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Paper short abstract:

Focusing on the affective labor that sustains commoning projects, this presentation examines the street art projects of an activist group that transformed this genre into a practice of commoning and a mode of critique to call out the government for not maintaining the commons for the benefit of all.

Paper long abstract:

Focusing on the affective labor that sustains commoning projects, this presentation examines the street art projects of a small political party, the Two-Tailed Dog Party (MKKP). In recent years, the MKKP transformed this genre into a practice of spatial commoning and a mode of critique to call out the government for not maintaining the commons for the benefit of all. The MKKP’s street art projects are collaboratively designed and open to the public. MKKP activists coordinate each project and typically six to ten people complete them including some passersby who stop to observe and then get on board. These projects build on affective labor, which, in the Hungarian context, strategically links projects of repairing decaying public property with the political program of revitalizing bonds of solidarity and rebuilding communities. The MKKP harnesses street art to demonstrate how democracy works in practice and what democratic citizenship looks like on the ground. Although the affective labor invested in commoning projects does vital political work, it is not recognized as a valorized form of activist labor. As such, affective labor does not help activists convert their activist labor into political capital, nor does it serve as a conduit for the MKKP to earn seats in the parliament. The affective labor of commoning, I conclude, sheds sharp light on the paradox that the labor of building democracy does not always benefit the ones who invests this labor.