Creative Institutionalism (Art) Experiments at the Fringes of the State

In the following notes, the IMAGINART research group tackles the promises and predicaments of collective instituting in the fields of art and culture. If there is more space today for both collectives and institutional work in a globalized art field, (how) is this work changing the nature of (cultural and other) institutions? We believe this art/institutional work is all the more relevant because traditional (state) infrastructures are globally undergoing massive transformations, teetering if not crumbling or failing outright. Firmly embedded in local genealogies of grassroots activism and anti/decolonial counterculture, and yet simultaneously interconnected, our case studies range from Palestine to South Africa, Indonesia, Hungary, the autonomous region of Rojava in northern Syria, Peru, and Italy. We are not interested in producing a normative, abstract theory of creative institutionalism, which would diminish the vibrancy, richness, and urgency of our stories. What we offer here is a transnational, translocal analysis—both comparative and connective—of diverse artist- and cultural worker–run projects that are self-organized, largely horizontal, and politically engaged, and which mobilize a variety of artistic practices.

This collaborative essay explores artist projects that experiment with alternative welfare provision; others that resist colonialism through cultural regeneration and the imaginative recuperation of precolonial cultural forms; yet others that make visible and work with long-silenced, censored histories of marginalized communities, pointing to other potential futures; and finally others that use, mock, and hack mainstream cultural institutions to foster the movement of experimental institutionalism. They all respond to a basic lack of the state, or to its failure to establish just and inclusive institutions, or to outright state (racialized, classed, and gendered) oppression, which can be due to (post)colonial, postsocialist, or neoliberal processes of politico-institutional transformation. The actors in this movement are a diverse group of people who come together into a kind of social bloc: artists and cultural workers, activists and scholars who have experienced and/or are fighting against multiple intersectional forms of violence committed by states and capital. How do artists and cultural producers work to reinvent public institutions by way of collective “art” practice? We have identified a set of common strategies these projects use to create institutions that are just and caring, and have organized these notes accordingly. Can we see these experiments as sites of an emerging political imagination that goes beyond institutional innovation?