Narrating commons institutions through Ostrom and Barad—Insights from l’Asilo, Naples

Urban commons have been innovating European municipal politics for more than a decade through the establishment of new institutions. Naples is a laboratory where artists, activists, and residents engage in commoning practices proposing alternative forms of self-governing the commons and the city. Providing a narrative from l’Asilo—a cultural commons based in the city center—this work highlights the emergence of a logic of commons institutionalization that challenges the usual binary division between human communities and non-human resources found in the literature on the theme. The paper addresses Ostrom's theory of commons through the lens of Barad's New Materialist thought, proposing a diffractive reading methodology and a case study analysis. Barad's Agential Realism inspires a new ecological deal in commons institutions theory, whereas governance is no more grounded on binary relationships between human subjects and non-human objects. If relationality pre-exists separation and the formation of borders among entities, commons institutions deserve to be imagined and narrated following a non-linear axis of causality and temporality. The case study focuses on three particular aspects of a-binary commons institutionalization: the arising of the practice; its condition of permanence and duration; and the entanglement between collective institutional norms and the commoners. This initial experimentation, this work argues, can guide the study and the narratives of commons institutions toward an ecological reconsideration of agency: from a human community in a binary relation with a resource aimed to its mere efficient productive management, to a non-finite and indeterminate creation of space–time.