Towards a feminist institution - A conversation with Marta Keil

Welcome to the Onassis AiR Conversations. My name is Myrto Katsimicha. I am a curator and cultural worker based in Athens and your host in this series of recorded encounters with the participants of Onassis AiR. Founded on the principles of learning and doing with others, Onassis AiR is an international research residency program in Athens initiated by the Onassis Foundation in 2019. They say that what happens in one place stays in that place. I cannot find a better way to describe all the things that have been happening inside the Onassis AiR house since I first entered as a participant of The Critical Practices Program in fall 2019. The truth is it is not easy to transmit an open-ended process of relationing which is very personal and relevant to a specific place and moment in time. How can I then give you a glimpse into that process? Everything starts with a conversation. Throughout this series, I'll be speaking with the Onassis AiR participants to shed light on their artistic practices and needs, as well as to reflect on ways of being and working together.

Today, I am having a conversation with Marta Keil. Marta is a Polish performing arts curator, writer and researcher currently based in Utrecht. Her curatorial and research practice focuses on the potentiality of alternative processes of instituting and on redefining modes of transnational artistic cooperation. Marta is a participant of The School of Infinite Rehearsals Movement VI with a collective research focus on modes of governance through the lens of institutions. In this conversation, we draw from Marta's experience to discuss feminist approaches on instituting otherwise.

Marta, welcome to Pali-Room!

Thank you. It's nice to at least virtually be back here.

It's very nice to be able to talk with you again. I would like to start with your background as a first question. You have a background in cultural studies and dramaturgy and you have been active in the field of performing arts in Poland and internationally for many years. As arts professionals working in a rather precarious field we either work with or for, continually moving inside and outside institutions and I am very interested to locate your specific interests on the subject of instituting. How did you start engaging with this question?

Thank you so much for that. I think it has started already with a decision that we made together with my partner and very often co-curator —partner in crime too— Gregorz Reske, when we started to curate a performing arts festival in Lublin in Poland in 2013. One of our first decisions was to see the festival (or at least an attempt to see) the festival as a public institution and to try to translate the festival duties and responsibilities, goals, desires into the framework of the public institution. And I think that was exactly the moment when the whole journey with the notion of the institution started for me. The reason why we decided to look at the festival from that perspective was that we realized that in the local context in Poland festivals were very much, as basically in many other countries in Europe and beyond, a result of the neoliberal shift in the arts fields to produce and present as much as possible. So, after the communist regime collapsed, we, all of a sudden, witnessed a kind of explosion of festivals. In 2013-14 you would have more festivals in Poland than the days in the year. We would have at least two festivals taking place every day —either professional or amateur— and they would relate mostly to the performing arts field, theater and dance, but mostly theater.

And then we realized, "aren't we in a way part of this market system"? Aren't we also, willingly or not, adding to this constant race towards the newest, the best, the most attractive? What does it mean to give visibility to certain artists and not give it to others? What are the consequences of the curatorial choice? What is the role of the festival and its responsibility towards the local audiences? What does it mean to do a festival in a situation where there are so many festivals in a given country? What does it mean to focus on international works? So, these were the questions that were really important for us. And then, we realized that actually translating the notion of the festival to the idea of the public institution helps to ground it in a particular context, and this "public" meaning a festival belongs not only to the one who founded or who financed it or shaped it, but also to the ones who receive and who witness it. And then we were wondering, what if we think of a festival that belongs both to its publics and to the artists? What would then the role of the curators be? Is the role of the curator to mostly bring the ideas and then create the best possible conditions for them to happen? Or is it more a role of a facilitator between the artist and the audience, or between the artists and their possible collaborators? Is this role of someone who reads the context carefully and at the same time produces the context also? So, that was the key of our research and of our understanding also that basically an institution can have a very strong political impact as a notion, as an idea, as a construct.

I also realized very quickly that the idea to run away from an institution or to create something outside of institutions is very often an illusion, because within a society we are in a constant process of instituting ourselves: negotiating or following certain ways about how we gather, how we talk to each other, how we build relations with each other. And what was more or felt more important to do back then was to try to see how we can change the institutions within which we operate from inside and thus the decision to kind of benefit from the privilege of being the ones who at some point have had the chance to shape an institution (a festival). From that experience another kind of path or another kind of interest in the institution unfolded: an attempt to introduce the notion of the feminist institution into the polish —and not only— context, and to propose it not as an idea or a topic only, but mainly as a logic of work or as a logic of how we work. And this is, for instance, one of the one core goals that we had together with two colleagues, Agata Adamiecka-Sitek and Igor Stokfiszewski, when we developed the project "The Agreement" on the invitation of Teatr Powszechny in Warsaw, which aimed at translating the public institution of a theater into a feminist one. Maybe I should also add here why I am constantly referring to the notion of the public institution. This concept is, again, very much grounded in the local context of Poland, where the performing arts field is dominated by the [model of] public theatre that is run and financed by either a city or the state. Now, on one hand, it is a kind of luxury to have public subsidies for the arts. On the other hand, since this model really dominates the field, we don't really have alternative proposals. The independent field is really scarce in terms of the possibility to grow because it almost doesn't have the support or it almost doesn't have infrastructures to exist within. [On top of that,] we don't really have an access to private funds. That is very limited, which makes the situation very complicated, especially when, for instance, the government changes. Every time the government changes, many institutions would feel it.

First of all, thank you very much for giving us a little bit of a context of the situation in Poland. I think that in a way we are experiencing a quite similar situation in terms of how the political situation in Greece often changes or affects the way that public institutions work and produce today. I wanted to divert a little bit from the script because the way that you brought forth the idea of the public institution brought to my mind the issue of accountability. And I was wondering on a practical level through the organization that you co-run what were your goals in maybe a longer-term, but also shorter-term in terms of the reform of the institution?

You mean the Performing Arts Institute (InSzPer) that we co-run in Warsaw?

Yes.

Indeed. We actually haven't created that institution, but we inherited it from colleagues, also from the performing arts field, who were happy to receive finally a venue and therefore decided to focus on their [new] venue. Performing Arts Institute was established by Komuna Warszawa, one of the hubs for the independent performing arts field in Warsaw. And then knowing that we are looking for an opportunity to continue our work with Grzegorz Reske, after we were fired from the festival in Lublin, we were offered the Institute and we invited four colleagues who are theater artists based in Warsaw to co-run it: Michal Buszewicz, Anna Smolar, Weronika Szczawinska and Piotr Wawer JR. So, there are six of us who run it now. We also changed the profile of the Performing Arts Institute a bit. Our main goal was to offer other, alternative, ways of instituting than the ones we've all witnessed so far in the field of the Polish theater landscape. One of the main aims is to redefine the position of the artists within the institution. The position of an artist being invited to a theater to do a production is obviously a very hierarchical relationship: because of the finances, not only because of the relationship between an employer and an employee (at least for a moment, when the production takes place). But also, the precarious position of an artist [versus an institution] often manifests in the moment when the general rehearsals take place. This is when the director of the institution that invited an artist usually comes to see the show. Legally, the management of the theater is entitled to reject the performance completely —not to accept it— if they don't like it, which would mean for the artists invited and their team not to be paid the whole amount of the fee and that an effort of some months of common work would be destroyed.

Our counter proposal was very, again, practical. What if, when an artist has to at some point confront the opinion of the management of the theater, we supported them as a collective? So, at the moment when the management of the theater comes to see the show, there is not one person and his closest team in front of them, but there are actually six of us in a row. So, there is a multiplicity of voices. We started this practice in case of works of our own, because it was, of course, the easiest way to do it. So, whenever one of the colleagues would have another premiere approaching, we would come to the theater —no matter where it is situated in Poland— and we would give them feedback and we would then manifest that it is not an individual actually coming to a large body of the institution, but actually there is a multiplicity of voices that is present. We realized that this type of group presence really strengthened the position of the theater director of the artists responsible for a given production, but also we realized that what was extremely helpful was not to be alone in the process. For instance, we would give ourselves feedback also much earlier in the process, at the very beginning, when the concept is being made, then maybe also later, when the script is being written: depending on every single production [and its needs]. So we would be present in each other's work as a collective body that supports each other on many different layers of the process. It is a really small gesture, but the very process of negotiating the presence of the collective at some of the rehearsals with the theater management was already a very important political gesture. The second area of our work, that was and still is extremely important, is to open up a tiny little space in Warsaw to welcome artistic practices that might have not had a chance to develop there, because they don't fit the profile of the institutions, because they require transnational collaborators or because they are coming more from the choreographic field rather than the theater one, or maybe because they are perceived as being too experimental.

I think you've already answered my next question, which was about how do you perceive the notion of the practice of instituting, and I would keep the horizontal and more collective ways of working and also the ability or the creation of networks of transnational cooperation as the highlights of this process, as far as I could understand. But since you were talking from your perspective as an arts professional, I was wondering where do you think lies the capacity for transformation within the institution itself?

Yes, that's probably the key question for nowadays. It is very much possible and on many different layers. Maybe I can point out two. One of the layers would be the very process of instituting. So, I really perceive the institution not only as this body that is quite firmly grounded in a particular space and that feels that it has been there forever and it is absolutely untouchable. I really think it is the other way around: an institution is happening or the process of instituting takes place every day. I really believe that the core political potential of being part of the institution lies in the everyday choices you make and the everyday practices you propose. For instance, if you're responsible for a particular department, let's say a curatorial or dramaturgical one, the process of instituting would happen on the level of how you set up the space for the meeting; whom do you invite for that meeting; how do you let people speak; how do you listen to them? And of course, it may seem very banal. It is quite organic. It is really nothing spectacular. What is key here is the persistence, the ongoingess of these gestures and these practices. So that would be one thing. If I see a potential of transforming the institution, I really think it is from within and I really think it starts from very simple, basic gestures. The other [layer] would be related to the current discussion about the #MeToo in the arts field and the understanding of how the figure of the master, of the genius artists, can be dangerous and how much violence it can bring to the field. I think the whole debate around the #MeToo movement in the performing arts field in Europe brings a potential of structural change of the institution, for instance by dismantling the figure of the master, and by introducing the understanding of an artistic process as a collective effort, not only as the emanation of an individual's idea. And I see a lot of potential in the way the institutions, willingly or not, had to or wanted to become part of that transformation. I see a strong potential here, mainly because it's a broad movement that happens not only in a particular institution, city or country, but really almost everywhere. So I really believe in the [power of a] collective voice. Also, a certain challenge or risk that I see is that they both really require time and patience. They don't necessarily bring results overnight and it might be frustrating. And here I see the biggest challenge at the moment when it comes to transforming the institutions from within: how to strengthen each other in the process, and how to support each other when it doesn't bring the results as quickly as we expected.

I would like to go back to the School of Infinite Rehearsals. I think it is worth mentioning that you happened to be the only female participant in this group. The way that you perceive feminization as an emancipatory process for me is quite important and it is not only about including more female identified people in leadership positions. So I would like to ask you, how does a feminist institution look like?

Indeed, everything at the representation level is just a first step. So it is really not only about the female representative in the management position, for instance. Although I feel it is a first step to take. But what I've also observed is that if it ends up there [on the representation level only], it doesn't really bring a change, because the structure stays the same. While working with Agata and Igor at Teatr Powszechny, it was indeed [the feminist approach] as the logic of work that is applied in the institution. For instance, we were wondering how we can bring visibility to the reproductive labor and how we can advocate for a remuneration of that labor in a decent way? Because this is what the current, let's say, modes of operating in the performing arts field do. Because the market also requires [us] to focus so much on the production of the new premieres, new openings, new ideas. They have to be brilliant. They have to be attractive. They have to attract as many audience members as possible. It is all about numbers. It's very rarely about the quality of relationships that are being built within this process. Thus, we were very much interested in that and this is how we understood the feminist logic of working of the [theatre] institution. That's why it was key to underline the crucial role of the reproductive labor: by which I mean the labor of many art workers that are very often invisible, and whose efforts actually make the production possible [administration, production, promotion, technical departments].

For Teatr Powszechny we proposed The Artistic Advisory Board —composed by representatives from all the departments and all institutional layers, but also by audience members and the organizations that the institution works with. So, we tried to compose a collective body that would be part of the decision making process and that would shape it actively by asking questions and understanding better what is needed in order for a decision to take place and to create a program. What was key here was the way how [the board is chosen and how] the meeting was organized. And again, we come back to these very basic questions: how the meeting is being set; who is at the table; how often do you speak; how often do you give space for the others to speak; and so on and so forth. Also, coming back again to your question, I realized that I struggle to point out a particular [performing arts] institution right now in Europe and say this one is 100% feminist. I struggle with it. I think that what is much more possible is to understand certain [artistic or institutional] practices as feminist, but I don't see at the moment the institution that would transform itself completely into a feminist one.

But if we already practice these feminist ways of doing things within our own organization, what is the need to name it as a feminist organization or institution?

For me, it is really key as a political gesture. I mean, it is really important to articulate this particular practice as a feminist one, in order to highlight what type of change we need in order to counteract the overwhelming presence of patriarchy that we are [deeply] embedded in and we might not necessarily always be very aware of how deeply we are part of it. Thinking about it again now, observing carefully, how the situation of the war in Ukraine unfolds and how it shifts the debate and the directions of the social debates at the moment, I see a big danger there. Because the way the war is being or has been introduced and the way it is also being reported in the media is that, again, you would see mostly males being sent to the front and women and children attempting to go away from the extremely dangerous war zone. And I wonder how these very images will influence, again, our way of thinking [about the society]. What is the [feminist] agency here? I see a big danger of a backlash here, talking more about the weapons rather than about the way of how we work together. And I'm wondering how we can contribute to make the risk of a backlash at least less likely to happen or to make its attempts and its impact at least a little bit smaller. I really think that this is exactly the reason why discussing the feminist practices is really key, as they attempt to imagine a world differently, a world where maybe this type of aggression will not be possible anymore. But also, I have to add here that the situation of war underlined again how difficult it could be to defend feminist values [with feminist means], because the violence, the bare violence, when it comes, when it happens, takes no mercy.

I guess language and also images as a form of representation are two very important institutional foundations that we must dismantle and articulate differently in order to start thinking but also doing differently. I am really glad that you are bringing your critical perspective here, Marta. You have been involved in many collective practices of mutual learning, like, for example, the "Forecast-A School of Thinking With" that you curated, which was a space of common learning and sharing practices with performing arts makers and thinkers. I think that was in September, if I am not mistaken, and I would like to ask you, what was your specific interest in applying for the School of Infinite Rehearsals?

I was really fascinated by the idea to practice the process of instituting in a way within the framework of the residency, but also to have this luxury of being able for several weeks to focus on the topic. And why I got fascinated by the call was where the school is situated, I mean, in Athens. I was really interested in discovering more the scene, but also in understanding better how in this particular context, which I find a lot of similarities with the Polish one —the one that I am most familiar with— how it's possible to institute otherwise —and I perceived the School of Infinite Rehearsals as an attempt to do so. In the logic of the market and the logic of the way the institution often works this type of school doesn't exist. It is not possible for it to happen, right? I mean, to offer time and space for research and to offer time and space to encounter different perspectives and different backgrounds, and to actually discover better the local field without an obligation to produce immediately on the spot.

Did you trace any feminist processes of organization within the city?

The trace I was following kind of intuitively and I was really happy to find was a trace of many self-organized galleries or smaller institutions that would work in a way against all odds. I saw a lot of organizations that are operating in private spaces and smaller or bigger spaces that make an effort to actually change things on the spot by building transnational alliances and by giving space for the others. That was, I think, the biggest feminist trace that was really crucial for me to find. From the organizations such as Callirhoe or MISC run by Nikolas Ventourakis, who was one of the participants of the residency too, or State of Concept Athens. I would say that these are just the examples that were very key for me to understand how when things don't seem possible or when the new initiatives don't feel like being necessarily welcome in the field —because again of the lack of public and structural support, financial and structural one— how they emerge and what they do. What I find extremely fascinating is that they don't necessarily emerge or they're not necessarily initiated in order to give space for the one who initiated them to bring their own ideas and concepts real. Of course, that happens, too. But what I realized was that their main goal is to open space for the others and to create conditions for the others to work and to share [the resources and visibility]. If we don't have many resources, let's at least share what we have and in that sense, these resources seem to multiply a lot. It was also very clear for me how much of an effort is required, how much of an emotional labor and care is needed to make them sustainable. That was probably something that was extremely exceptional for me to observe: how much of an effort is being present there and how much of a genuine need to provide this, how quickly it can become really a gathering space for others. How can actually the feminist practices or any counter-practices exist and unfold in the contexts that are not necessarily very welcoming to them? So, I found them as very strong political gestures too.

Thank you, Marta. I have one last question for you. We tend to talk about alternative ways of doing or thinking and it seems to me that most of the times we are using this speculative mode as a safety net that sometimes doesn't allow us to move forward and actually transform. What I mean is that we sometimes talk a lot about the future instead of the present. Before we close this discussion, I was wondering whether feminist practices can actually help us ground our work on instituting otherwise?

I very much believe so, because I think it is exactly because of the fact that the feminist practices immediately require some practical steps to be made. For instance, when I look on the code of practice or on a list of intentions proposed by many institutions that would like to transform themselves towards more feminist ones —for instance, I mean, the code of practice proposed by transit.sz, some years ago— they are always based on very practical gestures and basic everyday practices. This is also what Laura Roth, a member of the International Group of Barcelona en Comun and a researcher at the same time, very often points out, that the feminist understanding of politics or the feminization of politics really starts from the very basic gestures that we very often tend to overlook as less important or just not spectacular enough or not easy to promote of course. How can you promote the way how we set up the table at the meeting, right? But exactly these procedures and the mode of negotiating them, the fact that they are repetitive, this is something that I find as a very important perspective to ground the work or to finally situate it in the present, not in the future only. I totally agree with this observation that very often with projecting a better future and imagining alternatives, we tend to kind of escape a little bit from the present —and while we keep ourselves busy with a future, quite a lot of agency over the present might be taken away from us. I guess, what we can obviously really influence is the actual present, the moment right now, but we need to focus on it. In that sense, a lot of proposals coming from researchers and practitioners who are busy with the notion of the feminist institution bring that on the table. They really focus on these everyday practices and basic gestures.

Apart from the very practical level that you have been working on, you are also working a lot with metaphors, I would say, and I was wondering whether you could talk a little bit about your current project, "Breaking the Spell".

Of course. Breaking the Spell results, indeed, from struggling on how to work otherwise in the performing arts field. It emerged from the desire to find alliances within the field with other makers, researchers, and artists that are interested in the notion of the feminist practice and do practice feminist approach in their modes of working. I was really interested in bringing together the makers, the curators and the researchers that would be focused on the notion of thinking-with [not necessarily only thinking about] or being-with, so that we would not necessarily talk about, let's say, particular communities or particular problems or particular topics, but rather try to think with them instead and apply in a way their logic and their way of thinking. Therefore, I contacted four institutions in Europe, starting with the Residenz Schauspiel Leipzig, then Kammerspiele in Munich, Kunstencentrum Viernulvier in Ghent, and the Performing Arts Institute in Warsaw. We gathered a group of 18 artists [and thinkers] who traveled in different constellations to these cities in order to research together the notion of the practice of thinking-with and being-with. It is an artistic research process that has two aims. One is indeed to understand better what the feminist practice and what the practice of thinking-with could mean to the performing arts field and what its political potential could be. And the other aim is to strengthen each other as we come from very different countries, regions and backgrounds. Each of us has slightly different struggles and is embedded in a different context and the question is how, from being firmly grounded in that context, can we search for transnational alliances, who would help us to continue the practice, if the [local] context —as is the case with Poland and in many other countries at the moment—, becomes unbearable.

That need to focus on the feminist way of thinking is also very much rooted in my recent experiences in Poland when almost complete abortion ban was introduced. The idea of this project emerged in the middle of massive protests, the biggest protests that happened in Poland since 1989 [against an attempt to introduce the new abortion regulations]. They were an extremely important political experience, even if they did not succeed. And, based on that political movement, I was wondering how can we build alliances with the other movements taking place outside, elsewhere, and how can we —actually having very different battles to fight— strengthen each other? And in that sense, the project is just as much about researching the particular practices as it is about understanding what it means to be together and how we can propose —I very much hope so— a change and another way of working within the field by bringing our collective voice together, while amplifying it.

Where does the notion of witchcraft fit into this process?

The witchcraft came from, again, a particular context that I started to work on the project with, during the protests against the abortion ban in Poland, when I realized that all of a sudden the notion of the witches [came back to portray female and feminized bodies as] really dangerous for the society. All of a sudden we [and our choices] became perceived as very dangerous by the ones who run the country. Actually, I was wondering how come we end up again with this notion and how can we claim it back? And then, I revisited the notion of witchcraft as proposed by Silvia Federici, as the notion of a particular knowledge and experience, a way of being that proposes an alternative towards the one that is dominant at the moment, meaning a capitalist or patriarchal one.

And then, I came across this book written by Isabel Stengers and Robert Pignarre, entitled Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell, where they were describing one of the first alterglobalist mass protests in Seattle at the beginning of 2000s. Here they refer to the capitalist system that led to the protest as a kind of sorcery, that was kind of imposed on us [or casted upon us], so that we cannot see any alternative towards it. It really is as if we were part of a spell, part of the sorcery. The problem is we don't know anymore who the sorcerers are because it really feels that this is the only way to go and that's been here forever. Which is similar to how some of the institutions are perceived, right? So, I was wondering what can performing arts do and what particular practices of artists practicing thinking-with and being-with, and what kind of spells we would like to break in order to change the society and in order to find an answer to the current challenges. We try to conceive together how to work, but also how to position ourselves within the society otherwise. How can we be useful for the society? What kind of spells we can cast? What kind of the rituals can we bring to the conversation? And do they actually have a political power? That would be the main question of the process. So it's very much about the political agency: how to, in a way, reclaim the political agency in the times when it seems we have none or very little, when we feel overwhelmed by the bad news concerning the social or political order. So, that's indeed the way to empower ourselves and try to find a way to overcome what seems to be a trap we found ourselves in.

Well, I hope that we manage to break the spell and to release new imaginaries. Marta it was lovely speaking with you today. Thank you for thinking-with me and I hope we continue sharing our thoughts.

Absolutely. Thank you so much. It was a great joy to talk to you. Thank you Myrto.

Thank you for listening. If you want to listen to more conversations, please subscribe to our channel. You can find more about the Onassis AiR residency program and each participant at www.onassis.org. This series is produced by Onassis AiR. Thanks to Nikos Kollias, the sound designer of the series, and to Nikos Lymperis for providing the original music intro theme.