Practitheorising session at De Appel

Session at De Appel, Amsterdam (2024), where we explored institutional imagination through collective dialogue. The session featured case studies, including my research on Sala's (not-yet) exhibition archive, Yazan Khalili’s exploration of cultural workers in Ramallah, and Eszter Szakács’s work on Dora Maurer. These case studies highlighted the need for infrastructure within artistic practices, such as experimental representation in post-colonial contexts, organizing for survival amidst state fragility, and alternative mobility during the Cold War. Aria Spinelli and Chiara de Cesari contributed theoretical insights on ‘Fugitive Archiving,’ emphasizing the political and labor aspects of alternative archiving. The conversation concluded with Quinsy Gario’s reflections on friendship, labor, and power in collective practices, stressing the importance of labels for representing knowledge and questioning its use by institutions.

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Creative Institutionalism: (Art) Experiments at the Fringes of the State
In 2023, I participated in a collective writing session during a residency in Grimonster, Belgium, discussing anarchival practices in South Africa with scholar Carine Zaayman. This work led to the publication of Creative Institutionalism: (Art) Experiments at the Fringes of the State in e-flux notes. The session was organized as two encounters to share our research and develop writing on four key themes: Welfare, Economies, History, and Art. My collaboration with Carine focused on ‘Anarchiving,’ a concept developed in her doctoral research on South African Indigenous projects of historical reconstruction. ‘Anarchiving’ refers to practices that resist formal archiving while shaping collective memory and positioning. Our conversations deepened my understanding of how archiving can become a decolonial act of resistance, allowing critical reinterpretation and rewriting of colonial histories. This collaborative effort enriched my theoretical and practical approach to research.

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Symposium Practitheorizing Counterinstitutions at documenta fifteen
I co-organized the Practitheorizing Counterinstitutions symposium at documenta fifteen (2022), organized by IMAGINART in collaboration with the OFF-Biennale Budapest and the collective The Question of Funding. This workshop was designed to rethink the future of institutions by using lumbung practices, as showcased in documenta fifteen, as a point of reflection. The event alternated between storytelling, theorizing, and collective practice, emphasizing that theory should emerge from lived practice. By engaging in these modes of reflection, we aimed to explore how institutions could be re-imagined globally. Participants were encouraged to critically reflect on the kind of institutions they wanted to create, moving beyond traditional models to envision alternative, more inclusive structures. The symposium provided a space for rethinking how institutional power could be redistributed and how collective practices could challenge and reshape institutional frameworks.