Forum Lectures #30 Gigi Argyropoulou

Instituting and the spaces of symbiosis: militant curating, publics, and the monstrous democratic imaginaries

In this talk, Gigi Argyropoulou will discuss instituting as a critical method in curating, performing and organising that bears the potential to create “transformational infrastructures” (Berlant, 2017) and critical public.

As an unsettling process that produces forms and structures and yet refuses structuralization and institutionalisation, taking place inside and outside institutions. Examining how might we identify modes of making critical spaces and publics through artistic/social practices and interventions this talk will elaborate on the potential spaces of symbiosis. Argyropoulou will discuss many practices of what she will frame as “militant curating” as ways to critically situate a critical discourse through performance, art and social practice in and with the landscape. Bringing together examples from grassroots practices during the years of crisis and post covid in Greece this talk will put pressure on romanticised conceptions of democratic imaginaries in the current socio-political landscape and seek to rather analyse how inoperative artistic experimentations sketch a field of emergent practice in the production of social space, that rehearses critical publics - in and through the making of spaces that rehearse social/political pedagogies. Building on specific practices and hybrid methods Argyropoulou will seek to elaborate on the making of incomplete, awkward, necessary, non-productive critical and monstrous publics as the modes of intervening and being in and with the landscape.

About Gigi Argyropoulou

Gigi Argyropoulou (PhD, MA) is a theorist, curator, performance maker and practitioner working in the fields of performance and cultural practice. Gigi received the Routledge Prize for PSi 18 in 2012 and Dwight Conquergood Award for her work in 2017 and publishes regularly in journals, books and magazines. Gigi co-initiated, curated and organised public programmes, interventions, performances, festivals, conferences, actions, publications and exhibitions both inside and outside institutions and is is co-founder of EIGHT Cultural Institute for arts and politics in Athens. Gigi is co-editor of the special issue of Performance Research Journal “On Institutions” (September 2015) and was a member of the curatorial and editorial board of Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW)'s New Alphabet School (2019–2022) and co-curated the editions ‘On Instituting’ (Athens, 2021) and ‘Commonings’ (Berlin, 2022). Currently, Gigi is the editor of the upcoming publication: Instituting: Space-making, Refusal and Organising in Arts and Beyond (Archive books, 2024) and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Malmo Theatre Academy, Lund University.

Forum Lectures

Forum Lectures is a series of lectures by Danish and international thinkers and cultural workers reflecting on how art co-forms commonality. Forum Lectures bring thinking and shared study back to the university and invite public lectures on the last Tuesday of every month from 17:00 – 19:00.

The initiative is hosted by the research group of the New Carlsberg Foundation research centre Art as Forum. Our researchers are occupied by a.o. the infrastructures of the arts, collective modes of production, the entanglement of political theory and aesthetic theory, assembling curation strategies, dematerialized art, acts of strategic separatism and temporality in digital art.

The lecture is free and open to everyone interested.