Utopian Institutions - Inventing and Performing Collective Imagination

#performance

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?

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?

Schedule

Day 1: Introduction: What is an institution? (theory based, but with room for small-scale field research as well)
 

Day 2: What do we love and hate about institutions? (Who’s „we“?) What would the best institution be like? (exercises for collective dreaming)

Day 3: How could we address the wish to change institutional rules and functions? Which artistic practices of different forms of Institutional Critique can we find? (input from artists’ positions and art theory) Discussion: Would these artistic strategies/interventions be ‘enough’?

Day 4: Continuation of day 3 with focus on group work (one larger or several smaller groups) and getting into practice: Developing an own artistic or theoretical, but preferably performative answer to our question: What could an ‚utopian institution’ look like?

Day 5: Performance, lecture demonstration, concept presentation, maybe even institutional intervention or whatever form to present the group’s answer(s); feedback and reflection of the week (guests could be invited, but that’s up to the participants/will be discussed)

Prior application requirements

Please write/create a one page motivation letter (to send via e-mail) that answers at least one or two of the following questions: What’s your personal favourite utopian idea? What experience with a group (you were part of) or even with a group that wanted to be a collective will you probably never forget? What do you think are the aims of public art institutions (could be a museum, a theatre, a cultural centre…)? Eventually: also Which questions you have for the workshop week?

Knowledge requirements

No previous knowledge is needed, but the wish to discuss and learn together, to self-reflect and to be curious about collective practices and the question why these practices seem to fail so often. Depending on the participants interests the week can focus more on theoretical, text-based discussions or more on physical, performative, playful explorations, but ideally it’ll be a mixture of both.

Anna Volkland is a studied dramaturg (diploma 2009) who started researching on public state and city theatres and their „forgotten“ history of Institutional Critique (means the attempts of theatre makers themselves to critically change the institutions from within) in West and East Germany since the late 1960s as a research fellow at Berlin University of the Arts in 2014. She’s been teaching art students (mainly of the performing arts) since then and also co-lectured some of the one-week-workshops in the frame of Kollisionen at Berlin UdK which offered different forms of artistic research for diverse groups. She likes to combine theoretical, more language-based forms with more practical, physical and playful modes of learning and exploring.

www.annavolkland.com