Institutions in the Age of Precarity: Technologies, Materials and Imagination

In the last decade, workers in art and academia have been at the forefront of escalating crises. How is it possible not only to resist these crises, but to overturn them, reanimating institutions from within?

UK-based designer and course leader at the University of the Arts London Alexandra Antonopoulou and Associate Professor at the Film and Media Department of Queen’s University and independent curator Gabriel Menotti draw from their personal experiences and share two situated perspectives on the matter.

One comes from a two-year study that analyses creative practices and material manifestations created within the cracks of Higher Education institutions as an attempt to understand precarity, cope with its contradictions, and reclaim creativity. Another, from a platform that attempted to expand public agency over museal infrastructure and collections by using mixed-reality technologies. Combined, these perspectives offer strategies on how to promote the (re)birth of creativity within institutional spaces, making use of their shortcomings as opportunities for imagination.