collaboration, solidarity and the limits of the imaginable
john ros
june 2026
What does it mean to build something together — and what does it mean to sustain it? These questions are both logistical and political. The history of artist-led organizing, radical pedagogy, collective cultural production and the labor movement more broadly returns to a set of overlapping problems: how movements form, how they sustain themselves, how they fail and what it takes to remain in relation when conditions become difficult. Solidarity — as artists, as teachers, as learners, as laborers, as people bound by shared conditions — is one way of moving through that difficulty. Working across Jacopo Galimberti’s Images of Class: Operaismo, Autonomia and the Visual Arts (1962–1988)⁰¹, Sarah Schulman’s The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity⁰² and the documentary history gathered in Art for the Future: Artists Call and Central American Solidarities⁰³, this essay traces the conditions under which collaborative and solidarity practices become not only possible but durable — and where they fall short. What emerges is a set of pressure points and possibilities: between form and relation, between difference and common ground, between solidarity as feeling and solidarity as infrastructure.
collaboration as political infrastructure
Galimberti’s account of Italian operaismo and autonomia offers one of the most rigorous available analyses of how cultural production functions as political infrastructure. The central claim is that art operates as one of the many primary political sites. Publishing practices, collective editorial decisions, visual strategies and research methods are constitutive to movement-building. As Galimberti describes it, the object of inquiry is ‘the living connective tissue — made up of debates, readings, militant hubs and personal acquaintances — that merged artists and theorists.’⁰⁴ Form here is how people work together, how knowledge circulates, how collective capacity is built and maintained over time.
The journal Classe Operaia is an early case study in this logic. Its typography, layout and refusal of spokesperson politics were collective decisions that rejected both institutional legibility and the translation of class conflict into cultural consensus. For operaismo, this was not incidental — cultural institutions were understood as ‘insidious arenas where the conflicting interests opposing the classes were transformed into edifying battles of ideas.’⁰⁵ Editorial practice became a site of antagonism rather than mediation. Importantly, however, Galimberti resists presenting operaismo as a coherent doctrine. It was, he insists, ‘neither a homogeneous corpus of doctrines, nor a unitary political subject,’ but a ‘set of tortuous pathways with their roots in a common theoretical matrix.’⁰⁶ This matters because it separates organizational coherence from political capacity. Movements do not require ideological unity to build durable infrastructure — they require a shared methodology and commitment.
This principle becomes most explicit in Galimberti’s account of co-research through Danilo Montaldi. Co-research refuses the separation of researcher and subject, positioning knowledge as produced through encounter, narration and shared inquiry. By ‘placing the researcher on the same level as the subjects of the enquiry, and treating the latter as knowledge producers in their own right, Montaldi generated a horizontal process that aimed to facilitate the development of shared political activities.’⁰⁷ Knowledge remains provisional, situated and distributed rather than centralized. Authorship disperses. Sustainability here emerges from ongoing practices of attention and maintenance.
Galimberti is equally attentive to where collaboration fails. The N Group’s collective practice, despite its political intentions, reproduced structural inequality within its own internal economy: members received remuneration according to their material and ideational contributions, which ‘strengthened the group’s collectivism’ while simultaneously ‘undermining the internal solidarity between the less-moneyed members and those who received financial support from their family.’⁰⁸ Collective form does not automatically dissolve material asymmetry. Similarly, attempts at ‘class architecture’ — building spaces that might materialize autonomous political consciousness — collapsed, in Tafuri’s critique, into representation: rather than effecting change, these projects merely enacted ‘the space of community integration’ in a ‘theatrical form.’⁰⁹ Architecture reveals a key limit that applies equally to artistic and pedagogical practice: form cannot substitute for relation. Without ongoing maintenance, care and coordination, even the most politically intentioned structures are absorbed by the institutions they sought to resist.
This question of maintenance — of what sustains collective life — connects directly to my own practice. The studio is a laboratory: a space where experimentation, failure, learning and maintenance blur into a durational, collective process — a way of thinking, a way of being, a way of living. intermission museum of art (ima), co-founded with Rose van Mierlo in 2020, embodied this logic directly. ima proposed the museum itself as a site of uncertainty — ‘a building without walls, a non-hierarchical collection of interdisciplinary narratives and voices, both a guest and a host, and an exercise in cross-pollination.’¹⁰ Its architectural premise was the lateral network: decentralized, participatory and open. ima was built on a question — drawing from Meschac Gaba’s provocation that the museum was ‘not a model… it’s only a question.’¹¹ The collaborative responses it organized around shared themes produced a set of co-existing positions that accumulated into something larger than any individual contribution. Horizontal relation sustains — but it demands something in return. Attention. Maintenance. A willingness to remain in difficulty rather than withdraw. That is what solidarity is actually made of.
solidarity and its limits
If Galimberti offers the conditions under which collective practice can be sustained, Schulman’s The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity confronts what happens when those conditions are ethically or politically misread. Schulman’s core argument is that solidarity cannot be grounded in identification — in the collapse of difference through imagined sameness. ‘Because the kind of solidarity addressed here is rooted in inequality,’ she writes, ‘it is by definition fraught.’¹² This framing rejects the fantasy that solidarity can be clean, reciprocal or affirming. It demands endurance, accountability and risk rather than emotional reward.
Her critique of identification is important and deserves to be taken seriously. Liberal frameworks frequently substitute feeling for action, producing what Schulman calls a ‘magical combination of pure motive, clean action and predictably victorious outcome.’¹³ The desire to be seen as ethical replaces the labor of actually being accountable. ‘The bystander is often so used to being powerful without effort that they fantasize a simple change in attitude fixing the pain of the victim.’¹⁴ This is virtue signaling in its most entrenched form — the performance of solidarity as a substitute for its practice. Solidarity, in this account, is a continual practice — ongoing, imperfect and shaped by the uneven distribution of power.
Schulman’s framework carries a significant limitation that runs through much of the text: in critiquing the depoliticized version of sameness — the shallow affective identification that mistakes feeling for solidarity — she risks treating sameness itself as inherently suspect. This is a meaningful overcorrection, and one that mirrors a broader failure in liberal politics: the reduction of coalition to identity and the substitution of virtue signaling for structural accountability. Consider Pride at Work,¹⁵ the AFL-CIO constituency group that organizes 2SLGBTQIA+ workers across industries and issues. Its power comes precisely from holding difference and common ground simultaneously — the experiences of its members are vastly varied, but the structural conditions they face as workers are shared. Flattening that coalition into a single identity would hollow it out. There is a fundamental difference between sameness as surface identity alignment (‘I feel like you,’ ‘I see myself in you’) and sameness as shared material conditions and shared demands. We need housing. We need time. We need safety. We need dignity. These are material realities produced by capitalism and governance that cut across lines of identity. When organizers articulate sameness at the level of conditions rather than sentiment, responsibility is redistributed. Accountability deepens because it is tied to outcomes rather than feelings.
This is where Jane McAlevey’s organizing framework offers a crucial counterweight.¹⁶ McAlevey insists that successful movements are built by identifying deep common interests — organizing across difference rather than flattening it. Solidarity is produced through struggle itself, through the discovery of shared stakes under conditions of actual conflict. Difference shapes how people are positioned in a struggle. Sameness — the real kind, the structural kind — is often why they are in it together. A framework that begins and ends with difference, however analytically rigorous, cannot fully account for the organizing work of building movements that must coordinate across large numbers of people with varied positions and histories.
This tension has immediate stakes in the spaces where teaching, studio practice and labor organizing converge. In November 2024, writing to part-time lecturers at Tufts University, that argument took shape directly: ‘Our union isn’t just about workplace issues; it’s a space where we can leverage broader solidarity and channel that energy into our own communities.’¹⁷ The letter named shared conditions — rising rents, healthcare, workers’ rights, climate breakdown — as the basis for coalition-building across departments, institutions and political lines. It did not ask people to abandon their differences. It asked them to recognize that those differences are produced within a shared structural condition and that acting from that recognition is more politically generative than managing difference alone. This is McAlevey’s argument — and it is what Artists Call was actually doing.
artists call and the question of cultural solidarity
Art for the Future: Artists Call and Central American Solidarities documents the emergence of Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America in 1984 as a moment when cultural production became a form of collective political organizing. The campaign brought together artists, writers, musicians and performers across thirty-one exhibitions and an expansive range of performances, film screenings, poetry readings, street actions and educational events organized to oppose U.S. intervention in Central America and raise resources in support of Central American self-determination.¹⁸ It operated across institutional and grassroots platforms simultaneously — from alternative spaces like ABC No Rio to commercial galleries and major museums — forming a temporary cultural infrastructure capable of mobilizing workers around a shared political objective.¹⁹
Abigail Satinsky situates Artists Call within a longer genealogy of politically engaged artistic labor, connecting it to earlier antiwar organizing that had ‘catalyzed the formation of the artist as worker.’²⁰ Cultural labor becomes inseparable from political struggle. Artistic work becomes organizing work: coordination, coalition-building and the creation of new forms of collective political visibility. The campaign’s scope and its particular blend of aesthetic and activist practice demonstrates how cultural production generates the connective tissue of a movement rather than merely reflecting it.
But Artists Call also illuminates the complications Schulman names and the ones she doesn’t fully account for. Solidarity within the campaign was not a simple moral identification with distant suffering. As Erina Duganne observes, ‘these cultural workers sought to build transnational solidarity through feeling,’ but ‘the effectiveness of this approach was continually being challenged.’²¹ Emotional identification may initiate connections across geopolitical and cultural difference, but it does not produce durable political relationship. Solidarity must be built — through translation, negotiation and ongoing accountability — rather than assumed.
Jerri Allyn’s Queer Revolution sharpens this point from within the campaign itself. Allyn’s intervention exposes the contradictions that arise when revolutionary movements reproduce forms of exclusion within their own structures. She challenges the persistence of those who seek recognition within the very systems they claim to oppose, and more pressingly, she confronts the exclusion of queer communities within some revolutionary contexts directly: why does a revolution ‘full of women, turn tail and back on police intervention of gays gathering in parks and quietly in the backs of restaurants?’²² This is a critique from within the movement itself — solidarity as an ongoing problem that a movement must continue to negotiate rather than a condition it can claim as settled.
Those internal contradictions do not disappear when a movement ends — they shape what gets remembered and how. In April 1979, Italian authorities arrested dozens of activists, intellectuals and organizers associated with autonomia, effectively criminalizing the movement and forcing political life underground. The archive of Artists Call raises the same problem that Galimberti identifies in the aftermath of those arrests: what happens to the memory of politically engaged practice when its materials are dispersed, inaccessible or institutionally undervalued? As Josh MacPhee notes in his contribution to the volume, preservation alone does not guarantee meaningful engagement with the histories contained in an archive.²³ Archives are political spaces where decisions about access, legibility and institutional authority shape what can be remembered and how. The archive, like the collaborative form itself, requires maintenance and care — as a primary condition of the political work, not a supplement to it.
toward something new and unknown
What these three bodies of work share — and where they converge with the practical commitments of projects like ima, studioELL and the labor organizing that runs alongside them — is a refusal of the finished. Collaboration, solidarity, the archive — these are ways of working and ways of thinking, sites where the past is continuously contested and reactivated in relation to present conditions.
Galimberti’s account of the aftermath of the 7 April 1979 arrests makes this concrete. When direct organizing became impossible under conditions of criminalization, cultural production didn’t stop — it shifted. Works made during and after the arrests functioned as counter-archives, sustaining collective memory against an active process of historical erasure. The movement relocated into narrative, correspondence and shared recollection. What looks like defeat from the outside is, from the inside, a different form of the same struggle — maintenance of relation when every other form of collective action has been foreclosed.
This is the political commitment that animates both the laboratory model of studio practice and the lateral network model of institutions like ima. The studio is a site of ongoing experiment. The museum — when it refuses its own architectural premise of power — becomes what ima proposed it could be: what the ima founding statement described as ‘a space of unpoliced disruption, a question held open rather than answered.’²⁴ Collaboration in this sense is generative precisely because it exceeds what any individual or institution can produce alone. It creates conditions for thinking and making that would otherwise be unavailable — through friction, difference and demand that press against the limits of existing frameworks.
Schulman is right that solidarity does not deliver when we want it or need it — and that there is ‘nothing else that can bring us closer to a justifiable future.’²⁵ That future is built on the discovery — through struggle, through shared making, through the maintenance of relation under pressure — of what we actually hold in common at the level of conditions rather than identities. It is built on the kind of solidarity that McAlevey describes: produced through organizing rather than assumed through alignment; measured not by moral clarity but by the capacity to act together over time.
The question is not whether collaboration and solidarity are possible. The historical record demonstrates that they are. The question is what conditions make them durable — and what care, maintenance and political accountability are required to sustain them when institutions absorb, repress or simply ignore them. These are tensions no single text can resolve — nor should any. They remain productively open. And it is in that openness — in Gaba’s ‘not a model, only a question’ — that forms us, unites us and keeps us moving.
notes
01. Galimberti, Jacopo. Images of Class: Operaismo, Autonomia and the Visual Arts (1962–1988). Verso, 2022.
02. Schulman, Sarah. The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity. Thesis, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2025.
03. Duganne, Erina, and Abigail Satinsky, editors. Art for the Future: Artists Call and Central American Solidarities. Inventory Press, Tufts University Art Galleries, 2022.
04. Galimberti, p. 5.
05. Galimberti, p. 177.
06. Galimberti, pp. 10–11.
07. Galimberti, p. 197.
08. Galimberti, pp. 97–98.
09. Galimberti, p. 107.
10. ros, john, and Rose van Mierlo. intermission museum of art. Founded 2020. intermissionmuseum.org/about. Archived at web.archive.org/web/20240807134131/https://intermissionmuseum.org/about/.
11. Gaba, Meschac. Quoted in Ros, John, and Rose van Mierlo. ima founding statement, 2020.
12. Schulman, p. 15.
13. Schulman, p. 15.
14. Schulman, p. 15.
15. Pride at Work. ‘About.’ prideatwork.org. Pride at Work is an AFL-CIO constituency group whose mission is full equality for 2SLGBTQIA+ individuals in workplaces, unions and communities, organizing in the spirit of ‘An Injury to One is An Injury to All.’
16. McAlevey, Jane. No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age. Oxford University Press, 2016.
17. SEIU Local 509 PTL Stewards. ‘A Call to Solidarity and Action for Our Shared Future.’ Letter to Part-Time Lecturers, Tufts University, 25 November 2024.
18. Duganne and Satinsky, p. 10.
19. Duganne and Satinsky, p. 66.
20. Satinsky, pp. 21–22.
21. Duganne, p. 244.
22. Allyn, Jerri. Queer Revolution. In Duganne and Satinsky, pp. 257–258.
23. MacPhee, Josh. In Duganne and Satinsky, p. 271.
24. ros, john, and Rose van Mierlo. ima founding statement, 2020.
25. Schulman, p. 252.