Agnese Politi

Biography

Agnese Politi is a practice-based PhD researcher at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, affiliated with Afterall Research Centre. Her research investigates how practices of commoning can reposition publicly oriented European art institutions shaped by colonial-modern logics of authority and exclusion. Grounded in curatorial and spatial methodologies, her work explores institutions as contested infrastructures shaped by material and epistemic frictions and reimagined through feminist and anticolonial approaches.

She is also an independent curator and editor. She has curated and co-curated exhibitions, public programmes, and workshops across the UK, Italy, and Switzerland, fostering inclusive and dialogic approaches to cultural production. Her practice explores food, land, and resistance as relational sites of knowledge production, with a focus on situated pedagogies, commoning, and collective inquiry.

At Central Saint Martins and UAL, she has co-developed exhibitions and peer-led programmes including BOOKMARK EXHIBITION (2024), Visual Dichotomies (2024), PLAY DEAD – A Symposium of Sorts (2025), Co-Making Matters – Knowledge as a Commons (2025), and Composting Knowledge (2025).

Since 2024, she has worked as Research and Resource Developer at University of the Arts London, where she develops tools and methodologies for navigating and negotiating conflict in educational contexts, with a focus on positionality, power dynamics, and collective accountability. In 2025, she joined the MA Intercultural Practices (Residential) at Central Saint Martins as Associate Lecturer, contributing to the design and development of the Residential strand, which centres on site-specific learning and intercultural approaches through collaborative, context-based, and practice-led pedagogies.

She has participated in research residencies with DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency), including Difficult Heritage (2022, Sicily) and Rural Commons (2023, Puglia), as well as SCK – School of Common Knowledge (2024, Zagreb/Ljubljana).