Assembly of Undercommons Becoming with GABAA and Prof. Sanchayan Ghosh

Artistic Prefigurations, Institutional Becomings is a two-day symposium exploring how artistic practice engages with the institutional, economic, and political conditions that surround it, not only as constraints, but as sites of action: conditions to be questioned, unsettled, and reshaped to test, in the present, other ways of organizing social, political, and civic life yet to come. At a time of deepening socio-political division and the erosion of cultural infrastructures, such engagement is urgent. These reflections underpin the European Cooperation Project Institution(ing)s: Co-Creating Inclusive and Sustainable European Art Institutions, a collaboration between eight organizations across seven countries to develop new institutional models. Within this framework, the concept of instituent practices, as proposed by philosopher and theorist Gerald Raunig, is central to the project’s inquiry, describing practices that neither reject nor stabilize institutions, but understand them as processes in continuous transformation oriented towards emerging social forms. This symposium, in turn, brings together practices from across fields that expand and critically examine this potential, and which may, in Raunig’s words, enact “the actualization of the future in a present becoming.” This understanding of the present as a site of transformation underpins the notion of prefiguration: practices that embody, here and now, the values, relations, and organizational forms they seek to sustain in the future. Art has long rehearsed possible futures, but through this lens, artistic agency is not confined to expectations of novelty or to exhibitions and programmes as final outcomes; rather, it unfolds across a broader spectrum of relations, practices, fields of knowledge, policies, and contexts. With contributions by Andreas Engman, Artist Project Group (Andrea Steves and Lukas Heistinger), Chiara de Cesari, Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe), Dehlia Hannah, GABAA (Himangshu Sarma, Rabiul Khan, Ritushree Mondal and Surajit Mudi), Gareth Bell-Jones, Kathrin Böhm, Natascha Hagenbeek, Nathalie Muchamad, Reinier Hoon, rori, Soñ Gweha, Vijai Maia Patchineelam. Curated by: Bruno Alves de Almeida (JvE Curator & Resident Liaison). Assembly of Undercommons Becoming Assembly is a situation that creates the conditions for coming together around a specific purpose, whether to proceed collectively or to arrive at a shared decision, or not. Traditionally, assemblies have been associated with institutional or governmental structures. Here, our understanding of assembly begins from the idea of “Other Land” and the creation of a common platform for exchange, dialogue, and the sharing of urgencies. As part of Artistic Prefigurations, Institutional Becomings, we propose an assembly session that rethinks institutions through the lens of the “undercommons” (as articulated in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney). Drawing from our practices and methodologies, particularly pedagogical situation-making, becomings as collective gestures, and the site as an active collaborator, we aim to open up a space for reflection and exchange. Some of the questions and propositions we bring forward include: How can the idea of the undercommons be introduced through practice and lived experience? Which practices within current institutional systems continue to reinforce structures of homogenisation? How are common knowledge systems and everyday forms of intelligence displaced and “museumised” in the name of institutional progress? Who defines sustainability, and what is sustained as “institution”? What remains un- Institutional? How might we rethink institutions through radical pedagogy, beyond static forms and fixed frameworks? Who has the right to institutions, and how can they be reimagined or contested? As GABAA, we understand these actions, connections, questions, and shared forms of knowledge, as a “Human Library,” where people are the primary carriers of memories of knowledge, passing it on across generations through ongoing cycles of learning, making, and sharing.