How To Do Things With Institutions? – On An-Archiving, Dis-Placing and Re-Scaling

Bernhard Herbordt,Melanie Mohren

doi:10.5334/mjfar.74

Abstract

Our Artistic Research is realized through a set of performative practices: an-archiving, dis-placing and re-scaling. The paper explores how these practices would install temporary spaces for collaborative speculation and how through those spaces qualities of future institutions could be imagined or even provisionally set in practice. We therefore unfold three performative experimental set-ups: an encounter of two random spectators with a dystopian cross-media fabulation in two wooden boxes as theatrical set-up (1); a staged encounter of a states theatre’s colleagues and guests imagining the future of their institution against the background of historical and contemporary model villages (2); the encounter of two festival infrastructures: one actually existing, performatively and architecturally crossed with its alternative drafts (3). What kind of knowledge is activated? How to grasp and disseminate it? What novel modes of instituting do we need to welcome in order to enable those collaborative and performative practices? Or are they necessarily acting beyond institutions, continuously crossing borderlines between institutional frameworks, multiplying institutional affiliations and installing sufficient intersectional practices between institutions and other contexts? The research paper summarizes the three initial experiments of the collaborative PhD-Project ‘Institution as Art – Art as Institution. Artistic Research Projects and Performative Transformations‘ by Melanie Mohren and Bernhard Herbordt, analyses the results of an interview-series with hosts, performers and guests of those experimental set-ups and envisions an upcoming step of the research.

Highlights

An-archiving, dis-placing and re-scaling are performative practices
The text at hand contributes to that process and discusses three examples of performative practices applied in our research – an-archiving, dis-placing and re-scaling – and imagines possible critical remarks by the authors mentioned above on the possible insights provided by the experiments: Judith Butler, Peggy Phelan and John L
Maybe it’s not so much about changing the inner infrastructures of cultural institutions but about how people gain access to them? Or how the infrastructures would need to change to enable that access? How the ‘dependency of human and other creatures on infrastructural support’ might be handled, respectively ‘the conditions of precarity’ we find ourselves in, while being ‘radically unsupported’ by those infrastructures. (Butler 2015: 65)

Summary

Introduction

An-archiving, dis-placing and re-scaling are performative practices. They install infrastructures for collaborative speculation. How and leading to which results – that’s what the following paragraphs are all about. The text at hand contributes to that process and discusses three examples of performative practices applied in our research – an-archiving, dis-placing and re-scaling – and imagines possible critical remarks by the authors mentioned above on the possible insights provided by the experiments: Judith Butler, Peggy Phelan and John L. Video-, photo-, text-documentation available at: http://www.die-institution.org/index.php/en/2018-the-movement/ [Last accessed 19 June 2020]; ‘The Village’ (Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe 2019) – staged village festival as public research and performance. Video-, phototext-documentation available at: http://www.die-institution.org/index.php/en/2019-the-village/ [Last accessed 19 June 2020]; ‘The Festival’ (Donaueschingen Festival, Stuttgart Theater Rampe 2019) – 'The Festival' is a fictional festival. It displays radically site-specific or only imagined art, as well as designs of other institutions and neighbourhoods. Children welcome! Credits, video-, photo- text-documentation available at available at: http://www.die-institution.org/index.php/en/2019-the-festival/ [Last accessed 19 June 2020]

First Experimental Set-Up

Third Experimental Set-Up

Findings

Conclusion