Page 144 - PIP

A new vision
The failure of the driving forces of change to create a more equal world, haunts this assembly. It haunts the political left, communism, the Aufklarung and revolutionary ideas. It is searching for a new way to come to life again, a new entrance that could resolve the betrayal and the lies, by those who were supposed to implement change, that were experienced by many. A blurry idea, a vision arises in the midst of this endless discussion, towards an equality that recognises different needs, different beings and that is rooted in the experience of the freedom one encounters in feeling and understanding beings part of a multiplicity. One has to feel that multiplicity and experience their body in a world one wasn't aware of. It’s a pledge to turn the common paradigm on its head: freedoms may be born out of the experience of equality at large. Equality is not a restriction of freedom but the grounds for it. At the center of the fantastic institution there's a big empty room, empty also of projections. It’s up to the ones that go there to organise it for a while, then it changes. In fact the institution removes and displaces things from the world and installs them in this space.
Failing core of the institution
Soft, hosting, feminist and a possible shelter: the fantastic institution is lastly a place which accepts that failure is at its core. Failure is the shadow of any creation: the potential to fail is the counterpart of any attempt to make something new. The international art market doesn't leave any space for failures. Works are judged as soon as they are premiered and immediately categorized, bought or forgotten. They are objectified, reviewed and taped, and defined before they are even produced. There's simply not enough space to try things out, to test ideas and to experiment with the audience in the moment when the importance of the work is relative to that time and not to any other - the work does not need to be immortalized. A work of art is not a final thing, it is not a finished, unified object, designed to survive for eternity. It remains open.
The fantastic institution invites try-outs, that may eventually fail, or that are most likely to fail. Furthermore, the fantastic institution reflects on these layers and the different ways in which works can appear. Drawing from the events we have set up that honed this spirit, we noticed that the audience is much more interested in being invited into works which are still open and in participating in a context which is still undefined, searching itself, where they can search along. This is the moment in which audiences are put to work, where they are engaged in something other than a consumer good. The audience and the institution easily transforms art works into entertainment, into objects. It's not only the content that defines entertainment, rather, the context and the framing of the work play a large role in its definition. What the fantastic institution could do to make flowing between the work and the process possible, is inviting the artist and the audience into each other’s processes. In this sense, it becomes a sort of open university, where processes, experiences and knowledge can be shared in all the inventive ways people and artists know and invent all the time. The fantastic institution is "a shift in the institutional practice toward being a site for aesthetic AND political experimentation".
The artist's perspective
"We cannot accept that institutions do not practice what they propose”. We cannot accept their display of avant-guard ideologies while remaining rigid and hierarchic, violent in their selection process, exclusive, excluding and participants in gentrification by raising their ticket prices... It's outrageous when an institution appropriates discourses and represents ideas which they are intrinsically incapable of achieving. This is the truth of the theater, but also of academia. The discourse on art and the programs on art and art communication, seem very poor and boring. The risk of the "academization" of art is rife, which goes hand in hand with a clear normalization of discourse on art. The artists who took part in the symposium were unsatisfied, as the power relations between artists and curators is so unbalanced: the curator chooses the artist, while the artist has very little or no power in choosing the venue. It's not easy to address the urgency of the artist.
144