Gigi Argyropoulou

Gigi Argyropoulou (PhD, MA) is a researcher, theorist, curator and director based in NYC and Athens. Gigi has initiated and organised public programmes, interventions, exhibitions, festivals, occupations, conferences, performances and cultural collaborations both inside and outside institutions. Gigi received the Routledge Prize in 2012 and Dwight Conquergood Award for her work in 2017. She is a founding member and co-director of EIGHT/Το Οχτώ – critical Institute of Arts and Politics in Athens and was a founding member of a number of grassroots initiatives during the years of crisis in Greece including Mavili Collective, Green Park and Institute for Live Arts Research. She curated public programs in diverse contexts exploring critical modes of relation/intervention in cultural and socio-political landscapes. Her artistic work has been presented in theatres, festivals and found spaces including Spielart, ARC, ICA, Hellenic Festival, Bios, documenta14 amongst others. Gigi is co-editor of the special issue of Performance Research Journal “On Institutions” (September 2015) and the upcoming issue “Land/scapes” (2025) and publishes regularly in journals, books and magazines. Her edited book “Instituting: Space-making refusal and organising in the arts and beyond’(2022) is published with Archive books. Gigi was a member of the curatorial and editorial board of HKW’s New Alphabet School and co-curated the editions: "Instituting" and “Commonings”. She is associate researcher and senior lecturer at Lund University and her current work and research focuses on new institutional formats and publics, politics of landscapes and transformative pedagogies.

Instituting, spatial pedagogies and the “making of margins”

Building on the edited collection Instituting: Spacemaking, refusal and organising in the arts and beyond, (Archive Books, 2022) this talk approaches instituting as a critical methodology: a process that produces forms and structures taking place within and beyond institutions. Rather than understanding instituting as an alternative model of institution-building, I consider it as a practice of taking space and making otherwise—a mode of ongoing intervention in spatial, material and social formations. Connecting such practices of instituting to modes of what I have called elsewhere “militant curating”, I discuss specifically how practices disrupt spatial imaginaries forming critical publics. Thinking through and beyond the waves of institutional critique, I ask what it might mean to “make margins” and what spatial pedagogies emerge.
Focusing specifically on the spatial and pedagogical dimensions of instituting, I will argue that such instances can become what Lauren Berlant (2017) describes as transformational infrastructures that can emerge from within brokenness and offer pedagogies of “unlearning the world you don’t want to reproduce” and also at the same time building material and affective infrastructures and concrete spaces for and from within life.