Artistic Prefigurations, Institutional Becomings symposium

Artistic Prefigurations, Institutional Becomings is a two-day symposium exploring how artistic practice engages with the institutional, economic, and political conditions that surround it, not only as constraints, but as sites of action: conditions to be questioned, unsettled, and reshaped to test, in the present, other ways of organizing social, political, and civic life yet to come. At a time of deepening socio-political division and the erosion of cultural infrastructures, such engagement is urgent. 

These reflections underpin the European Cooperation Project Institution(ing)s: Co-Creating Inclusive and Sustainable European Art Institutions, a collaboration between eight organizations across seven countries to develop new institutional models. Within this framework, the concept of instituent practices, as proposed by philosopher and theorist Gerald Raunig, is central to the project’s inquiry, describing practices that neither reject nor stabilize institutions, but understand them as processes in continuous transformation oriented towards emerging social forms. This symposium, in turn, brings together practices from across fields that expand and critically examine this potential, and which may, in Raunig’s words, enact “the actualization of the future in a present becoming.” 

This understanding of the present as a site of transformation underpins the notion of prefiguration: practices that embody, here and now, the values, relations, and organizational forms they seek to sustain in the future. Art has long rehearsed possible futures, but through this lens, artistic agency is not confined to expectations of novelty or to exhibitions and programmes as final outcomes; rather, it unfolds across a broader spectrum of relations, practices, fields of knowledge, policies, and contexts. 

The first day of the symposium (May 28) features contributions by artists Cooking Sections, curator and philosopher Dehlia Hannah, and grower and plant breeder Reinier Hoon, exploring how artistic and institutional practices can generate ecologically grounded forms of action within wider socio-ecological systems, such as food and agriculture. Artists rori and Natascha Hagenbeek facilitate a workshop in the Jan van Eyck gardens, using soil to explore regenerative approaches to institutions, while a collective conversation with artist Vijai Maia Patchineelam foregrounds the artist as a worker embedded within institutional structures. A performative dinner by artist Nathalie Muchamad connects colonial histories with contemporary food sovereignty. The concluding keynote by artist Kathrin Böhm, explores how artistic practice can generate more-than-capitalist futures. 

In the second day (May 29) anthropologist Chiara de Cesari introduces the concept of “anticipatory representation” to show how artistic practices project and shape future institutions and forms of statecraft, and curator Gareth Bell-Jones revisits the Artist Placement Group, founded in 1966, which pioneered the interface between art and social organisation in Britain by embedding artists within commercial, industrial, and governmental organisations. A workshop by the Artist Project Group draws on community economics and neoliberal consulting models to explore how artistic practices can move toward post-capitalist modes of organisation, while an assembly by artist collective GABAA rethinks institutional structures through the lens of the “undercommons.” A performative dinner by artist Andreas Engman interweaves institutional critique and the politics of food, and a workshop-performance by artist and DJ Soñ Gweha, mobilizes multiple voices to prefigure alternative forms of collectivity.

In the symposium’s epilogue (June 12) Seon Buddhist nun and Korean chef Jeongkwan Snim presents the philosophy behind her practice and leads a guided meditation to close the event. 

The event is free and open to all, please register to guarantee your place.  

Artistic Prefigurations, Institutional Becomings is curated by Bruno Alves de Almeida (Curator & Resident Liaison, Jan van Eyck Academie) and developed within the European Cooperation Project Institution(ing)s: Co-Creating Inclusive and Sustainable European Art Institutions.  

Visit Jan van Eyck Academie for all information.   

Institution(ing)s is a medium-scale collaboration project co-funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.