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

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.