological rules to the chart, discovering different approaches to understanding the sustainability of a community. For example, if one seeks to sustain a community, one can examine whether the collective’s mission contains competing priorities by looking at the collective’s “modalities,” or by checking to see if the elements of community—imagination, passion, intention, and value24—are being practiced at each stage of the community’s development.

During our workshop with a young collective, the members realized that they were uncertain about whether their ideology was aligned with their organizational methods, despite having a vibrant Wetland Health due to the connections and reputations of community members. A relatively weak Ethical Organization and a strong Wetland Health may not only generate burnout and fatigue, but may trigger an unexpected crisis: high expectations from the wetlands can quickly become unrealistic. Since insecure feelings are contagious, suspicion and mistrust can plague Internal Relationships and potentially sabotage Allying Opportunities. We suggested that to resolve this situation, the collective should work on its Ethical Organization to meet the wetlands’ expectations. Or if the collective needed more time, we suggested that it carefully manage the wetlands’ expectations instead of being taken over by attention fever. We paid special attention to the tension among these four aspects (Wetland Health, Ethical Organization, Internal Relationships, Allying Opportunities) because they all belong to the Transformational modality, meaning that these aspects share the goal of transforming something, but each uses a different approach.25 Aspects within the same modality tend to compete against each other for the community’s attention and resources, draining energy from the community.

The four corners of transformational modality. Courtesy by Yin Aiwen.

Another way to look at the sustainability of a community is to determine if any weak areas might become barren of community elements. Take artivist communities as an example, which tend to score low on the Economy axis during self-evaluation. This is not because communities in the arts are uninterested in this axis; on the contrary, many are invested in exploring alternative economies in a communal setting. The problem is that insufficient knowledge about the General Economy can limit the community’s imagination for practicing a Communal Economy, leading to an underdeveloped Self-Organization phase. This tendency is evident in many web3 attempts to create alternative economic models through tokenomics.26 Without proper collective experience in alternative practices or sufficient knowledge of the pros and cons of the existing economy, these web3 ideas resemble immature ideas from early capitalism. As a result, these efforts either have very little resilience against fraud, or rely heavily on arbitrary regulation. It is beyond challenging to create a clear alternative when there is no clear understanding of the system one is attempting to escape from.

The three aspects that nurture the Sustainability of Passion (left) and the Sustainability of Value (right). Courtesy by Yin Aiwen.

The Economy is more than a frustrating reality test though. Insufficient capacity in the General Economy can lead to a decline in community members’ passion for their community. For a young collective, good Internal Relationships are vital to sustaining the initial passion of collective members. As they pass through the Self-Organization phase, members need to feel nurtured enough to be passionate. But when a community matures and, for instance, becomes well known, its ability to meaningfully engage with the General Economy is key. Many artivist communities stagnate at this stage; community members return to “real life,” assuming they are simply growing apart. But the chart suggests that there is unfinished business for communities that wish to scale their impact and realize social justice.

In a similar vein, a lack of facility in Communal Economy raises questions about collective value in the early stage of a community. An insufficient Communal Economy that is misaligned with members’ experiences in maintaining Safe Space, Internal Relationships, and Maintenance Labor can undermine the community’s value, thus limiting the development of Wetland Health and Social Justice. Lacking trust in their community’s value, members and their wetlands may also distrust each other as valuable partners in their social pursuits. Artist communities that tinker with alternative economic models as aesthetic toys either implode over uneven labor distribution and unfair financial compensation, or perish quickly, since they can only attract a small Wetland—a niche that treats the subject in the same limiting way.

Wetlands: The Key to a Transformative Ecosystem

The twelve aspects of community astrology call for a paradigm shift towards a holistic support system that integrates communal healing and collective action. Communities often exist as interconnected archipelagos that share wetlands. We see curatorial and funding practices that put these communities into competition, planting toxic seeds in the ecosystems of these communities. If our goal is to facilitate sustainable social transformation through collective practice, we need to account for the fact that communities aren’t atomized from each other. We need to commit to exploring noncompetitive modes of funding that cultivate and nourish community ecosystems. The question remains: How do funding bodies and organizations ensure that their investments in the internal work of a community are legitimate? How do we design a gate-keeping mechanism that embraces the messy, clumsy, lengthy, sometimes painful, self-revolutionizing journey of a community?

We think wetlands are the key. Wetlands generally consist of long-term, supportive, personal relationships. They are made up of individuals who are not responsible for the maintenance of the community but who find the collective’s work personally meaningful. This relationship to the community can make individuals in the wetlands personally care about the community more than those in “alliance” with the community, who tend to look at the community from a strategic and institutional standpoint. These features of wetlands give them a special position in community ontology: they are part of the External World of the community, but are close enough to affect the Internal World of the community. They develop at the intersection of Immediate Transformation and Scalable Impact, and ensure that the community’s value remains intact as it enters the wider world. At the same time, wetlands can be problematic: they can be demanding, and their mixture of the personal (as wetlands) and the institutional (as alliances) can be perplexing and ethically sensitive. And yet the situatedness and long-term presence of wetlands offer perspectives on sustainable community that the current art economy cannot.

Indeed, wetlands can leverage situated, caring curatorial and institutional practices. Just as community archipelagos share interconnected wetlands, individuals can be in a wetland relationship with multiple communities. They can help communities mediate internal conflicts, or pose inspiring challenges. As individuals progress into new social positions, they can bring Allying Opportunities to the community and enrich the wetlands as a whole, fostering a prosperous social ecosystem for all. Can wetlands open new pathways to fund communities?

A wetland-driven art economy, as we imagine it, could evolve into a sustainable ecosystem for communal practices and social transformation. It could help the arts overcome their structural, self-absorbed tendency and deliver on their social promise, even as it weaved a resilient, healthy wetlands for the greater art community. This kind of arts wetland has become increasingly necessary amidst a global backlash in cultural funding. To give one example: in 2024 many Dutch cultural institutions lost funding overnight, sending a shockwave through the cultural ecosystem.27 Traditionally, the Netherlands has funded culture generously, but this has resulted in a fragile cultural landscape because cultural practitioners rely on a monolithic source of funding. Similarly, any artivist community whose wetlands consist mainly of friends from art circles is in a precarious position.

We believe that it’s healthy for a wetlands to have a benevolent and moderate distance from the community, and for wetland members to come from diverse social backgrounds. A “biodiversity” of wetlands can enrich the practices and discourse of a community and can increase the community’s robustness by spreading out political and economic risk. Developing a healthy wetlands is not only the responsibility of communities themselves; it also falls on the shoulders of curators, art institutions, cultural businesses, and social organizations.

In our design brief, the funding model of wetlands does not operate as a one-way circuit for spectacles and speculations. Instead, it functions as a dynamic, multidirectional ecosystem that transcends categories and industries. Ensuring healthy wetlands requires that funders stay close to the ground, responding to the needs of the greater wetlands in society and creating a new ecology for collective prosperity. Future curatorial and institutional practices can thrive if they design and weave together a broad range of wetlands, supporting communities to flourish in multiple dimensions. In return, the art world will be liberated from the constant stress of proving its social importance. Because art will stop being merely a show and become life itself.