Where are we now, where to next? Reimagining cultural institutions

The symposium presents the output of the IMAGINART research project on Imagining Institutions Otherwise: Art, Politics, and State Transformation (2020–2026), while expanding its scope through a focus on Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and the current conjuncture in order to tackle core political urgencies affecting the role cultural institutions play in society.

IMAGINART has investigated a variety of creative counterinstitutions within Palestine, Italy, Hungary, Indonesia, Germany, South Africa and the Kurdish diaspora. These are artist-run, mostly grassroots spaces and projects that set up socio-institutional experiments based on principles of collaboration, horizontality and resource sharing. These projects mobilise artistic practices to reconfigure organisational forms and reimagine self-organised, collective life according to ideas of social justice and freedom.

IMAGINART’s main proposition is that these socio-artistic experiments produce an ‘institutional otherwise’ in the here and now, that may prefigure the future of cultural and other institutions. Thus, the symposium asks: What does it mean to ‘imagine institutions otherwise’ in this moment? What are meaningful responses to the ongoing fascist attacks on cultural institutions? How do counter-institutions propose to change our organised ways of being and working together? Can their tentative proposals, their lessons in the minor key, show how cultural institutions could emerge from the current polycrisis?

The full programme will follow soon on this page.