localhost

What does it look like when a gallery operates on a Partial Common Ownership model?

localhost is:

• a home-based gallery and salon in Walnut Creek where exhibitions open with a meal at my dining table.
• a research project proposing a stewardship model that returns value to artists and their communities, adapted from the PCOArt framework proposed by RadicalxChange and Serpentine Arts Technologies.

The intimacy of the setting is the curatorial premise. What is exhibited is what I have allowed into my home. Everything on and within these walls has passed the test: would I live with it?

But this question extends beyond the walls of my house to other ideas of home. The body is a home. The city is a home. The watershed is a home. The bioregion is a home. The planet is a home. Does what I allow in each of these homes align with my values? The gallery's mission is to curate exhibitions and produce projects that reflect these values of care and stewardship.

A guiding principle for this project comes from Edgar Villanueva's book Decolonizing Wealth. Villanueva writes that "money is medicine," in an indigenous sense of the word: anything that brings a system back into balance. Money can heal. It does not need to be vilified, nor should it be hoarded.

The root of "currency" is currere, Latin for "to flow". In a living system, energy and resources flow among parts of the system. Exchange is a part of nature; sometimes you give, sometimes you receive. Our systems need to come back into alignment with this cycle and embody the relational nature of the world - localhost is one experiment in that direction.

As Margaret Levi states in her talk at The Politics of Change, "the most important thing to remember is that property and ownership rights are social and political constructs... they're something we as a collective decide to do and enact."

The artistic and cultural context is a particularly powerful space for reimagining property and ownership. localhost is interested in experimenting with how art can propose new possibilities of socioeconomic relations. The gallery sits inside the tension it's examining: a privately-owned home hosting experiments in partial common ownership.

As Rana Dasgupta writes in Towards a Planetary Theology, the cosmological shift we need is "equivalent in scale to that produced by the Enlightenment itself" - a relocation of the sacred from the nation-state to the planet, and a recognition of non-human voices in political life. Dasgupta also notes that "theology is dead until it enters culture." The Enlightenment took hold because artists, musicians, and writers gave it cultural form. The next shift requires the same.

This is the work localhost is here to do. Our implementation of the PCOArt model will be published as an open-source toolkit so other galleries, collectives, and curators can adapt it. This shift needs a coalition (of artists, stewards, curators, galleries, museums) - and an invitation to begin.