Institutional Possibility: Protocols for Caring Institutions

As part of the research around institutional critique and the role that cooperation, facilitation, and dialogue play within the potential of institutions to change and transform to serve their purposes effectively for the public(s), Luise Willer and Janette Helm (researchers working at SFB in Berlin) and Lena Pozdnyakova (a researcher in the role of associate at SFB) have invited the collaborative research center community to explore the institutional possibilities that lie within the institution they are affiliated with.

The workshop “Institutional Possibility: Protocols for Caring Institutions” invites Caroline Woolard, an artist, educator, and the Chief Culture Officer at Open Collective, to facilitate a series of exercises that develop awareness about the potential of communication, cooperation, and reflection within institutional frameworks.

The workshop invites you to an open process of developing ideas and working on questions regarding institutional frameworks and their underlying structures, relations, and power systems. Together, we hope to critically reflect on experiences, collectively experiment with ideas surrounding co-designing institutional policies and procedures, and imagine new forms of governance and decision-making that could better serve its communities and public.

Caroline Woolard has years of experience leading such workshops as well as organizing independently funded organizations. She is a founding co-organizer of Art.coop, which exists to grow the Solidarity Economy movement by centering systems change work led by artists, and is the co-author of three books: Making and Being (Pioneer Works, 2019), a book for educators about interdisciplinary collaboration, co-authored with Susan Jahoda; Art, Engagement, Economy (onomatopee, 2020), a book about managing socially-engaged and public art projects; and TRADE SCHOOL: 2009-2019, a book about peer learning that Woolard catalyzed in thirty cities internationally over a decade. Woolard’s artwork has been featured twice on New York Close Up (2014, 2016), a digital film series produced by Art21 and broadcast on PBS.

This event is a collaboration between TP A02 and TP R, and part of agrupa, a series of events comprising talks, workshops, screenings, performances, and kindred happenings that focus on divergent perspectives, spaces in-between, and new ways of assembling and disassembling. The project explores the potentiality of socially engaged practices and participatory art concerning an eclectic assortment of publics and institutions.

Published 05/01/2023