Sitting on another ferry to leave Lamma Island, an outlying island of Hong Kong, the affirming and comforting wet humidity of the air dotted droplets on my face. Decidedly moving into the cabin, an icy rush of air conditioning drew goosebumps on my skin. There, I sat next to a previous professor of mine, Thomas Tsang, who has familial connections to Borneo, Malaysia.

We talked about my project, Making Mamak, premised on sharing and building spaces of urban commoning, built on conceiving kinships and friendships and impacting the city. “To build common ground is easier than to build something novel,” he said.

Both of us live in-between places. We come from a diaspora lineage, where we embed onto existing common grounds and tend to the affect of new places. In Lauren Berlant’s work on affect and intimacy, they write about how we seek common social and physical forms in the infrastructure of different cities.¹ To simply assume a common is present, is to forget the mending and repair we all must do to maintain these spaces. The actions of the collectives who took part in Making Mamak, such as circulating the act of repair through material flows in COEX@Kilang besi, or collective labour of building and maintaining spaces in Little Giraffe Story House, demonstrate collective management of the commons.² How can we radically reframe the commons as we migrate Making Mamak to a new commons in Montréal, a new mode of intimacy?

“I wonder how you balance between the two for your project?” He continued. Making Mamak is a nostalgic homecoming for me, but a new worlding for many others. To migrate and suddenly create another home for the project in Montréal, Canada, is a routine. To choreograph such intimacy in a new context, is a task I am challenged with in my own life.

But everyone knows the makings of a home.

Making Mamak took place in a what-was-home, a domestic space, Papan Haus. Located in Section 14 of the now fifty-year-old town of Petaling Jaya, the semi-detached house rumbles as the LRT (the metro) leaves Asia Jaya One, the station located just opposite the what-was-home. We collectively ate lunch and snacks to ensure there was space for conversation and hanging out.

What was novel about the findings from the workshop is the intermediary between collective and space. How do the collectives themselves also read this practice? It seems as if the collectives treated their space also as a living spirit, a companion which also needs rest sometimes. Each of the collectives defined their space with different names: a storyhouse, a place for books in a house; a playground, a creative place to explore; a platform, for emerging artists as a space for arts; discussion and residency; a living room, a place to take off your shoes and treat it as your living room; a hub, a space responsible for connecting space for many collectives.

I revisit the two premises I began this project with. The first was that art and cultural collectives live under the precarity of capital valued space. Due to the cultural policy and independent nature of each collective, funding from government means is a difficult pursuit. Instead, many turn to food and beverage integrated into the space to ensure that rent can be paid. The collectives hold onto multiple value systems, pushing forward with an agenda for art and culture, but realistically facing the market economy of Malaysia.

The second premise was that art collectives alternatively build a place through the care offered around friendships, kinships, and networks in new territories. It’s not so simple as being a friend, it is the maintenance of care of such spaces which underlie each collective. A dedication to the material flows of how to acquire new timber for the space, to maintaining relations with stakeholder who participate in the arts ecology. The everyday tasks of setting up the space for the public, greeting neighbours and folks coming through, rearranging the space for a new programme, building new extensions. The labour scales from a regional material awareness to collect, heave and construct, to the micro space-centric everyday tasks of turning off the lights. Collectives must tend to the spirit of the space first.

After the workshop and public conversation of Making Mamak, as I flew back from Malaysia to Hong Kong (where I live), I began thinking about commoning and gathering with a critical eye. Talk-writing with Yap Sau Bin, we located a juncture—the collective versus the space. I naively conflated the two, thinking that the artistic practice of programming, designing, and setting up the space is also an artistic pursuit. Sau Bin suggested considering how artistic practice holds a different space and power. It draws attention to beyond the neighbourhood, and more specifically, within the art world. I responded by reframing the spatial conditions as a design practice that adds thickness to the civic nature of the space. The arts collectives open when they want, and allow whoever to enter, before closing for the day. It adds to the usual discourse of public space facilitated by the government—a new commons managed collectively.

When I reflect on the collectives chosen for the workshop, a few of them do have a traditional arts practice in a different collective form. Pangrok Sulap uses woodcut print as a medium, but they are one of many collectives in Ruang Tamu Ekosistem. Papan Haus is on their way to curate their first exhibition, bringing in photography, performing arts, and visual arts. Kapallorek curates an artist residency programme with emerging international artists, but they themselves also have a new media arts practice. Little Giraffe Story House and COEX@Kilang Besi do not have a specific arts practice, but rather a design practice of transforming the space. In a way, it is to also give a spirit to the space itself, to design with the possible materials, social equity, and economic capacity to emerge with a moving, transforming, and even mutuating collective space.