Mixtape No.1 On Radical Institutionalism

With this panel and first mixtape, we inaugurate IMAGINART at the University of Amsterdam. The project is about investigating how artists and cultural producers in different parts of the world are collectively experimenting with public institutions, particularly cultural institutions, and reimagining them. Arguably, these creative experiments are producing sites and practices that might show us a path out of the current crisis of public institutions, which is a crisis of publicness and the state. Positioned at the cross-roads of the humanities, anthropology, and art, the project aims to offer a global survey of intersecting creative institutionalisms (Hungary, Indonesia, Italy, Kurdistan, Lebanon, Palestine, and South Africa) as well as a theory of art as avenue for the political imagination and statecraft.

Invitees to this conversation lead established cultural institutions, museums, and biennials that they are trying to change into more open, inclusive, emancipatory, and transnational bodies—thinking public space and publics otherwise. In Audre Lorde’s words, they want to “dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools.” They share how they translate transformative and decolonial ideas into a program of sustained action, i.e., how they practice radical institutionalism They talk about realistic idealism and how to deal with being tired, about implementing an ethics of care in the museum and how to keep imagining in spite of duress, and finally about extractive institutions and how they can be transformed into a lumbung.