Introducing COMMUNE — A Pedagogy of Celebration and Liberation
What if the club were a classroom? What if celebration was a form of study – a way of learning how to live, care, and resist together? These questions shape COMMUNE, a new manifesto and film project by Finnish–Dutch cultural worker Juha van ’t Zelfde.
COMMUNE explores how club culture, political struggle, and collective study come together to form what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney call the undercommons – spaces of learning that live within and against dominant institutions.
Drawing on thinkers such as bell hooks, José Esteban Muñoz, Édouard Glissant, and Paulo Freire, the manifesto reimagines the club as both sanctuary and rehearsal room – a place where people test freedom in real time. From Amsterdam to Kampala, and from Mexico City to Helsinki, Juha traces how communities build their own infrastructures of care – sound systems, mutual aid networks, collectives, and temporary institutions – to survive what he calls “the machinery of extraction.”
At its heart, COMMUNE argues that celebration is not escape but method. Every club night contains lessons in coordination, trust, and relation. “Study is what you do with other people,” Moten and Harney wrote. COMMUNE asks what happens when learning is embodied, felt, and danced.
The project grows from Juha’s earlier work on Progress Bar (2015–2020), a translocal club programme that blended performance, conversation, and politics. It continues that lineage by mapping today’s fugitive infrastructures – the small, interconnected ecologies that sustain collective life across cities under pressure.
The COMMUNE Manifesto is now live at commune.zone – an open text and evolving resource for anyone interested in the politics of sound, solidarity, and celebration.
Because liberation doesn’t only happen in meetings or marches. Sometimes, it begins with the simple act of moving together.
