Annotating, Institutions as a Way of Life
Workshop and Discussion Series

Annotating is a series of workshops and discussions, seeking to elaborate and explore perspectives on institutional practices. They are public events, with invited partners and collaborators, oriented by specific sub-thematics, such as feminism, technology, individuation, dividuation, performance, publishing.

The event series are interventions into a process of public making, a process of publication. “Annotating”, a series of open access readers will result — a set of compiled and commented, annotated and reworked edited compilations. Each “Annotation” is developed by a commissioned collaborator, a select author-compiler, who’s inspired and inspiring work is to bring into momentary focus, and relation, institutional-practices from a given perspective. What are the perspectival strategies, tactics and practices of engaging with institutions and institutionality? We look to these different, sometimes conflicting or productively disjunctives, as they emerge, as non-totalising, splintered and as a resistance to forced cohesion or general applicability.

Recomposing the inevitable canonizing power of all institutional practice, and in particular this thing we call ‘research’, Annotations seeks to envelop the outlier and undo the archive of movements known as ‘institutional critique’, ‘new institutionalism’ and ‘instituent practice’, concentrating on what is to be done, by whom, with whom and how. If we are to change institutional life (of which all life takes part), we must first change our understandings of how to act within them. If institutions are a way of life, a mode of being, we ask what other ways of life we might further imagine?

Each event will centre on discussion of texts, media and annotations developed by commissioned collaborators, generating ideas and collaborations for new editions. The overall Annotations series is convened by Bernhard Garnicnig, Lucie Kolb and Jamie Allen of the Institutions as a Way of Life project and edited by Curatorial Editor Mela Dávila Freire.

Location: IXDM Critical Media Lab, HGK Basel 
Registration: No formal registration is required, but we appreciate a quick and informal email to let us know you are coming to mail@institutions.life