Anders Carlsson: A Return to the Institution

In the field of performance practices with focus on the artistic discipline of acting, this artistic research project investigates art-tactics from the relative and compromised autonomy of an immanent institutional condition with attention to its performative, relational and embodied dimensions. If arts position to institution is embedded, complicit and mutually interdependent, by which tactics can art still exercise critical or resistant agency upon that structural condition in terms of instituent practices? Such a question is articulated after the modernist and postmodernist tactics associated with late-20th-century anti-institutional and avant-garde tactics have been exhausted, appropriated, co-opted, and commodified.

With departure in the art of acting, in its capacities to perform specific kinds of institutional critique, this artistic research project investigates what a return to the institution, and an insistence upon the institutional capacity to harbour differing perspectives and experiences, can contribute with in terms of artistic development and democratization. The research investigates site-specificity in terms of relational, embodied, and performative aspects of a given institutional condition and views the specific expertise of expanded acting as an expertise to playfully probing asymmetrical institutional conditions in which differing experiences, power-positions and interests poses both challenges and possibilities.

Through an exploration of a parasitical art tactics, arts mutualist interdependency with institutions is researched as a transformative institutive practice. With inspiration from the Belgian political theorist Chantal Mouffe, the aim of the project is to research how parasitical relations beside an ethical horizon of hospitality may contribute to a visionary affirmation of the institutional as an agonistic multiplicity.