Cara Montagna (“Dear Mountain”) is a form of correspondence. It’s a conversation that seeks to offer reciprocity to the mountainside to which, for two years, we have directed our gaze and thoughts: among words and landscapes, among those who write about it and what inhabits it. It’s about writing a letter in the knowledge that if a response ever comes, it will be in the form of the sliding of scree, the crunching of footsteps on the path, or the hidden gurgling of a spring.
While the second episode of this podcast series explored the relational tension that emerges between those who walk in the mountains and their environment, now the focus shifts to the material, affective, and political web that connects various communities. An ecological, political, post-human perspective that considers human beings as perpetually interconnected with animal and environmental agencies.
Our correspondence is therefore also the corresponding, the mutual correspondence, it’s reading the swirling present landscape through the reciprocal relationship between different elements, through the alliances that human, animal, and environmental bodies constitute.
Cara Montagna will soon be online. While awaiting its launch, we now publish the transcript of the conversation between Ilaria Gadenz and Cecilia Guida, one of the voices from the third episode.
Cara Montagna (Dear Mountain) is a podcast edited by Ilaria Gadenz, created with Valentina Gervasoni.
ILARIA GADENZ
I’d like to start from your text Community at the Center. Participatory Practices and Generative Spaces in Contemporary Art. Following the etymology of the word, you write that what the community shares is not something more, but something less, a debt. Could you elaborate on this concept, also in light of the obligatory reciprocity of its root munus, and the idea of the gift’s paradox, as Derrida writes about it?
CECILIA GUIDA
I’m referring to an idea of community that comes from its Latin etymology, communitas, as analyzed by philosopher Roberto Esposito. In this perspective, the munus (at the root of the word) is not a free and disinterested gift but a particular gift: a gift-obligation, a gesture of opening to the other that creates a relationship, and that carries with it a debt to be repaid.
The debt I’m speaking about is not something negative but what binds individuals to each other, a reciprocal commitment that exposes them to one another. It’s a “lacking” of something, a void to be filled through building a connection, activating a continuous exchange that never ceases.
This shifts the notion of community from an identity or property-based level to a relational and processual one.
The “debt” however—if we look at it in light of Derrida—becomes complicated. Derrida, in fact, says the true gift is impossible because the moment you give, you create an obligation, a debt in other words, and this makes the gift something economic and calculable.
For Derrida, a true gift should be totally free, without return and without even the acknowledgement of having given. But this, in practice, is impossible and herein lies the paradox: in its capacity to simultaneously be something that is and also something that is not, being and not being at the same time.
We could say that community is this living paradox: a place where the pure gift is impossible because giving belongs to all of us, but it’s the very continuous exchange, the relational structure that holds people together.
ILARIA GADENZ
Continuing along Derrida’s line of thought, with the idea that the gift, as soon as it’s intentional and there’s recognition of it, becomes contaminated and enters into an economy, can we think of communal forms that exist outside calculation and economic logic, and how has (participatory) art worked on this boundary?
CECILIA GUIDA
Yes, I believe we can think of communal forms situated outside the logic of calculation and the extractive economy, provided we recognize that this doesn’t mean being “outside” the economy in an absolute sense—social practices, while existing on the margins, are within the system; they’re part of it. You can’t really be outside, but you can act differently within the economy.
It’s exactly on this boundary that the Indonesian collective ruangrupa worked with Documenta 15 (Kassel, 2022), proposing the idea of the lumbung—the collective granary in Indonesian—as an operative, affective, and political principle.
The lumbung wasn’t a mere metaphor but a concrete practice of redistributing surplus, co-decision making, and consequently care. In this sense, community wasn’t seen as an instrument to increase symbolic capital but as a system of relationships that generates value in a non-linear, non-competitive, non-measurable and non-capitalizable way.
The artists participating in Documenta were involved through networks of affinity, collaboration, and trust—ruangrupa’s approach was: “Make Friends, Not Art”—according to a curatorial model that challenged traditional selection systems—their selection wasn’t hierarchical but rhizomatic, and took place through a network of “lumbung members,” full co-curators, who in turn invited artists or groups. This selection shifted focus from monumental works for collectors or markets to building real relationships, lasting alliances. And so in Documenta 15 “Make Friends, Not Art” meant that art becomes a pretext—not the ultimate end—to weave communities, build bonds, and sustain shared practices. In this way, ruangrupa included in one of the most important artistic manifestations of this part of the world, showcasing practices from the global south that often remain outside canonical circuits because they don’t “perform” in the economic or spectacular sense of the term.
So, to address your question directly, Documenta 15 operated on the boundary between the art economy and forms of radical mutualism, not to deny the economic context but to partially deactivate it, decenter the authorial function, and distribute curatorial power in a genuinely horizontal way. In the ruruHaus—the curatorial team’s operational and social headquarters—one wall featured an enormous diagram showing all phases of building the exhibition, from the collective’s appointment as artistic director through opening and beyond, along with the distributed funding model for “lumbung members” (around $25,000 each) and a common fund for shared projects. This diagram was remarkable because for the first time in Documenta’s history, the public could see the entire event budget and how, when, and where funds had been deployed.
Documenta 15 was an experiment that generated strong institutional and political tensions but which, in my view, reopened the chance to think about community as a non-functional space, not evaluable according to an extractive logic, yet fully active on the cultural, social, and political level.
ILARIA GADENZ
In Community at the Focus, you write about those participatory projects that create common spaces of another kind, and here you use “kind” in the sense of generative, emancipatory projects, embracing Derrida and Ronell’s notion that participation is not belonging. Could you explain this point?
CECILIA GUIDA
When I write about “common spaces of another kind,” I’m referring to participatory projects that don’t limit themselves to reproducing preexisting institutional or relational models, but that generate spaces founded on new forms of relationship, new ways of being together, often hybrid, open, informal.
I use “kind” not in a classificatory sense, but generatively—inspired by Derrida and Ronell’s idea, outlined in a 1980 Critical Inquiry article, that participation isn’t founded on belonging to an identity, a fixed community, or a predetermined role, but on taking part, on being engaged. It’s an important distinction: it’s not about being part “of” something, but contributing to making it exist through the very act of participation.
In this sense, the participatory projects I refer to generate temporary communities that don’t define themselves through exclusion or boundary, but through openness and shared practice.
An example is Victoria Square Project, conceived by American artist Rick Lowe in response to the invitation to participate in Documenta 14, hosted in Athens in 2017. The project takes its name from the square of the same name that in 2015 became a camp for refugees and migrants arriving in the Greek capital, and therefore an urban symbol of themes related to hospitality, the coexistence of different cultures, and related social tensions. Victoria Square Project today is a space that exists and that is still operative, open to all inhabitants of the square, to organizations supporting immigrants and refugees, to cultural associations for getting to know each other and comparing experiences.
ILARIA GADENZ
Many questions emerge from your book, I’ll pose two: how should the relationship between artist and community be reframed? And what responsibility do artists have toward the communities they involve?
CECILIA GUIDA
When we speak of “community-based art,” we’re not referring to a pre-packaged format, to a repeating model, but rather to a theoretical category and “critical” practice where the levels and nature of participation differ depending on the interweaving of material aspects with immaterial ones (for example, stories and memories, both personal and collective), interweavings that occur in the context where the artist operates. Social practice is insistently local in its scope, and relationships are consolidated in person.
The artist’s role within a community extends far beyond traditional authorship—their responsibilities multiply: their ability to relate, their empathy allows them to respond (and here I mean responsibility as the ability to respond) to contexts where they’ve been invited to work, sensing and recognizing a community’s desires and critical issues—so listening becomes crucial—while also serving as a facilitator-mediator committed to challenging dominant narratives and co-creating with community situations that may become self-sustaining over time.
Authorship becomes decentralized and the artist turns into a weaver of connections. This defines their responsibility—I’m reminded of Maria Lai and her collective happening of 1981, Legarsi alla montagna (Binding to the Mountain), when, after learning of a local oral legend, she invited people to “bind together” the houses of Ulassai, and the entire community participated in what became the first relational performance in art history. The artist thus becomes a connector, building worlds through dialogue, plurality, and concrete action.
Moreover, an artist’s responsibility toward a community is ongoing and enduring—it doesn’t end when the work is presented, but includes caring for the social effects the work produces.
Many projects can serve as examples, including the landmark “Culture in Action: New Public Art in Chicago,” curated by Mary Jane Jacob—a foundational exhibition that essentially established the field of public space art practices. This took place in 1993 with preparatory work that had begun two years earlier. The ten invited artists came into contact with specific city communities, deemed uninterested in art (women, workers, adolescents, the sick), confronting them at length about what they felt they needed or desired, and art’s potential to think about and address problems from a different perspective.
Among the processual interventions undertaken, artist and theorist Suzanne Lacy—author of the expression “new genre public art,” in response to minimalist art placed in public spaces as if they were open-air museums—formed a temporary committee of women, named “A Coalition of Chicago Women,” which over two years met formally and informally, arriving at the decision to celebrate one hundred women who had stood out for their contribution to society (in a city where there were no monuments dedicated to women), through one hundred stone boulders with bronze plaques bearing the names of the chosen women, scattered throughout the city. Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle instead collaborated with the network of high school educational organizations operating in his predominantly Latino neighborhood to create Street-Level Video: a permanent video workshop conceived to enable groups of adolescents to create videos that represented their lives and interests more realistically and thoroughly than the rhetorical content and clichés conveyed by mainstream media.
A more recent community-based project that I followed is Serena Crocco’s, titled Via del Ricordo, initiated during the residency I curated at Casa degli Artisti in Milan between 2022 and last year. Serena chose to work in the Crescenzago neighborhood in the city’s northeastern outskirts, focusing on an extraordinary space: the former cemetery on Via del Ricordo, abandoned for sixty years, with a project aimed at reconstructing its memory and enabling a gradual, organic reopening for the benefit of the neighborhood.
Through convivial moments (there was also a Sunday lunch in front of the former cemetery entrance), workshops, occasions for exchange and collecting memories, articles and photographs, the artist involved elderly neighborhood residents (who are the site’s historical memory) and children from an elementary school (who have no memory but imaginative power) in a repositioning of the collective gaze on this forgotten city space and in a profound collective reflection—one still ongoing—on the relationship between places of life and those of death.
ILARIA GADENZ
How does community work change, or how does the work of artists who relate to the idea of community change, faced with the now consolidated idea that we cannot speak only of human community but must necessarily expand the field to include everything that is non-human?
CECILIA GUIDA
I’ll answer thatby discussing workshops, because they represent a central element in relational and participatory projects as they offer a fluid way for artists and communities to connect.
The workshop centers on the process rather than the product and creates conditions for reciprocal learning. It’s not just an operational tool, but an environment of possibilities where participatory art can exercise its transformative function.
Recently, together with curators Giorgina Bertolino, Francesca Comisso, and Alessandra Pioselli, I worked on the first monograph of the artists Caretto/Spagna—who accompanied us in editing the volume titled Bright Ecologies.
In my text, I reflect particularly on their workshop production, which is vast and often gives rise to works, as well as being considered work itself—for Caretto/Spagna, in fact, workshops are collective works that involve people and develop with them.
Speaking of participatory practices and non-human communities, in Italy one cannot fail to consider Caretto/Spagna who, in their research and artistic practice, challenge the illusion we have as human beings of separation from nature, and invite exploration, movement in the world—inhabiting is one of their research lines—and experimenting with various ways of perceiving living beings, human and non-human, animate and inanimate things that inhabit it. In their workshops, a cognitive process occurs whereby things are perceived “before” in one way and “after” in another.
ILARIA GADENZ
Caretto and Spagna’s work seems to embrace both these poles. In the introduction to their catalogue, they write: “if the being exists only in a relationship, then everything is ecological and every artwork is always collective.” How would you define the relationships established in their projects?
CECILIA GUIDA
Caretto/Spagna are philosophically close to the hierarchical ontology of Deleuzian matrix that affirms differences without any hierarchy or totalization: for them, life is a system of relationships, an energy flow that incessantly transforms matter.
So in their projects, relationship is the generative force that shapes the work and transforms those who participate.
In other words, as you just said and they write in the introduction to the volume Bright Ecologies, “if being exists only in relationship, then every work is inevitably ecological and collective”: in their works, authorship is distributed among participants; relationships are situated in specific contexts and times; the work is not a product but an event open to new configurations, to continuous transformation.
ILARIA GADENZ
What is meant by artists as “morphogenetic agents”?
CECILIA GUIDA
This is a definition by Caretto/Spagna who describe themselves not so much as authors in the traditional sense but as agents within a system of material, living, environmental relationships.
As artists they “take part in” an ecological and transformative network that places human and non-human elements, biological processes, perceptual dynamics, geological components etc. into dialogue.
Caretto/Spagna anticipated by two decades approaches and questions today considered essential and fundamental for an inclusive vision of perception and interaction with the world, closer to post-humanist philosophy than to critical debate on participatory and socially engaged art, which still remains inscribed in the twentieth-century humanistic paradigm.
ILARIA GADENZ
In the preface to the updated version of Artificial Hells by Claire Bishop, which you translated, there’s an attempt to explain the reasons for the disappearance of the concept of participation in critical discourse over the last twelve–thirteen years. We speak of participation and how it’s been replaced by terms from other epistemologies, other urgencies: care, healing, ritual… What happened to the word “community”? Is there total overlap between participation and community or can distinctions be made?
CECILIA GUIDA
In the introduction to the new updated edition of Artificial Hells, published last year by Luca Sossella, Claire Bishop mentions the fact that over the last twelve–thirteen years, the word “participation” has lost centrality in critical discourse, and has been partly replaced by terms like “care,” “healing,” “repair,” and “ritual.” These are words that respond to different urgencies, and in this scenario, the word “community” hasn’t disappeared but has been subjected to a semantic shift. Today we speak less of community as unitary subject and more often in terms of situated multiplicities, temporary alliances, relational ecologies. Community is no longer “the public” to be involved, as in the ’90s and 2000s, but a fluid condition within which participatory artistic practices, gestures of care, and forms of resistance are articulated.
So I’d say the word hasn’t disappeared but rather Claire Bishop references it in a more complex, more cautious, perhaps more responsible way.
Regarding the overlap between participation and community, I’d say there’s no complete overlap—it’s better to distinguish between them. The meaning we give to “participation” is certainly important: as I mentioned, by participating I don’t mean being part of something (I can participate in or collaborate on something without feeling part of the community) but rather taking part in creating something, building a community. It’s an ongoing process where participation must be actively practiced in order to generate open and porous communities.
ILARIA GADENZ
What are the main risks that Claire Bishop identifies in artistic practices relating to communities?
CECILIA GUIDA
According to Bishop, one of the main risks in relational and participatory artistic practices involving communities is an excessive emphasis on ethics at the expense of aesthetics. That is, a work’s value often gets measured in terms of good intentions and inclusivity, while overlooking the symbolic force, critical edge, and formal power of the artistic intervention—participatory art is not just social activity but also symbolic production, existing within the world while maintaining distance from it.
Another risk is the instrumentalization of communities—a form of extractivism where participation becomes merely a pretext to legitimize a project or generate consensus around the artist or the sponsoring institution. In such cases, people’s involvement fails to be truly transformative.
Bishop also warns against the aestheticization of social issues—when real conflicts are made visible only to be contemplated, without generating change or genuine shifts in perspective. This creates the risk of “representing” marginality without questioning its structural conditions.
Finally, there’s a broader political risk: participation as a soft form of governance, where the artists finds themselves playing a social operator/mediator role, absorbing public functions left uncovered by institutions.
In this way, art risks becoming a symbolic “band-aid” placed on systemic problems. In chapter six of Artificial Hells, Bishop speaks precisely about this, with provocative intent, through analysis of those artistic innovations that flourished in the United Kingdom in the ’80s, under Margaret Thatcher’s conservative government (1979–1992), called “Community Arts Movement.”
So according to Bishop, in the relationship with communities, critical awareness must be maintained, as well as attention toward the work’s disturbing power and formal tension—avoiding participation becoming an end in itself or a reassuring label—and the works, projects, and performances that Bishop describes in the book were chosen with these very aspects in mind.
ILARIA GADENZ
I’m collecting definitions of community. Could you tell me yours?
CECILIA GUIDA
I’ll respond through literature. There’s a Raymond Carver story called Cathedral that I always recommend to students at the beginning of my course at the Brera Academy, because it explores the very dimension of sharing that I consider central when discussing community.
In Cathedral, the protagonist—a man closed off from others, incapable of empathy—finds himself hosting his wife’s blind friend. Initially uncomfortable, everything changes when the two begin drawing a cathedral together: they do it jointly, the protagonist guiding the blind man’s hand with his own eyes closed. Through this simple gesture, the man sees for the first time through relationship, which transforms him: an epiphany occurs.
This story beautifully captures the sense of opening to others, the shift from “I” to “we” built through gesture, through shared experience.
For me, community exists—or rather, happens. “Happens” feels more accurate because it frees community from the constraint of lasting time and connects its creation to events. Community occurs in a place—be it symbolic, physical, or digital—where people experience life together.
