Final IMAGINART Symposium
De Appel / Cinetol, 16 June, 2026
Where are we now, where to next?
Reimagining cultural institutions
The symposium presents the output of the IMAGINART research project on Imagining Institutions Otherwise: Art, Politics, and State Transformation (2020-2026), while expanding its scope through a focus on Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and the current conjuncture in order to tackle core political urgencies affecting the role cultural institutions play in society IMAGINART has investigated a variety of creative counterinstitutions in Palestine, Italy, Hungary, Indonesia, Germany, South Africa and the Kurdish diaspora. These are artist-run, mostly grassroots spaces and projects that set up socio-institutional experiments based on principles of collaboration, horizontality and resource sharing. These projects mobilize artistic practices to reconfigure organizational forms and reimagine self-organized, collective life according to ideas of social justice and freedom. IMAGINART’s main proposition is that these socio-artistic experiments produce an institutional otherwise in the here and now that may prefigure the future of cultural and other institutions. Thus, the symposium asks: What does it mean to ‘imagine institutions otherwise’ in this moment? What are meaningful responses to the ongoing fascist attack on cultural institutions? How do counterinstitutions propose to change our organized ways of being and working together? Can their tentative proposals, their lessons in the minor key, show how cultural institutions could emerge from the current polycrisis?
Panels:
1. Cultural institutions in times of genocide
2. How do counterinstitutions work: The promise of the minor key
3. Practitheorizing: Utopia, the otherwise and the radical imagination
4. The neofascist conjuncture: What is to be done?
In the first panel, entitled ‘Cultural institutions in times of genocide’, we aim to examine the role cultural institutions and universities in the Netherlands and Europe have played in the struggle against the unfolding genocide in Gaza–when and how they have used their resources, platforms and power to mobilise for solidarity–and the promises and predicaments of this organizing work. The idea is to focus on what cultural and academic institutions could and could not do, and why, and the ways individuals managed to work through the cracks of censorship and institutional inertia to push their institutions to take a stand and implement measures to stop the genocide.
The second panel explores how creative counterinstitutions work: what are the ideas and logics that guide these socio-institutional experiments? What are the main features of their praxis? What struggles do they face, both internally and externally? How do they relate to mainstream institutions like major museums and the state? How do they connect transnationally to amplify their agency? What kinds of ecosystems support their work? This panel is divided into a series of sessions focusing on different methods and tactics: art commoning, an/archiving, and transinstituting.
In the third panel on practitheorizing, we explore some useful concepts to work with: utopia, the otherwise, and the radical imagination. Scholars and (practi)theorists have offered these concepts not only to analyse but also to bolster and nourish the kind of counterinstitutional practices that the symposium focuses on. Here, we address a core question that has long preoccupied IMAGINART and that we have tentatively conceptualized through notions of ‘practitheorizing’ and the ‘practical imagination’: what are good, ‘useful’ concepts to work with, which can enable/liberate the imagination as entangled ideas, practices and created realities?
The concluding panel focuses on the predicaments and promises of ‘instituting otherwise’ in relation to the current late or neofascist conjuncture. Counterinstitutions operate within shifting ecologies, whereby traditional institutions have been deeply shaken by neoliberal, postliberal, and neocolonial projects. Particularly late or neofascist forces have made of targeting cultural institutions and universities a hallmark feature of their policies. How to resist these attacks and thrive?