Para-institutions and Spectralities in the cultural and knowledge industries. Art instituting practices

Abstract

The paper presents two collective schemes of artistic, curatorial and pedagogical practice, their methods and methodologies, and their “off-center” situatedness. In the light of feminist theory, anti-colonial studies and radical epistemologies, both structures organize an artistic-pedagogical program that confronts the very processes of instituing in the harsh imperative of the globalized knowledge economy. It presents practices and methodologies such as those of the willful archives, translation and micropublishing, the deterritorialization of history, expanded museopedagogies, and techno-aesthetic artistic interventions, which formulate an archive of actions, tactics and strategies, educational materials and perhaps new artistic forms and genres, in order to produce small and larger disruptions to the hegemonic models of cultural practice, reclaiming-through their spectrality- a dynamic role for art of challenging the phenomena of our times, the right to expression and making art, the cultivation of social consciousness and citizenship, the confrontation of exhaustion and fatigue and the possibilities of learning otherwise.