Abstract

This article examines the critical relationship between self-organisation, modes of social improvisation and sedimental societal practices in order to consider how emergent practices may ephemerally contested the dominant production of space by enforcing, destabilising and initiating new modes of organisation. Focusing on the cultural and political landscape of Athens during the years of crisis this article will discuss practices that appeared in unexpected forms engaging with cultural production, research cultures and social solidarity in relation to the changing socio-political landscape. While social frameworks collapsed, cultural workers questioned the limits of their praxes and a diversity of self-instituted forms emerged such as occupations, interventions, acts of institutional critique, emergent DIY performance praxes, curatorial and research platforms. I argue that such praxes could be understood and examined as forms of ‘instituting otherwise’ in relation to social and material contexts. Specifically, this article will discuss two cultural occupancies that took place in recent years: Embros Theatre occupancy in 2011 and Green Park Occupancy in 2015. These ephemeral experiments as instances of study engaged simultaneously with theoretical production, performance practice, spatial organisation, and social action which seemed to reinforce each other through public programs/actions. Examining curatorial practices, political methods, research clusters, modus operandi and public participation I will work from specific conditions in order to offer wider considerations on imaginative destituent strategies that bear the potential to criticality devise ephemeral forms of instituting otherwise. This article problematises the relation between art and activism, resistance and incorporation, collectivity and disintegration in order to theorise potential positions we might seek to institute in the coming years.