 Hello, welcome back everybody. Thank you, thank you. Please take a seat. Please take a seat, all of you. Thank you. So, I'm going to introduce to you Carmen Mollet. On 1st of January 2018, 10 Brussels-based art professionals opened a shared bank account to which all members would have equal access and rights. Since then, all income generated by any of the members is credited to this account, while all of their individual expenses are also made from the shared account. Each person is free to make expenses from the common account regardless of the income contributed to it. We will now hear about Carmen Mollet, a live case study in its own right, and one which we as IITM members examining their solutions should embrace. The story of the case of Carmen Mollet will proceed our own session where we will be examining and discussing five other different case studies. I am very happy to introduce to you Dirstin Maksilov, who's been invited to moderate this discussion, as an actress herself, being involved in commoning projects such as SOS Really and Common Income, and Dirstin will join us on the stage. And with her, we assume we will have Anna Rispoli who works on the border between artistic creation and activism, and who is one of the founders and active participants of Common Income. Take it away. Do you hear me? Anna, you're here. So I was invited by Anna to moderate this session, and we see it a little bit more as a conversation between the two of us. We are both like busy with solidarity activities that focus on the redistribution of money or wealth or resources, how you want to call it, and we are both artists. So it's how to say we work on the grassroots of redistribution, and the landscape of redistribution models is very broad, and both are all the initiatives that we are involved in their more small scale. Common Wallet in particular works on a very intimate level, and SOS Relief, which is an initiative by State of the Arts, which maybe I will introduce during our discussion, but we'll see what happens, and works on redistribution through direct payment on account of someone in need. So there is someone who can say, I need money, and someone who says I have money, and then we match those people and they transfer money. So it works a bit on a bigger scale, but it's also very small initiative only for Belgium. And Anna and me, we met in another initiative, which is the Common Income, and the Common Income is a group where I think four or five people that are busy with rethinking, maybe and coming up with another prototype that can maybe be embedded in different environments also. So that's where we met, and the prototype hasn't been launched yet, but money moments have been launched, and we will talk about it maybe in our conversation. So how this session will go, Anna is going to give a short introduction of the Common Wallet. In the meantime, we see it a little bit informed, so if there are questions from the audience, I don't see everyone very well, but I see most of you. You can already raise your hands and ask the question. If I would have a question during the presentation, also Anna can respond to my question, maybe Anna has a direct question to me, so it will be trying to get a style of conversation in here, but we'll see how that goes. Common Wallet, as I say, is working on a business level, and I found one sentence that I thought is very intriguing which is saying, it's a radical economy prototype that aims at the polyamorous relationship with money. So on that note, I'll hand over to Anna and launch her presentation. Thank you very much. I really love this sentence because it's a lot of the possibility of imagination. It's a big project that works on intimacy, as it says. And so I thank you all for going to this kind of the suspension of this belief to create this intimate discussion between us, even if unfortunately it can't be there with you in a physical presence. But feel welcome also to have the last question by doing the presentation. So it's a project that we really intimate in that format. So the Common Wallet, as I understand it, is more or less 10 people, maybe in Brussels, four years now, are sharing all one bank account. How do you happen? It's one of these side effects of a project that doesn't see the light, but then the side effect is much more important. We want to create a cooperative and this cooperative could have not be the main and go to the community of a common thought producer to provide the professional expenses. And we want this part to be extremely fluid, not to be without science at the beginning of each project. So we thought that we need to exercise and exercise for its validity. We don't want to fall again into a cooperative seat and the mutual traction analysis is a lot in here. So let's make an experiment on a personal level, very formal, let's have one bank account and for three months we just share. And at the beginning we want to look at the professional account, ask for 10 cards and we decided a couple of principles. These principles were to worry everything we were earning with everything concerning the cash flow into the account and to use the account for all and the expenses that we need or that we want to do so that the difference between the essential cost because the energy and the school etc. was a personal level of non-essential cost, that we had here, a holiday or very expensive books, I don't know where people died. After these three months we realized that we didn't understand enough so we wanted to keep it for long, we experienced for one year and after this year we decided that we didn't want to open the corporate even more and we just wanted to focus on this shared common account. Why? Because we realized during the journey and the journey means that these kind of people have also changed from new people actors to people left so there is also a constant evolution on the needs that are projected and all that. So we realized that our main focus was to unlearn some of the services to unlearn the the destiny of the character which shows the actual value to success or to failure and to meet this failure and success in a seemingly lonely way in our culture because if you don't make it at the end of the month it's a fault. If you make it it's your value. If you earn more than others it also helps something about the presumption of failure. And it takes five minutes to make this very simple relation of a failure or success in failure. It's extremely extraordinary so many complex factors that is not the individual destiny but the individual willingness to do their work well. Classical ability fortune, luck help us to be the same good trend a lot. So after this five minutes a very simple evaluation of the symmetry of unfairness of position we thought that it would be very interesting for us to experience experience a new failure of your comedy that was based on a hierarchical approach that we are not here to fear system in which nobody ever believes they are taking upon a sense of particularity. Which is not very easy to discover. We needed at least a few years to learn how to deal with this liberation of the years as many experienced as many made to solitude and very filled with good friendship. So the challenge is then people try to transform money into a comedy and to transform the character of solitude into friendship. It's as simple as that very what I'm very reading and true to it I would say but also there is this other course between and they do that on a complexity of levels of course. So how is it possible if you question the characters who are live when we talk about money early on how is it possible to to shift from the feelings of neutral judgment how is it possible to shift the deep understanding of money as a pure scarcity basically or really for the emotional scarcity into or to reinforce the notion of abundance. It doesn't mean a little bit more because we are kind of together of course but it's very very different to have bound up the amount of people together rather than muscles in the end rather than the amount. So how does it work how does it work the experience is very simple even if you're facing one of your own kind of knowledge as a human being you just get to your favorite guy which is a little bit of a challenge once you've chosen your favorite guy you ask for a professional account you ask for 10 cards and you start to wire the entire key or your keys into the account which means more of your salary, your wages and also important that the allowance is tax enforcement and then we go to a more dynamic phase which is the gift the health page the eventually the rent that you get from houses that you have so the capital capital when we talk about this nature and that's when you start to use this account for every cost that you can make this principle that we call radical trust thinking that all riders are doing exactly the best they can even if your account suddenly goes to zero very quickly in the middle of the month that's exactly the best that could happen so no control make control you have a lot of communication for us what was very important was this kind of practice of regular meetings so we had what we call common breakfast in which we thought it would be important to just adjust for practical level how we should spend our money what happened can we earn her can we help each other can we consume better so in fact we realized that what was the most important thing is common breakfast the function was to share the emotions that were triggered by this common we shared the fears that were arising and the variables we shared the sense of security that the common model meant for many of us security because a lot of things become possible suddenly become one person can hold one year of time also basically getting out to be productive we by doing this it can happen that the cash flow of an office is expiry and even and to argument the different cash flow by hand is it to practical and practical level you can learn a lot from others how to do is the other side is really different and it's much more easy to do demonstration for someone as a product themselves because of this separation of the input here so the advantages became quite clear but the main thing was sharing the information of this common breakfast was the emotional unlearning the emotional process that we were facing together to recognize that it is possible to be together it is possible to create a radical model to achieve beyond the beyond the the other people it is possible to know that the current leader is not alone and that he is not is for the revolution we wanted to discover within the system it is not long one course we need many revolutions but it is a smaller revolution that is extremely accessible you may wonder who are these people these people one child and one half child in the sense that one member is inside a common wallet that the partner is inside a common wallet and the other child which of course has a great range of conversations and they are understanding how to be because this group of people we can share how we can think together to only share our cash flow this is extremely interesting to approach because we have been reflecting a lot on how to expand the project how to recognize the project and so to involve the savings and the outreach so we can only share the cash flow which is a sort of present moment and then we are wondering how to customize the past for the outreach and future for the savings we realize that this is another aspect as it is extremely to emotional development as well as emotional weight much money and love there have been needs very interesting but it is still going on we cannot solve it I think that the diversity of the members of the community some of the parties and your work in an edge field some of us are producers we have different experiences different age different professions different the way that we can work in our work I think that each of us as as different learning as different process of this experience the common world is not appropriate I would say for us for me what was what was really interesting was to observe how from a feminist point of view I was explaining which is the way that was divided the economy would be my couple in a sort of obsessive melody approach to justice so counting that the thing and everything the class the same thing because otherwise it would not be fair that was my approach to the capital economy the family economy we might share a common account in a different part and the moment I'm sharing now a common account with 900 people I feel how this transform behind the core of myself the capacity of trust in the future we trust the future because we realize that the character is not extremely violent on the real but there is much less violent on the real class but the capacity of anticipating the needs of others and also feeling that your own needs might be anticipated might be taken care of and we verify this one-on-one relation in a sort of circular and collective direction with experience and style and with experience and style so I don't want to take it too long because I feel like we hear your question if you have some but to summarize we try to not create rules before they are really necessary so we start from principles rather than rules principle which is more patronizing the way of determining certain attitudes or the approach to each other even if there is a little behind the scenes of course run across of replacing the logic of control with a logic of trust how much satisfaction is made of the capacity that means that if I need more or if I take more undenacted balance with this asymmetry because it means that these are my possibilities and these are my needs but you don't feel obliged to compensate your eventually scars financial contribution so that's why I'm not going to create unconfessed our relationship and so break the direct proportionality between income and debt I don't spend the money I earn I earn some money and less time for it well in general the other thing that we add in our chart is the foster actress so we share the tools in this society and to gain confidence what do you say shall we start from here and then see how it develops or have they gone? No it sounds very good I actually had two questions for clarification just for the experiment that we were involved under the common wallet one is the the precarity of the participants how much did it differ in the beginning? I would say the experience group we had the extremely precarious participants earning very very little like six or seven hundred years a month people would say we are on the top list of the earning but first of all we have fixed salary the income is increased and we have a certain stability so the two extreme are close and in between there are many other many other months there are parties that work for instance with the staff and the folks to be paying for many years for many months I would say they are also extremely precarious even if they earn a lot of money and we waste a lot of money for other and extremely precarious situations because what I realized often is not only the giving that needs to be unlearned but also receiving money like taking more that you earn also reading needs to be unlearned and I wonder like how long did this take because if we imagine future initiatives I think this is a quite slow process so I was wondering about like how much time does it take to unlearn to take more than one earns yeah that's a I mean the common knowledge is a micro political experience but of course it's not a spiritual project it's not that we don't see the rest of the world it's extremely cosmetic towards the rest of the world society so for me I can talk personally for me the exercise that worked a lot was the concept that one doesn't need to even receive it's not that we either receive only reading the group between the 10 people but we even receive in terms of society so if you don't need to the groups directly but you are from a broader society group it's also part of this very complex economy and this is also why we can start to understand the feeling of failure and success and precarity because it's not only because we can't provide after now the success that we are supposed to provide and the society is taking a lot from us so there is a I think these osmosis between a circular economy that is supposed to be closed for instance that people share one half count and you could also probably imagine that in fact this society is extremely broader than these 10 people helps a lot to break with the reciprocity and the small accountants they are how much you improve, how much you take yeah I think a lot has to do with the trust a bit over time and I'm for example out thinking in SS Relief it is really like a one time transfer but we saw for example that after a while people started to give more often so giving kind of created actually I have more I want to give more this is totally speculative because we didn't run a how do you say really like a questionnaire it's speculative but I see and then later we also developed like a golden reliever tool where people could inscribe I give for 6 months an amount which is 50 euros and 400 euros and there was one person also starting with 200 euros later on a second round of 400 euros so I would say there was some unlearning happening and this talking about money I find it also very important and you are involved in another initiative which is common income can you just share a little bit about this but the common income is first of all it's a research project so it's really a project that is also for development people and then would like to map the solidarity models that within these last years have been developed thanks to a necessity of the crisis and those have been developed because we all share the feeling that at the end the way that we deal with the sources and the solution of the sources so common income is a mapping project that as a vision also comes out with a proposal of the solution with BVI it creates a sort of solidarity model with BVI so we have been starting by inviting a variety of people that are actually in our fields to a safe space meeting as we call them so more things we can really talk very confidently about hospitality and we have been shocked in a way by the harshness of the reality of the faculty in their art fields how people have maybe survived in the last two or three years by these understanding we realized that already this is an extremely important tool that we would like to offer to the community so it creates more moments like that where people can be entitled and organized to be very consistent about the economic situation and about the solutions that came out of it the perspective is to again come out with a proposal of a solidarity model that might be to be for sure might be focused around the public or on the housing thank you is there any question in the audience at this moment yes thank you a lot first of all this is very inspiring and first of all I want to ask how did you arrive at this time of doing this in the beginning like what kind of past helps to arrive at this point of view and the second question is how the togetherness of these people happened I did not the choice of the ten people I am a super second person I am not the first part maybe proposals of meditation to arrive at this point of view to be able to see yourself inside this project like I feel like to see myself in that it is very inspiring but there is a lot of fear around so how did you arrive at this time to make that decision to create this project but I think that we have been lucky because we didn't aim to that so far we were really thinking of the three months we were excited and not really ambitious and then we got trust by doing I think this is also important because we always failure made the experience that the result is not brutal rather than transformation but it is sort of an organic role in the future and that's why when we encountered people that we would like to start to come around we tried to share this view of the softness in a way also neutral softness not to be far but to welcome the inevitable resistance of each of us as well as the sharing of the world very often your salary for many people is your own identity you are your salary you are what you earn and that's why people are extremely violent for its human rights act of the law now so how to soften these correspondence of your value, your personal individual value your salary what you earn and what you earn it's interesting to be down with that softness it is very deeply encrypted in our psychology and so how we did for us was what I'm bringing into the project how these people met it was a bit sort of a neutral resonance by talking about this possibility for these people to co-alize and crystallize around it and then some fresh members we just ask I have a personal history of individualism especially mine is the king that in my family is used to individualize and to individualize and to separate I would like to further this experience of my relationship with mine and my destiny of solitude and financial system so how for people that have been motivated to be there in the possibility of the expansion of discussion like a group we try to work on them of course our approach is rather to propose and promote the possibility of creating high common wallets as a very interesting exercise is not so many side effects rather than making a common wallet of 30 members these would be very practical because as I said one of the key with valuable trust is communication that we meet physically once a week that we constantly are chatting with each other this is very important but also personal personal life or professional life that we have to share with other projects so the reason we need the construction of friendship that we meet so I don't think that the group could be much bigger than 15 rather than people very big but there are some factors that are important I was actually wondering if you don't like to talk about COVID so much anymore but COVID was quite a difficult time how resilient and how helpful was a project like common wallets during these two years period where a lot of artists and cultural workers had inherently less work for us it was extremely valuable I have to say that we have never been so well economically I don't know how it finds because a lot of a lot of the expenses in our life is really traveling outside and doing the cuts drastically the important thing is that we could commonize we could share the support grants and support the urgency grants that's only some of us see very unjust and very unfair approach to same support and so if you share these benefits it's really important for us to have access to this this is one of the reasons why CIS recognizing that it's completely that some artists are inside the system so a lot of them are not inside the system and the difficulties that we see especially for young artists now to recognize the support for the faculty basically that also means like if we want to prepare for the next crisis we should start common wallets initiatives now but it does take a while to unlearn and to trust it's not something that can just happen in the crisis or could you imagine a form where it could just like an urgency or urgency arrives and you can just create it in the moment but I have a feeling that we are not the same people that we were before of course not on the outside of the world in general as societies would be supposed to believe you are learning skills is more evidence I think also for the sector I mean this Brussels meeting for NPM I think for the days and the work so we are in the reflection that the new ways are to learn so this creates a sort of acceleration better and the feeling that people are much more from now this is the possibility of sharing a life time sharing things on one side and the other side it is a bit advanced from the middle class of neutral class of building trust for building self supportive groups for the team well meetings are that's a hope this will be before it's definitely more necessary because the goal is still not only because of our economic crisis but the logic of crime is a few years we are at this and we are together Any other questions in the audience? Yes I hear you are super nice but it's true it's your way of thinking very practical question what are you doing with the leftovers if you have more money in the end of the year of the month what are you doing? Are you sharing it or do you decide to invest together or what are you doing with this extra money? It's very rare so this sort of problems is not on the top list but on the problems but when we have the more money what we consider is necessary for the cash flow of months for a separate savings account and this it's kind of sometimes it's labeled like I know the Benjamin Blaster it's not a useful kind of anticipation we start to learn really this early is that nothing is just secure in two to three days but we can level it in weeks in two months it's very important to find it's level and then it is still an abundance that the rule was to never not to express desires which are important desires that can be really good for three to four months or maybe two three months it's clear that there is definitely not because you are not more of only artists or only art professionals it's much more mixed with now likely so we do not consider using this or let's produce a piece that doesn't find a producer it's no professional expense if you are pure people and for example if someone says okay I want to renovate my house or something like this is this coming from the common income or from the savings account or is there a separate channel sometimes I don't know I mean that's a bit the benefit of this before we really share the cash flow but we do not share yet the the average of the savings the personal savings is something that we have been for one reason or the other accumulated in years because this is even more asymmetrical in the cash flow people that have a house people that have two and people that have nothing they only have bags so how to share this implies even more of future from one of these as efficient in your sort of life long mutual commitment but it's also important to be polite to be kind of what we just write down the names to be sure that all the bags are paid and we can meet them and talk about savings houses, property because we are more competitive we need to formalize more we have the effort to be as responsible in terms of organization but we said if you pay a mortgage if you blow the house and you pay the mortgage we are all paid your house and the property is yours for instance we are renovating an apartment but we pay with some other money that we're coming from somewhere else that we're before in New York but we are paying two houses the expenses of two houses the house where we live and the house where we live and the effect of the generations that we have long time in the world for the kind of water, for the kind of electricity for two houses so the way that we always put ways between the two economies and the expenses that we trust and it's very small need for tolerance that we accept in fact it is a mutual sacrifice that we will end up in a legal property but there is not a contradiction to say in a way asymmetries are a knowledge that we are not aiming of a group in which everybody we are aiming that value of asymmetries or what they can also give so what there is also a way to to turn into something that is good for the group and any other questions in the audience yes, Matt thank you, wow such an enticing presentation in relation to the questions we have this morning what it could be because I think there is a lot to learn from your experiment project on a larger scale, a decision scale what it could mean to do something like this with 10 theaters in Brussels which is in a way completely because you have to do with finding, you have to do with governmental organizations also in relation to communication about feelings that arise and we would have to think about what that means but in relation to the framing of success in relation to on a solitary basis the fear from the future and the key things that you said were so transformative I think there is a lot to learn for most of us here in the audience on an institutional level from what you did on an individual personal level maybe you have some thoughts about that and my second question is you mentioned that people came in and out I'd be curious to hear why people left the project if you can share that maybe I should answer this first which is easy people left I would be called the life also at the moment it's really complicated from a national level so if you can have the space it dedicates to the company wallets because it's also an unusual technique there on each other all because they felt that they had down the journey they wanted to be a downed experiment for one learning for the next 100 and they felt that they had a focus and they had some and they had some sort of they will say it's different around the possibility of using the principle so I would say if you come around for much practice because the practice is very difficult to apply from a very important certain institutional level because the practice is all of these it is complicated that our practice is based on a common it's based on creating a cracks loop in the system in a sort of a more harder way it doesn't just throw anything around but just dismantle models for ourselves we don't really live in a very capitalist system to omit the the six parts how to at this level on an institutional level first of all in terms of administration so how do you justify the the predication of the budget this is I'm not prepared enough to say how much it costs for you as an artist I always hope that there is a way at least a way to go forward to open a little cracks into that and I'm sure that there are creative ways of making this the legal that creating is a freebie in terms of principles radical trust and known hierarchical non-functionalizing solidarity I think it's too important to say that easy, easy can be a lot many efforts have been a little bit of experience in New York especially and again my experience is just on the point of view of an artist on the point of view of the actual of the house but I see that even in principle that this is an attempt to say we are all on the same case then the rules to protect each other's face and each other's capacity of how we influence the network are all oriented to creating a difference for those that are pit-fierce and those that are small-fierce we can do it more and etc etc which is totally understandable because that's exactly how the world works but if we want to challenge real things I think we need to challenge the principles that we need to open these numbers I think it would be something that would be fantastic it would be disgusting it would be peer-to-peer and rather than solidarity it would be trust I think it's three notions that in the time with general emergency which society is clogging I think it's something that can really become a piece of regeneration also an energy of being a piece of useful energy in each other's years and the motivation and the change Thank you Anna Francesca, one more minute is there one last urgent question Okay very quick did you have conversations around ethics about spending and whom or how, where it could be spent it feels like an old question in an autonomous project but it's existing within a neoliberal capitalist you're spending your money did you talk about that? Yeah Of course that's the first year, because of course everybody has an online application of our bank account now so you can constantly check what the level is and just adjust your expense of the day of the week we have a secretary of the month so we have a patient figure of the secretary that just from the level is the most you have to think about buying the papers rather than what he suggests suggests we were afraid of the transparency which is one of the important principles of the project you have to go to neutral judgment and neutral check no matter what this person is saying about this matter and if everybody realize there's not so much happening there or if it is happening it's part of the learning process sometimes you need to face the dark side of the island nerd that wants to know exactly what the others can handle but because it's not the job to say as soon as you hold it you agree with that and the country can have a conversation about it it's not about the mood we can insist about it sometimes it's also painful because we are in a conflict between the desire of not judging each other and the needs of understanding why certain things are very important for someone else but no, this person explained that these very expensive purchase were important are important that's it, the thing I said because that's about the trust if they come with this that's it one side effect in general because we very often we buy and consume to compensate frustration and loneliness basically we waste less satisfaction in human relationship than in consumption so in a way we also learn from each other how to exchange some of our things so we never manage, for instance, to do a very organized rationalization of expansion we don't buy we don't and it is being proved by Shah we still challenge very much the process of learning from your experience thank you very much, Anna I think everyone thank you for the invitation you actually very interesting Thank you for the afternoon Thank you. I will take your last note where you said you all started to consume less. I think this is also a very nice empowerment for the future that all consumers with less. And after this session now, there will be five case studies which won't only deal with money, but around fair arts practices, and it will be guided by Ingrid, or you will take over the mic, I think. No? Yes. Thank you all. Thank you.