Agnese Politi

Biography

Agnese Politi is a practice-based PhD researcher at Central Saint Martins and Afterall Research Centre, University of the Arts London. Her research examines how contemporary European art institutions and cultural networks organise and sustain the conditions of cultural work, before these conditions take shape as public programmes, political agendas or institutional languages of impact. Situated from Southern European and Mediterranean perspectives, her work brings together infrastructural critique, feminist organisational thinking and practices of commoning through an interdisciplinary lens shaped by her background in critical urbanism and curating.

Research Focus
Her practice-based PhD research examines what happens when the language of the commons enters art institutions and cultural networks shaped by uneven European geographies, processes of peripheralisation and inherited hierarchies of cultural authority. It asks how institutions produce and legitimise knowledge, whose practices become visible within official cultural narratives, and how shared cultural resources are accessed, organised and sustained. The research considers commoning as an institutional, spatial and political question. It approaches cultural institutions as public infrastructures where cultural memory, public value and collective knowledge are produced, negotiated and contested. From this position, Agnese examines how cultural organisations might rehearse forms of solidarity and interdependence through networked work, the decentralisation of authority and the building of alliances with self-organised, feminist and grassroots practices. Her research also seeks to pluralise how the commons is understood by drawing on autoethnographic practice and attending to feminist, grassroots and self-organised practices whose vocabularies, genealogies and modes of relation do not always pass through the explicit language of commoning. This inquiry is grounded in contemporary European conditions, with particular attention to Southern European and Mediterranean contexts marked by austerity, fragile public infrastructures, territorial struggles, self-organisation and histories of cultural mutualism. Agnese examines how cultural organisations respond to underfunding, precarity and institutional overextension through the ways they distribute labour, resources and responsibility, navigate conflict, support reproductive and relational work, and sustain commitments beyond temporary projects and funding cycles.

Independent Curatorial Practice
As an independent curator and editor, Agnese has developed exhibitions, public programmes, and workshops across the UK, Italy, and Switzerland. Her practice combines research, facilitation, writing, collective study and processes of situated knowledge production. It is particularly oriented towards supporting feminist and grassroots practices of storytelling, archiving and transmission, especially where these practices make visible memories, relations and forms of cultural labour that remain marginal within official institutional narratives.

Through curatorial and spatial methodologies, she develops spaces for collective study, facilitation and situated exchange, attentive to intergenerational and translocal forms of feminist transmission. These spaces allow institutional positions to be examined and reworked through concrete practices of care, responsibility and shared organisation. Across her work, institutions are approached as contested and transformable arrangements: places where cultural authority is reproduced, and where less visible practices, shared resources and self-organised forms of collective life can open other ways of working together.

Currently Research Fellow at the Centro de Estudios and Museo Tentacular, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2025–), collaborating with Museo Tentacular on Museum of the Commons, a project developed through the L’Internationale network. She is also involved in the development of the Shared Institutionality Laboratory (LIC).

Transnational Network & Collaborations
Her work engages with internationally institutions, networks and cultural ecosystems, including L’Internationale, Arts Collaboratory and Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency. Through these contexts, she develops collaborative forms of cultural production, situated research and processes of institutional transformation, contributing to translocal networks and to the development of methodological tools for contemporary cultural practice.