PIM - Para Institutional Models

Para Institutional Models rethinks the role and format of the art institution. PIM turns to the institution’s weight, gravity and creation of a public sphere, and gathers around art objects in order to practice negotiation, accumulation and mediation of artistic work. The organisation consists of around 40 artists working with performing arts, architecture, visual art and literature in Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland. PIM leaves the traditional institution’s gravity point of the nation, and replaces it with concepts of sustainability in a slow traveling across the nordic region. We are interested in creating cuts in the accelerated attention economy of the big cities – and to place PIM in rural contexts. We ground ourselves in the landscape by only traveling by bus, train and boat. PIM asks how art production can be sustainable and allows sedimentation in space, time and discourse.

The structure is developed from a perspective of the institution as an apparatus to negotiate what we share and administrate in common as a society. An important parallel aspect of this task is to continuously negotiate the “we” that constitutes a common. In doing this, the institution is also a tool to produce public sphere. It is the interface to negotiate the different and conflictive subjectivities that form a public. As citizens we take part in this negotiation on the condition that we accept to have a shared interest in and responsibility of this public sphere, also with individuals that have interests that are conflictive to our own. Rather than striving for consensus, this logic resonates with the idea of agreeing to disagree and yet accepting to stay in the negotiation.

Another aspect specific for the art institution is in the relation to art work as something oscillating between practice and object. In this figure of thought the practice belongs to the artistic subject, and the object is the temporary manifestation of the practice in a public context. Here, the institution is a necessary tool for the negotiation, mediation and implementation of art in a public sphere.

PIM arises from the urgency to find and practice another sort of gravitational point and to redefine how we gather. As artists, many of us live in big cities where public sphere increasingly is privatized, and working conditions are dictated by fast circulation and attention economy. We abstract time and space with fast internet and air-borne travels to other big cities. The unsustainable necessities of art production create burned out bodies and superficial work. With PIM, we wish to create a fictional but also practical break from the economy and temporality of the big cities.

The work of PIM evolves from two yearly events: Mediation, a public symposium in the spring, combining artistic and discursive work, and Returnal an evaluating seminar in the autumn where we recollect the work of the past year and define a thematic trajectory for the year to come. These events will ambulate between a number of collaborating venues and platforms in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland and possibly Island. We will also produce an annual publication.

The first symposium Art as Practice - Art as Object was scheduled 10-12 September 2020 at Ställbergs Gruva. Due to covid-19 the symposium has been postponed to 16-19 June 2021. The publication Art as Practice - Art as Object will have its release 25 September at höjden (Stockholm), Skogen (Gothenburg), DANSEatelier (Copenhagen) and WRAP (Bergen).

Participants: Insister Space (dance/choreography platform Stockholm), DANSEatellier (dance and choreography platform Copenhagen), Skogen (art venue Gothenburg) studio nav (architect studio Stockholm), Museum of Impossible Forms (art platform Helsinki), Weld (dance venue, Stockholm), Non-Existing Center (art center Ställberg) RISK (art collective Copenhagen), Runa B Skolseg (writer Oslo), Goro Tronsmo (director/artist Oslo), Ellen Söderhult (choreographer Stockholm), Annika Lundgren (artist Gothenburg), Sara Gebran (choreographer Copenhagen), Anders Paulin (director/dramaturge Stockholm).