Meeting point

ГМИИ им. А.С. Пушкина и ГЦСИ в Санкт-Петербурге при поддержке «Фонда поддержки инноваций и молодежных инициатив Санкт-Петербурга» в рамках 2-го Кураторского форума © Санкт-Петербург 2020

Paradoxes and Conundrums of Participatory Art

Nothing is wrong with participatory art, per se. Yet another issue is what kind of socio-political conditions and juridical structures call for, allow and/or prevent the participatory art to fulfil the given promises for social and cultural change. Conundrums of Participatory Art is imagined as a curated participatory self-reflexive conversation that will eventually result with a collaboratively composed cross-disciplinary questionnaire. Some of the important issues to be discussed are related to different processual hierarchies between the artists, participants and institutions stemming out the socio-political and economic systems and structures that condition the work conditions, means and relations of production, etc. The main paradox of participatory art, however, stems out of the promise of social change because the question whether it's possible to substantially change society with art that is produced by art institutions and structures created by that very same society still remains an unresolved puzzle.

Suzana Milevska

The Questionnaire of Participatory Art will gather the most relevant and urgent questions about the aims, potentialities, and failures of participatory art. The Questionnaire is not conceptualised only as a usual repository of questions, but it also functions as a participatory and collaborative research tool that invites the participants to formulate their own questions and to «feed» the questionnaire in processual and collaborative ways. This will eventually enable them to develop new participatory artistic, curatorial and educational research methodologies.

The final outcome of the workshop

Comrade, Comradely love, and changing an institution from inside

We start with a little introduction to a contemporary concept of «Comrade» as presented by political theorist Jodi Dean, and a little introduction to the old, and now recovered, concept of comradely love by Alexandra Kollontai, and how these two concepts can help us in creating a community that could transform the idea of educational and museal institution.
The second day the participants introduce themselves and their work, specially in relation to museal and educational institutions. We discuss together in which way institutions have had forcefully to adapt to new circumstances but rarely have led the way to change. How would we imagine an institution that really builds into the future? What kind of anachronism can we find in today's institutions and how could they be updated? Other important questions: Is the conventional role of the museum obsolete? Can education save the museum? And what do we mean by education?
We take as a case study the recent cancellation of Philip Guston's exhibition:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/25/...

Or the change of name of Witte de With art center in Rotterdam:
https://www.artforum.com/news/former-witte-de-with-announces-name-change-to-kunstinstituut-melly-84 168

The third day we construct together how this new institution should be, based on the notes taken the day before, and very importantly, we think how it could be called. Is the concept of comrade and comradely love we studied the first day a good path into this new institutionalism?

Dora Garcia

1. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/11/...

2. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/86/160585/...

3. https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/...

4. https://img.macba.cat/public/PDFs/...

Bibliography