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This article analyses experimental institutionalism in the city of Rome, focusing on artistic practices of the C.S.O.A. Centro Sociale Autonomo Occupato (Squatted Autonomous Social Centre) Forte Prenestino and the three-year occupation of Valle theatre, Teatro Valle Occupato. In scholarly research on art institutionalism, artistic practices in squatted spaces are often overlooked. While the 1990s European wave of experimental institutionalism transformed the concept of an art museum or art institution into a processed-based, community-oriented, and participatory platform, in Rome, the collectives of activists and artists used more autonomous endeavours, such as processes of instituting, to affirm how artistic practices' use of radical imagination can foster collective agency, creativity, and radical statecraft. In the following, radical statecraft is understood as a political act that reclaims and creates anew institutional infrastructures. Teatro Valle Occupato's experimental cultural institution of the commons at the 17th-century theatre Valle from 2012 to 2015, and the projects of artists and musicians of the European underground cultural hub C.S.O.A. Forte Prenestino at the squatted 19th-century military fort in the working-class, peripheric neighbourhood of Centocelle, are crucial examples of artistic, cultural, and institutional experimentation, whereby artistic and cultural practices foster social relationships based on freedom, mutualism, solidarity, and the commons. In both cases, the contingency to grassroots politics forged the desire and imagination to either create anew or carve out a social space. By reclaiming spaces in which art is used as a means of radical statecraft, these practices reimagine society fostering non-market-driven social relationships becoming pivotal in the struggles against the neoliberal turn in Italy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The judgement of the Italian Constitutional Court no. 131 of June 26, 2020, ruled on the legal regulation of the Third sector, recognizing the possibility for public institutions and Third-sector organizations to establish a “shared administration channel as an alternative to the profit and market ones”. This article starts from the assumption of “welfare common good” as a hermeneutic category to look at the regulatory horizon outlined by the sentence. Firstly, this category will allow identifying the limits and aporias related to the way in which the principle of subsidiarity has been concretely conceived of within the planning of public policies, specifically social ones, up to now. Secondly, the category of “welfare common good” will help re-signifying the legal devices belonging to the so-called “subsidiary law”, by connecting them to those experiences in which new forms of designing welfare services have been effectively implemented in a participatory sense, albeit they have intersected such a normative itinerary only in part so far. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]