Biennials as Commons? Uncomfortable Cohabitations in the case of the Athens Biennale 5–6, OMONOIA (2015–2017)

This chapter enquires how contemporary art biennials might act as infrastructures that support commoning, practices of collective use and management at the intersection of art and urban space. Although many biennials in the last decade have hosted and have been contested by discourses and practices of commoning, recent biennial literature has granted little attention to the relations between these seemingly incompatible phenomena, especially from a spatial perspective. Drawing in particular on recent spatial and infrastructural approaches in critical urban theory on commoning, this chapter conceptualises biennials as threshold infrastructures to point to how they are positioned between facilitating dominant urban representations and enacting collective imaginaries for sharing art and the city differently. Using mainly the example of Athens Biennale 5–6, OMONOIA (2015–2017) and making references to documenta 14 Learning from Athens (2017) and documenta 15 (2022), it looks at cohabitation as a methodology for embedding biennials in urban struggles, learning from and practising commoning.