Institution

institution as practice

Pia Louwerens

institution as performative practice.

institution as an institutional body that performs and my body as an artist performing as part of it.

institution as something that I am entangled with and try to think about.

institution↵ as whatever is instituted, or has instituted itself: a behaviour, a field, an agreement, an organization, plus the practice of instituting.

institution as midsize institutions↵ such as art academies and exhibition spaces.

The nation state as institution↵.

Sitting as institution.

institution as enforced by the teacher who tells you to sit up straight.

institution as hard work.

institution as the place I met my ex.

institution as a combination of repetition and power.

institution as needing to be repeated, or reproduced repeatedly, in order to become instituted.

institution as needing power, authority, resources, attention—often from other institutions↵—in order to become instituted.

institution as instituting practice

institution as just starting out, but the origin is hard to pinpoint, since it emerges within a layered landscape of other institutions.

institution as a process of being instituted while instituting.

institution as a new groove being formed in a soup of existing infrastructures, because of a love affair between repetition and power.

institution as self-organization, which starts out as a new habit—not only do we meet once a week as a group, but we start imagining a future for ourselves as a collective. We think of a name, we start a Facebook page. We re-occur. We become legible as an institution↵, or as part of another institution↵. Perhaps we’ll get funding—resources and endorsement by institutions. We’ll hire a space.

institution as having a dreamy, misty core, a collective imagination.

institution as something that never stops and is, truly, really, a practice.

institution as lines that need to be redrawn constantly before they fade, and are at risk of being drawn straighter by repetition.

institution as instituting—rewriting the text for our application.

institution as instituting—getting new uniforms.

institution as instituting—hiring a designer for our website.

institution as reproductive practice.

institution as needing, devouring, care, and attention.

institution as being held by many different people, objects, resources, infrastructures, practices, in many different ways and for many different reasons.

institution as the place where I go to give people guided tours.

institution as the place where I wear a hoodie with a text on it.

institution as saying ‘we’ when you are talking about it with friends although you only started working there one week ago.

institution as an orientational device—a path, starting out as informal but becoming more trodden. The more it is used, the clearer it becomes, and the easier it becomes to walk it.

institution as fortified habitus.

institution as infrastructure.

institution as both a result of (re)production, and a cause of it.

institution as self-preserving.

institution as precarious.

institution as self-referential.

institution as slow to respond to crisis or complaint.

institution as cutting machines that are as much defined by what they are as by what they aren’t.

institution as both the path and the fence next to it and the impossibility to walk the bushy patch of field next to that.

institution as an apparatus that makes the cut for us, that makes us forget we do it time and time again.

institution as enacting a politics.

institution as conditional.

institution as empowering.

institution as identity.

institution as a character.

institution as a desire for comrades and just one moment of ease in this difficult life.

institution as giving us money.

institution as a condition enabling the simultaneity of performing the institution↵ and resisting the very process of institutionalization.

institution as entangled with everything their practices produce, as phenomena.

institution as tending to forget themselves as they focus on what they produce.

institution as inside of us.

institution as a possessive spirit.

institution as architecture.

institution as impossible to leave. (See: embeddedness↵)