we cannot say that we have arrived somewhere, yet neither can we say that we haven’t

a glossary of commoning terms 

We Cannot Say That We Have Arrived Somewhere, Yet Neither Can We Say That We Haven’t: A Glossary of Commoning Terms, is a collective publication that explores ways of being and doing together in contemporary art. Five independent cultural spaces —La Escocesa (Barcelona), OFF-Biennale (Budapest), < rotor > (Graz), Shtatëmbëdhjetë (Prishtina), and tranzit.cz (Prague)— have come together to create an open glossary that gathers shared learnings, tensions, and strategies around the notion of the common.

The book, available in six languages (Albanian, Czech, Spanish, English, German, and Hungarian), can be read and downloaded for free at www.emotional-labor.eu, in print-at-home, EPUB, and web text formats.

We Cannot Say That We Have Arrived Somewhere, Yet Neither Can We Say That We Haven’t: A Glossary of Commoning Terms  brings together seventeen entries that explore concepts such as facilitation, emotional labor, anti-ableism, global majority and intersectionality. It is a collective attempt to name what is at stake when organizing cultural practices with a transformative vocation, especially in local contexts and with diverse communities.

Aimed at cultural workers, artists, curators, educators, and mediators, this glossary does not offer fixed definitions, but rather a partial and situated cartography of knowledge in the making.

The publication is grounded in concrete experiences developed between 2024 and 2025 in five European cities and seeks to offer tools to rethink the role of art spaces as places of coexistence, conflict, encounter, and possibility.

This book is part of the Art Space Unlimited project, an international collaboration that aims to open up cultural institutions to people and communities who, due to structural inequality, are not part of the contemporary art circuit. The publication was driven by the aforementioned organizations and co-funded by the European Union and the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic.

The glossary’s contents are available under a Creative Commons license.

partners

• Tranzit.cz

• OFF-Bienal Budapest

• Foundation 17

• <rotor> Centro de Arte Contemporáneo

Here you can download the Press realase.

This book was published as part of the Art Space Unlimited project, co-funded by the European Union. The opinions and views expressed are solely those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the EACEA. Neither the European Union nor the EACEA can be held responsible for them.