2026 ~ Meditations#16 ~ Masha Domracheva on DAI's COOPs trajectory

Masha Domracheva (DAI 2024-2026) leads us through a year of COOPs (or in full COOP study groups), one of DAI’s four defining curriculum components, not just by means of simply reporting on their happenings but by focusing on the core of this specific DAI trajectory. Through Masha’s questions and answers we get a better idea of what COOPs might mean and would like to be, in dialogue (and in dissent) with the art world at large, what they propose to the bodies crossing through for a while, working together in time and space. 

Proposing another infrastructure of art production or the space between individual and collective

“A system of civilised co-operators, given the social ownership of the means of production, with the class victory of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie, is the system of Socialism.”
(Lenin "On Cooperation", Selected Works, 1950, English edition, vol. II, Pt. 2, p. 719.)

DAI’s structure is embedded in a larger world. Each part of the study trajectory has metaphorical roots in reality: KITCHEN is meant for “cooking,” namely trying out something before completing and presenting it elsewhere. FACTORY is for gathering co-thinkers and co-practitioners to lay the foundation for collective practice. WEAVER is toanalyse and connect what has been harvested during the confluences. And while also holding metaphorical meaning beyond the language of techne, COOP is perhaps the most self-explanatory. The COOP program literally consists of seven (in 2024-2025) cooperatives fixed within the temporality of seven months and five confluences.

A COOP's structure is the most political, as the foundation of any cooperative is rooted in economic and social justice. What matters in this study is not only the theories discussed or projects developed, but the act of working within an alternative system—one opposed to the neoliberal logic of the Western world and, by extension, the art world. The central challenge is shifting from the position of an individual to that of a collective participant.

Grounded in socialist thought, the cooperative tradition imagines a fairer society built on horizontality, equal rights, shared resources, and sustainability. These values are reflected in the COOPs in both direct and subtle ways.

The study continually returns to simple, essential questions:
How do we listen and truly hear one another?
How do we create space for expression?
How do we argue, negotiate, or agree to disagree?
How do we carry each other’s ideas and work?

And it begins to pay attention to a recently emerged question—yet to be explored:

How do we navigate diversity, and especially neurodiversity^[1]?

Tensions arise when each participant is confronted with the external realities they are carrying along. For some, cooperation comes more easily due to their cultural background of their respective socio-political environments, while for others it becomes more challenging for equally objective reasons. These reasons lie, first of all, in the neoliberal logic of contemporary art mentioned above. But, put simply, what does this logic imply in practice?

Artists who manage to enter the system through art education soon find themselves facing an economic demand to build a career that fits a business model in which they are ultimately seen as entrepreneurs. They are required to constantly promote their individuality, turning their art into a commodity. When art is treated as a commodity, its production cannot be easily shared. Every idea becomes a potential asset, carefully protected for future monetisation. The space of ideas—where they emerge, develop, and are implemented—thus becomes a site of competition rather than collaboration. This means that ideas develop in a hermetic space where they cannot be challenged. All of this generates divisions, exclusions, and hierarchies, alienating art from people, and keeping it the prerogative of those who succeed in the contention for attention.

Naturally, this striving for attention continues once an artist enters a collective environment. As a curator, I could already see this while preparing group exhibitions. No matter how hard one tries to establish a collective process and environment, artists in a group show usually operate for themselves, becoming, for instance, territorial within the exhibition space.

For young artists shaped by neoliberal institutions and structures, entering the collective environment of DAI—and, in particular, the communal living and sharing of basic resources during the Confluences—can already be challenging. Yet the most significant struggle inevitably emerges within the COOP component of the study.

Considering this as the crucial theoretical background for my research, with the following I wish to examine on the one hand how the foundational principles of the institutions leading the COOP help navigate the tensions that arise, and on the other to identify what methodologies help to overcome individualism and support the maintenance of an egalitarian environment that enables students to open up in order to work with others.

Each COOP is rooted in one European art institution, each with its own principles and interests. Many of these institutions are themselves in flux, dealing with political uncertainty, loss of state funding, or leadership shifts. This instability directly shapes the ambitions and working methods of the COOPs.

For instance, De Appel joined DAI in its renewed form, with Lara Khaldi as a new director and a new temporary location in Amsterdam. The lack of state funding, the lack of a building fully at its disposal, and the larger political situation forced de Appel to experiment with ways of achieving a self-sustainable existence, and most importantly to raise new guiding questions:
How can an institution act as an active agent for organising around social movements? How can it be embedded in the wider reality of the community, the city, the country, and the world?

This orientation attracted people working on housing, land, and decolonial justice. Two of them shaped De Appel’s COOP tutorial team: Noor Abuarafeh and Marina Christodoulidou. Their guiding question became: how can an institution and its people take an active role in thinking through practical questions alongside creative and intellectual ones in a time of genocide?

Yet this question resonates far beyond De Appel. Across contexts, the COOPs confront practical realities: limited resources, economic discrepancy between guest (DAI) and host (a visiting country), and unpredictability of new environments (such as new locations, or new tutors). These conditions demand constant improvisation, redistribution, and sustainable thinking.

If several COOPs go on a research trip, they order one bus. If they engage with a local community, they share food centrally cooked by the DAI Kitchen. Many had to engage with the task of thinking about money and resources conceptually—how to generate them in ways that could support a group and a cause sustainably.

So, we can say that COOPs are proposing a new infrastructure of art production, where transparency and resourcefulness in the process allow students to gain trust and open up to the possibility of acting otherwise. Gaining access to the means of production collectively, I believe, is crucial here. When students see the overall budget and its distribution, with resources shared equally, they gain a clearer understanding of how structurally corrupted neoliberal systems of distribution are.

COOP becomes an exercise, a rehearsal, a tryout, an experiment. Not yet a reality that affects life drastically, but an embedded knowledge of an alternative. An alternative not only for art practice, but for imagining and practicing other ways of living together than those proposed by hegemonic political systems. Ultimately, it functions as preparation for action—in a world that destroys human and nonhuman lives with impunity.

COOPs seem to begin with camaraderie—solidarity despite disagreements. The first task is to navigate the space between individual and collective, translating personal skills and emotions into some public contribution, finding common ground in struggle and motivation. It requires exposure and vulnerability, and that can accumulate tension. But learning to endure that tension is essential in any societal form in order to resist divisions.

After facing each other, COOP offers the participants the possibility to face an immediate reality of geography, and all the consequential relational revelations: from a place to its complex history, from its complex political present to its people and their struggles. It proposes a porous structure where you should be ready for something unexpected to both enter and exit—from your peers and from the environment. Guidance matters, but not in a hierarchical sense: it provides context, adjusts the lenses, and helps navigate encounters and negotiations.

Each COOP has its own focus, yet their goals converge in one: an everyday revolution.

Revolution not (yet?) through militant resistance, but through other means—a sound, a walk, a hack, a contribution, an exchange, a barbecue, or tea in a living room. Each act shifts focus toward some grassroots change.

One of the most inspiring processes I witnessed was organised by SAVVY. Tutors brought it back to basics—students started with just being together, sharing food, drinking, and walking outside. No pressure of doing something productive together before simply accommodating bodies within the collective space.

The COOPs propose practices beyond market value. Such practices often take inspiration from real survival strategies—publishing from political imprisonment, or filming struggles lived on the ground. Again, as beautifully stated by SAVVY’s COOP: “‘Predicament’ (…) is the work of categorizing reality, of naming the conditions that constrain us. (…) It carries with it the risk that you must take to resolve any predicament—you must act, you must be resourceful, you must be bold. You must be able to see, but you must also be able to move—move with the knowledge that your vision will be obscured, and your movements will be targeted.”

This year’s new COOP destination was Cyprus. Most groundwork and final presentations took place in Nicosia. The question of land and borders became central, haunting COOPs both in Cyprus and in Nida, the second main destination.

The COOP Forest Inscriptions was focused on reading buffer zones perhaps more than others, assessing how humans, animals, and vegetation are affected by geopolitical forces. These zones were explored by the COOP participants under scientific guidance, as the COOP collaborated with local specialists both in Nicosia and Nida, as well as peer-to-peer guidance: participants led research-based exercises about one specific site in Nicosia, that is a former asbestos mine today converted into a botanical garden. Exploring technologies that help to prevent fire or show radioactive residues on the trees in affected zones, the group tried to apply these scientific methods to artistic practice, expanding their cooperative approach.

The COOP tutors share some methodologies that are often built with students during the process. Thus COOP enriches practices of both tutors and students who are mutually exposed to each other's ways of making. For instance Forest Inscriptions tutors, predominantly spatial practitioners, expanded their work through performance practices and actions introduced by students, which were later integrated into their final presentation.

Student led exercises seem to be an important methodology. Everyone can propose an exercise that can help to relate to a particular place or to each other, within the group. That allows students to gain agency in taking a lead and caring for others, which ultimately allows to embody a more active position, a position beyond what is expected and normalized. The exercises themselves often could be translated into «training for subversion».

Both COOPs Forest Inscriptions and Hosting Lands analysed camouflage, intended as learning to read spaces so to detect when a bird-catching nest is actually a British military radar system.

For the COOP Summit, both groups embraced camouflage. Forest Inscriptions members embodied forest creatures, leading audiences on a mystical quest titled “What does the forest hide?”, while Hosting Lands infused the space with the smell of wet soil.

Since a long time, the COOP Curating Positions, the veteran of all COOPs, has translated cinematic apparatus into other mediums: montage into exhibition installation, or script-writing into a performative walk. This time, cinema spilled into reality, blurring screens with lived surroundings.

The methodologies of the COOP Hosting Lands reflected its title Trespass, Loopholes, Action Design. Participants trespassed abandoned properties, discovered systemic loopholes, and speculated on subversive scenarios under the guidance of hackers. COOP tutors, Harun Morrison and Aziza Harmel pointed out that the COOP practice is not abstract, it is very concrete and tries to respond to an immediate reality of the world, “The more right-wing governments regulate people’s bodies, the more it forces people to seek marginal access.” Scarcity increasingly touches all spheres of life, particularly for precarious classes. Playfully interacting with systems of power, COOP participants embraced corruptibility and defined their positionality within these systems. The overall anarchist energy among people of Nicosia—shaped by corruption and artificial divisions—naturally fed these efforts.

If I can’t dance built their COOP around an over-and-over-repeated collective practice, that doesn't strive for complexity or diversity but rather humbly offers one thing—mastery, and with it confidence and serenity. The magic of a collective rehearsal in a performative moment affected everybody present. You could float in that aura or let your body join in with its voice. The COOP attempted and succeeded in breaking the conventions of representation, keeping practice, focus, dedication, and discipline at the core of the public moment.

And now you are ready to sing!
What does it mean—to sing?

From what I observed across the COOPs, it means acting together without knowing where the voice will land, trusting the collective to carry the sound forward.

Conclusion

Lenin's ideas on cooperatives became the foundation of a society in which nearly every aspect of life was embedded in processes of collective decision-making and collective living. Rooted in a shared episteme and implemented structurally, cooperation became a generational code—one that continues to resonate within post-socialist societies, where it remains latent and ready to be activated.

By contrast, the neoliberal European cultural environment operates according to an opposing, individualistic code, making DAI’s task considerably more challenging. Yet while Lenin’s revolution never succeeded in becoming international, DAI’s COOP study trajectory explicitly experiments with internationalizing cooperative practice. In this sense, COOP is not only a revolutionary educational initiative, but also a project with broader historical significance, a potential blueprint for cooperative systems beyond art education.

^[1] I will not be touching this issue here as it requires a separate research focused on interviewing neurodivergent participants.