Utopian Institutions – Inventing and Performing Collective Imagination

About

How do public (art) institutions function? Which are their internal contradictions? What have been their historical founding ideals? What are they good for today? Mutually we’ll imagine a new (art) institution the participants would love to build.

While institutions are often seen as stable constructions, they are more fragile than we might assume. When we think of public cultural institutions (like libraries, museums, art schools, theatres): They are made for people, believed in and performed by people – and they need a material and financial base and a policy that supports them.
The workshop invites to take a closer look on public (art) institutions: How do they function? Which are their internal contradictions? What have been their historical founding ideas and ideals? And what could they be good for nowadays?

Mutually we will try to imagine new (cultural) institutions or specifically one example of a non-profit (art) institution the participants would love to build. What would be its aims, its agencies, its structure and working modes? Should it be based on old institutions we know?

Course leader

Anna Volkland

Course aim

Participants will also learn about the artistic practices and discourses of Institutional Critique and look at examples of imagined or performed ‘fantastic institutions’. In the end we’ll develop a first draft of a concept for a dreamed-of institution that could be written, painted, build as model in space, performed, shown in a video and so on – the form is up to the participants’ interests and our technical possibilities.

However, the process of inventing this kind of a new institution together would also be a first try-out for a joint working structure – as institutions are as well places of joint working structures. Which kinds of hierarchies does the group want and would need to answer the tasks? How (un)bureaucratic, (non-)hierarchical or inclusive/exclusive could we work together – and imagine a new institution to be?

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