Outpost for Unreal Institutions

Reimagining Institutions for the Radical Unreal

In a world marked by global and local crises, there is a creeping disillusionment in the ability of modern institutions and their bureaucracies to break free of their stubborn adherence to the status quo and produce meaningful change. What institutions might we be missing to ensure a just and equitable transition away from capitalism? What collective agencies need repairing in order for us to govern more empathetically? How can creative practices work with citizens to support transformative, sustainable, resilient and radically different futures?

The OUI is interested in surveying the ever expanding movement of designers, artists, organisers and cultural workers who deploy institutions as medium, as a form of co-speculative practice. These pseudo or unreal institutions set out to re-script the often banal functions of social and civic institutions as a way to create ambiguous spaces of constructive fictions. These projects allow us to challenge societal norms and question what other needs, desires, or dreams our institutions might allow through the subversion and contestation of these taken-for-granted scaffolds of our everyday lives.

A Nine Day Research Outpost for Collective Imaginaries

Like the very ‘unreal’ projects it seeks to unpack, the OUI at DDW serves a double purpose: as both a visual archive of existing work, as well as a site of knowledge creation that aims to map and advance the methodology of this diverse field - how do we cultivate “unreal” spaces for this to happen over and over again? The OUI will serve as an active studio space, engaging a variety of creative practitioners and visitors in creating new links, analyses and proposals for unreal institutions.

Over the course of the nine day design week, the OUI will map the backgrounds of the fictional institutions’ creations, study the vocabularies and aesthetics of their becoming, examine the mechanics of their maintenance, as well as interview some of their founders and caretakers. A process that collaboratively prods and probes the unreality manifested by these projects to better understand both their potentials and propositions for new modes of living. The findings will then be published after the design week as a book, titled Directory of Unreal Institutions, a directory or “yellow pages” for fictional institutions and our collective imaginaries.

The Outpost for Unreal Institutions installation is made possible with the support by Bureau Binnenstad Eindhoven.