Convivial Commons departs from a central tension in contemporary political ecology: while humans increasingly claim to “speak for” non-human systems, the agendas they carry into these acts of representation are rarely neutral. They are entangled with personal interests, economic pressures, and shifting social and cultural priorities. In moments of financial or political crisis, the concerns of non-human actors—trees, waters, soils, pollinators—are often the first to be silenced again.

Against this backdrop, Convivial Commons asks a deceptively simple question: How might non-human entities articulate their own agency, and how might autonomous, more-than-human deliberation be made possible?

Convivial Commons constructs a prototype parliament in which non-human actors participate in structured, rule-based forms of deliberation. The work draws conceptually on BeeDAO, an earlier investigation presented at Documenta Fifteen, where the ZK/U explored preliminary models of shared governance between humans and bee colonies. BeeDAO tested the extent to which ecological actors might contribute to collective processes when their sensorial and environmental data are interpreted algorithmically rather than through exclusively human judgment.

Building on this foundation, the ZK/U Proxylab—following an invitation from BeFantastic and Goethe Institute Bangalore—together with local practitioners developed an initial design iteration of Convivial Commons during the summer of 2025. This collaborative phase allowed for early testing of procedural formats, conversational agents, and performative cues, which have since informed the more refined structure presented at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale.

Team Berlin: Matthias Einhoff, Clemens Gruber, Stefan Koderisch, Lars Neckel, Lea Sofso, Miodrag Kuc, Nerea Ferrer
Team Bangalore: Abhishek Kapahi, Sambita Modak, Rasagy Sharma, Supriyo Manna