The Social Cooperative as a Commons Machine

In the late 1960s in Italy, a process to de-institutionalise people admitted to mental asylum structures got under way. Law 180/1978 — also known as the Basaglia Law after its main proponent Franco Basaglia — reformed the mental health system in the country and drove forward a new healthcare model based on communities of care.

In the city of Trieste, key to the so-called Basaglia revolution, the gradual closure of psychiatric hospitals has given rise to a network of alternative services that include apartments, hostels, homes, day centres and patient-managed cooperatives. Opposite the severity of the competition- and profit-based capitalist model, these cooperatives present a new “social business” set-up that allows self-employment to be encouraged as a form of livelihood and creates economic frameworks underpinned by cooperation and mutual support.

Ombrelle rosse (Red Umbrellas) is a collaborative project involving three agents: Lister Sartoria Sociale (Lister Social Tailoring), a tailoring cooperative from Trieste, Ombre Rosse (Red Shadows), a self-organised group of sex workers, and the Comitato per i Diritti Civili delle Prostitute ApS (The Committee of Civil Rights for Prostitutes ApS). This alliance seeks to open a public discussion on care and social reproduction in diversity via the production of objects using recycled materials that come from discarding and neglecting in capitalist urban life. Thus, the broken umbrellas — a common object of waste in Trieste owing to a strong wind known as bora — take on a new life as they are turned into frisbees, kites and capes in Lister’s production labs, in the former Trieste Psychiatric Hospital, the world’s first closed mental asylum. The battered umbrellas encounter the red umbrellas (a symbol of sex workers) to build a common path of social participation and emancipation.

Within the framework of the exhibition machinations, a tailoring workshop in collaboration with local agents and a public act to present the project, showing certain pieces manufactured in Trieste, are held in the Museo. Both activities explore in more depth the capacity of the cooperative as a machine of social reproduction and a mainstay of communal life, based on the alliance between collectives fighting for their rights.  

Participants