Common Copyshop

Workshop & Performance
HKB Hochschule der Kunst Bern, 2017
Kunst Museum Bern, République Genial, Bern, 2018
KAOS art lab, Brussels, 2019

How can copying change the world?

Common Copy Shop is a nomadic workspace that uses the classical copy machine as a socio-generative working model for building an intellectual commons economy.

Copying is a method of translation: from one medium to another, from color to b/w, from paper to space, from one author to another, one mindset into a neighbor’s. Translational shifts adapt copying into a proliferating activity in which components are formed into a whole and transferred into other contexts.

The Common Copy Shop has different faces. Within the exhibition project “République Génial,” it was proposed as a workshop for MA students of the College of Arts Bern and as a participatory installation for the public. Visitors and participants in this Common Copy Shop jointly generate a living archive of Shareables. They are invited to contribute and recuperate items and actions from copying experiences and see them from a commons perspective. Using this archive of Shareables, they create a joint working unit in which they can perform an economy of copying and the creation of artistic “generics.” For this, often the classical copy machine may be in use and sometimes it is replaced by the physicality of the participants themselves. This way Common Copy Shop creates an alternative artistic economy and offers a prefigurative space to investigate the politics of its consequences.