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. Exhibitions open with a meal at my dining table. It is also 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. What would I live with in each of these homes? How do I want each of them treated?

The gallery works with artists whose work supports this perspective. Some are tradition-bearers, working inside lineages they inherited. Others work with land, water, climate. Others work with language and symbols, and the relationships between them. In any case, their work represents a vision or embodies the energy of a world I want to live in.

A guiding principle for this project comes from Edgar Villanueva's book Decolonizing Wealth. In this book, Villanueva says that "money is medicine," in the 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. The flow is cyclical. Our systems need to come back into alignment with this flow. The arts economy can lead the way - and localhost is one experiment in that direction.

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. The shift Dasgupta describes needs a coalition (of artists, stewards, curators, galleries, museums) - and an invitation to begin.