“Cases Studies in Organisational and Institutional Change” (Workshop)

Case studies of recent and emergent operational change processes within art museums and contemporary art pltaforms that are seeking to transform specific dimensions of their organisations in terms of advancing a specific ethos, revising concrete practices or re-defining their relations with users and publics.  This work emerges from the long arc of work by L’Internationale to develop new figures of the modern and contemporary art musuem (variously “the useful musuem”, “the situated museum”,  “the constituent museum”, and “the museum of the commons.”) Led by Prof. Elena Raviola and Prof. Mick Wilson, with Giulia Mengele (PhD Student, LUCCA, Italy) and invited guests from L’Internationale confederation.  

The target groups include graduate students, senior reserachers and professionals in the field. 

The wider research agenda will be introduced, providing a context for the case studies of contemporary art musuems and their approach to organisatonal change. In addition to presenting the case studies, there will be a wider exploration of the conceptual framework used to develop the analyses. One focus will be on the differences between “organisation”, “institution”, and “infrastructure” as terms of analysis, taking account of the different tendencies within contemporary art doscourse, and organisation studies. We will consider how these three different constructs are contrasted within different traditions. In both organisations studies and in contemporeary art discourses there has emerged a new focus on “infrastructure” contrasted with “institution” and to a certain extent as a an alternate formulation of “organisation”. What has been happening, and how is this related to shifts in artistic and curatorial practices. From the ongoing research project “Mapping the Political Imaginary” and the Researching Imaginaries inensive in May 2025, we have found a new importance to the construct “organisatonal imaginary”. This construct will also be explored during the workshop. 

This event is part of a series of workshops - “Applied experiments in institutional imaginaries” - that are both educational and research actions. Prof. Elena Raviola and Prof. Mick Wilson co-lead the research project “experiments in applied institutional imaginaries” at HDK-Valand. Each workshop is a stand alone event but the series aggregates as part of a larger publishing project that is developing a publication for spring 2027.  The project is realised in association with the L’Internationale confederation and the EU funded project “Museum of the Commons” (2023-2027). This is an associated initiative of CAPIm.