Exquisite Commons

This publication refuses sequence: it circulates, drifts, returns, disappears, and reappears. There is no first page, by design. The moment you decide to step onto the boat in the sky you are part of the crew. What follows is a story about the people who brought it into being. ISSUES is the annual, peer-led publication that serves as the milestone public offering for each School of Commons* (SoC) programmatic cycle. ISSUES 2025 collates and contextualises the processes, practices, and methodologies of each participating project within SoC 2025, who were each invited to contribute in a form and style that was both reflective of, and complementary to, their own ways and workings. With each edition of ISSUES, the SoC Cohort collaboratively develops a collective framing that brings together the thematic threads and working methods they have both individually and collectively explored and developed during their 10-month peer-learning journey. For 2025, SoC presents ISSUES 2025: Exquisite Commons, taking the foundations of the ISSUES publication structure and bringing it into an entirely new process of self-organisation. This evolution of a previously linear practice produces new connective pathways between the collective theme and individual project contributions, as well as for the publication itself, which, for the very first time, lives on in digital, broadcast, and print formats. Traces of the Exquisite Commons approach can be found throughout the publication, most obviously in the replacing of a typical Collective Editorial for the Metafesto: ‘Making a Vessel in the Sky’, and the bridge prompts that accompanying each text, drawing poetic lines not only between each individual contribution and the collective theme, but to its entangled clan of fellow contributions, too.