Artistic Prefigurations, Institutional Becomings was a two-day symposium exploring how artistic practice engaged with institutional, economic, and political conditions as sites of action: conditions to be questioned, unsettled, and reshaped.

Developed within the European Cooperation Project Institution(ing)s, the symposium drew on philosopher and theorist Gerald Raunig’s concept of instituent practices: practices that neither reject nor stabilize institutions, but understand them as processes in continuous transformation oriented towards emerging social forms. It also explored prefiguration: practices that embodied, in the present, the values, relations, and organizational forms they sought to sustain in the future.

Through talks, workshops, collective conversations, performances, and performative dinners, the programme explored how artistic practices could generate ecologically grounded forms of action within food and agricultural systems, connect colonial histories with contemporary food sovereignty, and foreground the artist as a worker embedded within institutional structures. Discussions also examined how art could shape future institutions and forms of statecraft, draw on community economics to develop more-than-capitalist modes of organization, and mobilize the undercommons to rethink institutional structures and prefigure alternative forms of collectivity.

Against deepening socio-political division and the erosion of cultural infrastructures, the symposium considered how artistic agency could extend beyond exhibitions and programmes as final outcomes to test, in the present, other ways of organizing social, political, and civic life yet to come.