Art Institutions and Political Imaginaries

Asia Tsisar: The phrase that I often find in different texts, but specifically it is even, I believe, mentioned in the core description of BAK. And I'm just very curious: what do you mean when you say "political imaginaries"?

Maria Hlavajova: One of the most difficult questions. Well, I think BAK has been set up 25 years ago to, perhaps through an active process of inquiry and quests, really try to arrive at some sort of a definition.

Of course, as an art institution and public art institution, our primary work was not production of theory, although production of theory has been quite significant for us. We greatly engage around the questions of imagination as capacity of an individual to imagine the otherwise, something that doesn't yet exist. And also the notion of "social imaginary."

I'm kind of touching upon a number of theories that look at "social imaginary" as something that is already given and conditioning us, you know, with possibilities and limits of what we can imagine as individuals.

I was, from the get-go, starting off with the "political imaginary" as distant, kind of more radical dimension within the "social imaginary," as where we collectively can kind of arrive at some sort of conversation and perhaps even conclusion of what kind of world we really want. That would probably qualify for "political imaginary."

I've struggled to define the difference between the social and political in our practice, specifically when it comes to art political praxis. We tend to use the social and the political nearly interchangeably, or at most we say "social and in political conditions."

But I came to believe that that kind of objective "social" is very often used to address the conditions that already exist. And with social artistic practices that we see in abundance around us, given the world in utter crisis—

I think a lot of those social practices of art, and I don't mean this pejoratively, on the contrary, but most of them, or a lot of those socially driven, socially engaged artistic practices, are kind of geared towards realizing the possibility of living under the current conditions. And I think the political wants to disrupt the current conditions and kind of fly towards something that is in excess of that which already exists.

So, "extraordinary," "otherwise," this would be terminology we've been using, and perhaps overusing at times, specifically the "otherwise."

And I think this is where "political imaginary" aims at kind of imagining other possibilities of the world. And not only just imagining collectively, which is a collective creative process, but also seeking pathways towards actualizing it, or living it, if you will, as if it were possible.

Asia Tsisar: Would you agree that the work of any contemporary art institution involves this concept of "political imaginaries," if not explicitly, then in some, let's say, maybe unpronounced way?

Maria Hlavajova: Such a complicated question. So maybe inadvertently, implicitly, you can find some traces of political imaginaries in all art institutions, but not all art institutions are created equal. Not all art institutions have the same agenda, mission, desire.

And I think specifically, if you wanted to use a very, very easy fault line between kind of market-oriented art institutions and art institutions that are oriented towards providing a space for political imaginaries to be invented and tested out, I think there is quite a dramatic division between these.

And when I talk about art institutions in the case I kind of devoted my practice to, I talk about public art institutions. And I think this is quite important. This is not to say that public art institutions cannot be devoted to political imaginaries, but I think if public institutions are devoted to making things public and being public—you know, publicness as a matter of existence, as a, if you will, service to society—then there necessarily will be some sort of a distinction.

Asia Tsisar: You give the distinction between public institutions and institutions which are oriented on the market, but I think what I want to highlight—and it’s a very probably overused phrase—is that everything is political. Also, of course, placing some artists on the art market and positioning them and creating this narrative around their work is also a political gesture.

One of my concerns is what happens to artists from marginalized communities, from vulnerable communities, from communities influenced by some tragic events like wars and so on. What happens to them when they are placed on the art market with this label—artists coming from a certain region—and it comes hand in hand with the political situation in this region? And then somehow I believe the interest in this art comes with the political interest in this region. This is an unplanned question.

Maria Hlavajova: No, I absolutely think it’s very important to debate this a little bit, and I’m not ever claiming I have some license to truth to this.

And also, when I draw that fault line, I did not mean to refuse what the art market does. So I’m not naive when it comes to, I don’t know, commercial galleries and their function in the ecosystem when it comes to sustaining the life of artists in very many cases. So this is not what I meant to say.

But kind of promoting radically political artists on the market, or artists from, as you said, vulnerable or marginalized communities, comes out of necessity because the system within which we live requires so. And so we talk about neoliberal capitalism. If we want to figure out a way to sustain an artist, we need to sell their work, etc., etc. So it operates within the logic of the existing system.

Now, I’m not trying to suggest that public institutions work against that logic, but in their obligation toward being public, they also actively search what other systemic possibilities there are. So not only support through the public grant system, for example, but also: can we collectively—and this is the political imaginary, I think—can we envision another way of being together? Another way of being together in a society where we would not be kind of thrown to the wolves or live at the mercy of the neoliberal art market, but could ourselves establish the ways of survival, liberty, and livable life in common, equitable conditions for everyone.

Now, this sounds extremely idealist, but that’s precisely the creative process that political imaginaries engage in: what are the possibilities? I mean, when speaking of political imaginaries, it’s complex. I often, together with my students, turn to the notion of visionary fiction, which is essentially the same pathway towards envisioning the world otherwise, if you will.

Something else than science fiction. I think science fiction is very much a Western creation—kind of man, you know, in a laboratory envisioning a better future. But perhaps going to other traditions. If science fiction asks, “What will the world be in the year, whatever, 3500?”

I believe visionary fiction asks the question, “How do we, complex we as it is, how do we want the world to be?” Of course, we could speak about that we. We can, for now, speak of people who gather together in a room because they want to invest in the pathway of this visionary fiction. But still, the question: what do we want the world to look like in the year 3500?

And when we together envision it, then comes a very important question: how do we assure that we get there? There are techniques, methods, you know, that could help us. Intergenerational feminist accountability as one, you know—going back through generations and asking, what do we need to do so that the generation after us can not only carry on with this impulse, but also live a livable life in common? Which is, at this moment, very difficult. One of the reasons for this is the neoliberal market as such, the art market being a part of it.

Asia Tsisar: We often say that there are political works of artists, but not that much we discuss political imaginaries of the work of an art institution. So, in my humble opinion, it involves, for example, how we diversify our attention, what we consider important.

Probably all those thoughts came to my mind with the beginning of the full-scale invasion—observing not only the response of the artistic community to what happened to Ukraine and then, suddenly, let’s say, the loss of interest in the issue, but also comparing it to the response, for example, to what happened to Palestine, and again, the willingness to support Palestine. And then… I think you got what I mean.

I’m not saying that all institutions were doing something wrong, but I’m just observing a very disturbing general trend in which the efforts of art institutions, of people in art, to try to imagine this better world and contribute to some meaningful changes are also dependent on media attention, on the general discourse about the topic, or any kind of problematic issue.

And we kind of divide our solidarity according to our likes and dislikes. Maybe this is very harsh wording of it, but I’m just curious—have you noticed the same, and do you have any thoughts on it?

Maria Hlavajova: Yeah, complex question again and many questions in one.

Asia Tsisar: Yeah, sorry.

Maria Hlavajova: No, I think it's good to try to detangle. Maybe from the very onset of this complex question you posed, you used the term political works by artists versus political work by artistic institutions. I just want to kind of clarify what I mean, what I understand under political work.

And I probably would go to the very, kind of, chronically known Godard statement, who said, I don’t make political films, I make films politically. And I think this is quite important to also distinguish in artistic practices by artists—so that a depiction of a particular political event, be it war, be it genocide, is not necessarily constituting a political work.

Very often, it's a mere representation of the tragedies of this world. And I’m not dismissing it as unimportant, but I’m always very cautious about artistic practices that reproduce the evils of the world. And those are works that very often sell well on the art market because they're easy, they're quick, they are supposedly political, and stuff like that.

And imaginary is something else. Imaginary is precisely, rather than this direct one-on-one critique where you depict the evils of the world and actually give them much larger space in the art world, what I’m interested in is looking at works and supporting or advancing works that are done politically. And they necessarily, rather than being in critique, include this imaginary of how things could be different.

So, in the vocabulary of moving away from merely depicting what’s happening, thinking how things are in the world, imagining how they could be otherwise, and then activating, enacting, or living that imaginary. There is a very important distinction between political work and work done politically. And I think this could also be applied to art institutions in that respect.

I never operated on the number of likes—not only as a person (I am not on social media and I don’t understand that logic at all). Of course, media attention is crucially important when you need to distribute certain important message or proposition. That’s absolutely crucial.

But I would like to propose that a lot of what we’ve been doing at BAK was essentially to create close, maybe safe space—although I know how this term safe space is being abused again by the neoliberal logic of capitalist societies within which we live. But sometimes it’s meaningful not to broadcast to the world and create a space for people where they can speak openly, without the presence of cameras and lights, in order to deliberate about not only what is necessary, but also what is possible.

And I think for BAK this has been hugely important and perhaps overwhelmingly the more interesting part of work: where we created an environment, or convened a possibility—not curate, you cannot curate that, it’s more convening, it’s kind of curating from below, if you will—creating circumstances, conditions for people to come together to deliberate. Whether they deliberate through talking, through drawing, through making, through envisioning, through performing, through dancing, what have you—but deliberate together about the possibility of being together.

And so the artists don’t necessarily have capacity to propose a plan of how to stop the conflict in Ukraine. I wish this was the case. As much as we’re powerless to the atrocities happening in Palestine or Sudan. But what artists and art practitioners that we have worked with at BAK can do is gather together and envision an infrastructure of the world that will be void of the fascisms we’re facing today, void of genocides and attacks and wars that we see today.

So, what would that world be is essentially the question. And when that kind of, again, political imaginary is brought to life—and why I think it’s political imaginary, because it’s not ordinary, it’s extraordinary, it’s otherwise, it’s different, it’s radically moving away from what we know, despite the world telling us this is not possible.

And then the most important thing is to socialize this knowledge, to socialize the proposition, to socialize the imaginary — to bring as many people on board as possible. This is where I think many art institutions fail quite dramatically. Even those institutions that genuinely want to change the world — and of course not all do, some are doing perfectly fine in this war-driven, fascist-infused neoliberal capitalism, making money and carrying on — but those that actually want to intervene on a systemic level are producing political imaginaries, and perhaps even ideologies. That’s a word no one likes to use nowadays, but still: ideologies that overlap with movements across the globe — social movements, anti-globalization movements, and many others.

This is where I see an underused potential: to communicate not just through social media, not by begging newspapers to cover a beautiful exhibition — because frankly, I don’t care about that — but by connecting with mass movements around the world that essentially want the same thing: another world. This is where art institutions truly committed to this mission need to push much further than we have so far. I’m not saying nothing has been done, but what’s required is a much deeper connection to the collective will to live in the world differently.

Asia Tsisar: It’s fascinating what you’re saying, and I really agree with it. But then there comes the question that, for example, BAK has been working on — that it is always tied to a very specific place. You are, in a way, dependent on that place: the city, the country, the context. So how do you then reach people worldwide? What are the possibilities for such communication if it isn’t through the usual channels we know today — social media, recorded conversations that are then broadcast, uploaded to YouTube, or shared on podcast platforms?

Maria Hlavajova: I absolutely agree with you. We are dependent on that which is killing us. This is the political dilemma that all institutions face. And I don’t mean art institutions only — but also the infrastructure of social media, which is itself an institutional space. We know it sustains us and kills us at the same time, and we have to learn to navigate that paradox.

On your comment about BAK being situated in specific contexts: I come from East-Central Europe, and my school of politics was the dissident culture of the 1970s and 1980s. That’s how I grew up. Little did I know when I moved to the Netherlands in the late 1990s that this dissident knowledge would turn out to be not only relevant, but crucial.

For the past 25 years, BAK benefited from that public funding — until recently, when both the city and the national arts council withdrew their support. But during those 25 years we were able to work on a range of political imaginaries in ways that were never confined to the local environment. I hesitate to use the word “network,” but there has emerged a complex planetary infrastructure of artists, art institutions, and social movements with whom we have collaborated.

Often we would invite people in, but just as often we would go out to other places. To a great extent, we at BAK pioneered something I called extituting. Of course, much of our work has circled around the idea of instituting otherwise—asking: how could we be a different kind of institution? We dedicated a lot of practical and theoretical research to this question of instituting otherwise. How can we, in the very process of becoming an institution, operate differently?

The idea of extituting otherwise was about sharing the resources we had. Of course, financial resources are one type, but there are many others: connections to practitioners who think, work, and believe in similar ways; time, space, attention. All of these constitute an ideological and emotional infrastructure.

For example, a long-term project we developed, Former West, unfolded over eight to ten years. It wasn’t just about connecting with other places, but also about endowing them with whatever resources we had—while also learning from their incredible resources of knowledge, time, space, and funding—so that they could work on the same subjects within their own situated environments.

This notion of extitution is particularly relevant now, as BAK has been defunded locally. But extitution is not something I invented; it is the result of a community of people connected to BAK. Together we have been shaping what I would call a planetary nodal system of places—planetary, rather than global, because “global” has been hijacked by neoliberal capitalism. These nodes are places that think and work in similar ways, allowing practitioners like us to find a home and collaborate with those communities.

In this sense, I imagine a new type of institution. Not a network in the traditional sense, but an extitution—a nodal infrastructure around the world, rooted in shared ways of thinking, imagining, and acting. It connects radical art practitioners on one side and social movements with similar ideas on the other. I believe this is where the real potential lies today: in distributing epistemologies, knowledges, and practices across such a planetary nodal system. And I do think this is already happening.

Asia Tsisar: You do?

Maria Hlavajova: I'm absolutely—I'm absolutely… what's the word? I don't want to perform an optimist. I'm not. I think I'm, to a great extent, a realist. But I've seen enormous pockets of possibility all around the world, despite the destruction we experience.

And perhaps a little note here—something I talk about maybe too much. I carried out a series of semester-long courses titled Neither Hope, Nor Despair. What is it that drives us in this time? Because I find hope a bit misleading—almost a near-religious kind of thing I remember from my distant childhood: you just hope and it will be all right. But it won’t be. And despair is equally debilitating. Despair is so heavy, it makes me immobile—unable to think, unable to move, unable to act.

So I was thinking through that course, together with my students: what is it that really drives me? Because I'm not an utter optimist. I'm not a hopefulist. I'm not a despairist.

And then I came across—maybe ten years ago, maybe six—an op-ed in The Guardian by the feminist thinker and writer Rebecca Solnit [1], where she talked about disillusionment as the most important category.

At first I thought: disillusionment? That's horrible. But when I read what she meant, I understood. She spoke of disillusionment in a positive sense—as letting go of illusions. It's like two feet on the ground, rolled up sleeves, and doing things. And I see this happening. So I embrace this notion of disillusionment in its positive sense.

I think it has real bearing for artistic practices. The twentieth century—especially its second half—was largely driven by this notion of illusion. Think of utopian projections about the future, the embrace of so-called progress, which was mainly a Western type of progress—a privileged avenue toward the future for very few, and the rest are whatever.

[25:50]

And I think that’s the difference between the second half of the twentieth century and the contemporary moment. Today we cannot afford to engage in these utopian illusions. We need to land on the ground and do the work—together with others.

Asia Tsisar: One of the previous guests I had on this podcast was Anna Miljanić [2], and she emphasized the importance of being connected to each other in a meaningful way—even in the most challenging situations.

That’s something she learned during the decade of the Balkan Wars. And you, with your background and your experience—when you go to another part of the world and use that knowledge to imagine something different—it resonates with me. Maybe I’m speaking very broadly, but it sparks a kind of hope, or perhaps disillusion, in my mind. Because of course, it’s impossible to simply read a book and learn the lessons, or to replicate solutions by just copy-pasting them into another situation.

But the idea of bringing experience from one challenging context and reinventing how to navigate another—that warms my heart a little. Because it feels like an answer to that desperate question: what can the experience of war be about, if it’s not only about war itself?

How can we overcome the stigma of a tragic experience? That’s really all I wanted to share—it’s just a very warm comment.

Maria Hlavajova: Yeah, you know, wars… how to say?.. I get a bit of a speechless moment each time. And also the fact that where I sit, where I live, you know, we're so complicit with the fact that there's no more active invention of how to stop these tragic, tragic circumstances. It's really...

But what do you say about bringing kind of lived experience, bodily experience with you, something you cannot learn otherwise but by living it in a way… from then-communist Czechoslovakia, which was under occupation, of course, of the Russian army from 1968 till 1989, perhaps 1990, was first kind of refused locally, like, "we don't need this here, we're fine with democracy," you know.

And perhaps to a great extent, when I moved here in 1999, there were still remnants of what you could call social democracy. And I kind of very colloquially used to tell specifically my students that also democracy and capitalism were something else under the Cold War conditions, because that competition between two systems—which we refer offhandedly as communism and democracy, while we should refer to it as communism versus capitalism.

So I believe because there was this competition, I think even democracy and capitalism looked a bit better, if that can be said of that version of capitalism as something good, of course.

But as 1989 was the dismissal of whatever Cold War, which, of course, we're back into, you know, up to our teeth. But the notion of democracy in the West started to degrade dramatically in that respect. The features of fascism started to take over slowly, like that proverbial frog in boiling water. When we at BAK started to talk about political imaginaries and the notion of fascism, we were continuously called hysterical by the media in that respect.

So what I tried to say is that for a long while it was, A, absolutely refused. I'm not saying that it's ever been embraced in the Netherlands, but it was possible, unlike now. But also, I didn't really understand how to use that experience from the late 70s, early 80s of the dissident Charter 77 [3] in a way.

But, you know, if you read some of the literature of Charter 77, specifically the publication by Václav Benda [4] from 1978 called Parallel Polis [5], it starts with the fact that it doesn't make sense—or it's impossible—to negotiate with the power that be; that would be a suicidal effort to try to negotiate with the so-called communist government at the time. So the only way was to exit from that kind of framework and create your own framework.

And I think this also indirectly echoes one of your questions as to how come art institutions just don't respond to every challenge actively enough so that it echoes directly towards concrete challenge. Because we would have to just respond all our lives. How many challenges a day arrive at our desk that you need to sign a petition, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

[30:53]

And it's exhausting. And it's part of the strategy—if I can call it a strategy of the system. It just wants to exhaust you so you're not capable of anything else. And so this proposition of Parallel Polis is to desert that culture war. By the way, a title of one of our readers, by Sven Lütticken [6]. Desert it. Go out of this frame in which they push you. Go out of it and create your own frame.

This is not escaping your responsibility. On the contrary, because within your own frame, you are in charge of your priorities. So rather than just in continuous response and resistance, you're going to posit what you need to do with others and perhaps, rather than be in resistance, be in re-existence. This is one of the terms I borrow from an artist, Albán Achinte [7]. Instead of resistance, we need to move towards re-existence—re-existence, exist differently.

And so within this Parallel Polis, it was like, you know what, we're going to train our skills. We're going to create our communities. So one day we will be ready. So we will not have to be reinventing the wheel. We're going to have it all.

And if you look at Parallel Polis, like we are very lyrical about, I don't know, the Prague rock scene in the 1980s. And we think, wow, this underground music scene—it was amazing. And it was amazing, but it was a result of the work of this minister of culture of this Parallel Polis.

Or take education. You could not go to university and learn meaningful knowledge at the time. So what would they create? They would create this living room university, and that would operate actually in instituted form. I have that word—or created that word—with this academy, because you couldn't create a classroom and go for it. You would just go with two or three people to a private apartment. You would first check that there were no surveillance devices installed anywhere. And then, with your very minimal skills of German, French, or English, you would try to decipher all those thinkers we couldn't read. And then the next day, you would go to another apartment in another constellation of three people and do again the same. And so these were these cells—small cells, but extremely agile and operating, and many.

And I think this is what we need to do now. And we need to train for the not yet. This is another title I'm speaking without intention in titles of BAK projects, but it was a project together with artist Jeanne van Heeswijk [8]. Trainings for the Not Yet, so that we train each other in the knowledges that we will need one day in order to live a livable life in common, so that one day we are ready. We don't need to start from scratch.

And this Parallel Polis for me is a school of politics that I came of age with, because it taught me these techniques of just persevering in learning. It's perseverance in learning. And then I don't mean only reciting philosophical work, which is also important, but also learning in creating these particular networks; in learning how to support people who lose jobs because of the circumstances, who are in exile because of the circumstances, whose family members are killed because of the circumstances, et cetera, et cetera. So it's the caring network—not only committing to one another, but also committing to a possibility of another future, but then without illusions.

Asia Tsisar: I'm laughing because I can give you a very, very personal example of how that worked. What you are describing, this celling with me and BAK, because the first time in my life, I visited Utrecht this spring, and the building was already closed, unfortunately. But for a good number of years, I was hunting for your publications. And I have a library here in Ukraine of your publications. I would buy them in any, you know, art institution around the world where I was able to find them. And it's impossible to find them in Ukraine.

And this is just a very, very funny example: you would buy all these books, then you kind of come back home with a bag full of books, and then you just read them all, give them to your friends, and make them circulate around, because this seemed like some kind of, you know, insight into the other world—not kind of knowledge, but the imaginaries that were impossible to imagine until you just read about this in the book, about something which has already happened. For example, I have now in mind this publication of New World Academy [9], if I'm not mistaken, about We Are Here or Pirate Parties or…

Maria Hlavajova: The Kurdish women movement, for example.

Asia Tsisar: Exactly.

Maria Hlavajova: It's very moving to hear this, Asia. And I want to say one thing: although I am gone from BAK, I'm really happy that BAK is going to continue, because a number of artists kind of took over and will carry on with an artist-led initiative called Basecamp for Tactical Imaginaries. So it's literally—they occupy that building, which is very important for the gathering of people. And you see, again, this terminology of tactical imaginaries is quite crucial. And I think tactical imaginaries are those imaginaries that are scalable into life.

We have a lot of imaginaries in our field, a lot of extraordinary thinkers, but how do we scale this into life is really quite important. That word tactical is about that: how do we bring it into the texture of life so that, you know, they can take us toward a better life despite, or in spite of, everything.

Asia Tsisar: But also I have probably this critical observation from my colleagues, and they would say, kind of responding to what you said before, that art institutions are kind of exclusive places. So most ordinary people don't think that they are, you know, welcome there, that this is the place for them to be.

But, for example, in the situation of displaced people, a lot of extraordinary and truly meaningful opportunities were provided for them by art institutions. So, for example, they didn't find the possibility to communicate with people or to, let's say, adjust in society with the help of social services, but art institutions were providing such things for them.

So, one part of the question is about this potential exclusiveness of art institutions, and the other thing is that probably a lot of my colleagues would mention, in this context, how long do we need to rely on, let's say, NGOs, ordinary people—it’s not like it's our job to do these things.

This over-reliance on civil society, on actors of art communities, can lead to burnout, because with a lot of ideas and cool things that you are able to do, until it's institutionalized and supported by governments, it wouldn't work in the long run.

Maria Hlavajova: Yeah, thank you. This is an extremely important critical response. Of course, artistic practices are very often seen as elite, and very often they are. And I think this goes back to what I said: although we very actively connected to a variety of social movements and social organizations, we, like many other institutions, could do more.

But, you know, BAK has had kind of three important elements, and of course you would think about art, you would think about theory, and you could think about—and this is very difficult to name—we refer to it as social action. Because the moment you call it social movements and you call it activism, you might also fall out of the funding system, because you're supporting a political movement or what have you. So you need to navigate an extremely complex minefield in that respect.

So if your work is too political, why would you receive public art funding? You know, and we had this argument from everywhere: from left, right, top, down. But those arguments that we are too political and too theoretical were distributed in equal measure, and they are contrasting one another, right? Because one says you're working too much within the realm of politics; the other says you work too much in the realm of theory. And we try to keep these three kind of feats constantly on the ground: the artistic, the theoretical, and what we call social action—but you could call it a field of social imaginary.

So maybe you received the messages, contents, or knowledges of BAK through books, so mostly that theoretical thing.

And I dare to say the critique who say that there have never been ordinary people at BAK, never been there, is wrong, because we even had a department called Community Portal, which ran a community kitchen, which was, you know, organizing a variety of gatherings with a variety of communities. That's continuously there.

But, you know, I remember kind of a semi-conflict with the local arts council, because during COVID lockdowns, we were running a community kitchen, the Basic Activist Kitchen.

By the way, if you listen well, the Basic Activist Kitchen, they use the abbreviation—the BAK: Basic Activist Kitchen. The BAK saying: we are the real BAK, not that kind of thing. We, the kitchen, are the core, the heart. So it says a lot. And I think if you have the yellow book Towards Not Yet: Art as Public Practice, I think that's one publication that tries to name it. But the moment they try to capture this social, social, mobile, kind of vivid, liquid environment in a publication, it becomes a publication, right?

But back to the kind of feud I had with the local arts council: where we offered lunches for people who had no access to food services during the COVID lockdown, they were like, “Yeah, but you don't advertise, you don't put pictures online,” and you go like, “Who are you people? Do you want me to build my social-political capital by photographing people who have no access to food as they're receiving sandwiches from BAK?” Never, ever will I do that. So that activity, which was extremely actively happening in the basis voor actuele kunst, in the base of BAK, is really not material for public relations, you know.

But this connects me to that other thing: when I mentioned Basic Activist Kitchen making lunches during the COVID lockdown, it’s, again, an art institution taking up the task that the city, the borough, or the government failed to do.

And I think you're absolutely right there. And this kind of circles back to my misgiving about the notion of the social, because this is where we try to maintain this whole idea of care: that we just care for that which is being forgotten within society, and very often exploit and exhaust all the energy there is for doing this.

So there's no space for political imaginaries. And I think it's, again, part of the strategy—how to keep us to the ground, how to keep us kind of not dreaming and acting out a better world, but kind of just trying to hassle our way to survive within the current circumstances.

And yet I want to insist that art institutions must, in spite of this crisis, engage and prioritize political imaginaries. Otherwise, we do not get out of this extraordinarily complex moment in any direction. And, of course, I fear a kind of bounce back towards fascism and other sorts of totalitarianisms that are just ready to take all the living space. And we must disallow that. We must stop it on the tracks. But naming it continuously and screaming it to the world: “This is fascism,” by imagining ways of living non-fascist lives and living them. So enacting, materializing this imaginary is not just dreaming—remember, doing it. Absolutely sure this is possible.

Asia Tsisar: I completely agree with you, but I can imagine that there will be people who would say, “Okay, I really want to do it.” But there is this fear of, let's say, long-term commitment, because if you take the responsibility for a certain community or for certain people, it's a long-term responsibility. And in a lot of solidarity practices that are there in the art field, we are operating on a project basis. So we have the funding for the project. You basically put people who you want to take care of in this very unstable position: when you offer them a hand, and then in a couple of months you say, “Okay, we are out of funding, the project has ended.”

So I'm just curious how you manage this situation in BAK, and in general.

Maria Hlavajova: Yeah, I fully agree. The logic of projects or project logic is really extremely complex, extremely exhausting. We're always grateful for any money we receive for a project, but indeed we need long-term possibility.

I mean, had we talked a year ago together in this situation, I probably would have a different narrative than now because after 25 years we got fully defunded.

We started 25 years ago from a zero and operated a couple of million a year, actually, in the last couple of years. These were funds that were there to convene possibilities for others to think through the fellowship program, produce artworks through the art commissions, exhibit, etc.

So for me, this insistence on public funding has been really, really crucial. And I always knew it doesn't come just like that. We quite programmatically engaged in, how would you call it, in building circumstances and supporting the circumstances within which the long-term support of this sort of practices would be possible.

And that's why I say a year ago I would tell a different story because we were in the middle of that and now we lost that possibility. But I think engagement in the political work of creating infrastructures within which this work is possible is really important. And then very often you would need to work within the circumstances that you actually fight against.

Take Slovakia, extreme, extreme circumstances, you know, against any kind of progressive possibility of working within the art field. So I use Slovakia. I cannot speak to many other situations, but Slovakia is where I come from and I intensely follow that situation.

So how do you do this within the circumstances where it seems impossible or conditions against which you really need to work? So I think this is where we need to learn other pragmatics of political work within the field to sustain the possibility of long-term operation. And then it comes back to kind of fighting for another society on a long term and no competition as the capitalism wants us, but cooperation, sharing positions with two, three people so that we share the basic income with one another, creating cultures of solidarity to the extent possible.

I don't have a blueprint. Every condition is very different. And what I have tried for the last 25 years, operate within the conditions where this still was possible, but kind of see how we can convene not just for the locals, but for particular ideas of searching for another world.

I'm afraid I don't have any better answer than this. But I think in this time in history, we need to relearn resilience. Resilience from those who are in extreme circumstances, such as circumstance of war, and just try to understand that solidarity is not just a word, but a practice and a way of living.