Unsettling Political Economies: Instituting, Blurring, and Monstrous Space-Making

This article begins with an anecdote.

The first time I encountered the term “political economy” was as a senior in high school in Greece. Political economy, understood as the study of how the economy shapes politics and how politics affects the economy, was one of the key subjects, along with sociology, math, and essay writing, in one of the four strands that students could choose in their final year as pathways to university. The four strands were broadly defined as follows: (1) engineering and science, (2) medical studies, (3) law and humanities, and (4) economics and sociology—this fourth one was considered the least demanding and, thus, the least ambitious.

The political economy of the public and private school system in Greece at the time revolved around frontistiria (a word that translates to “care centers” but actually refers to private preparatory schools). These private educational centers prepared students for the final university entrance exams, which took place after high school graduation. The vast majority of students between the ages of fourteen and eighteen enrolled in these centers. Students attended frontistiria after school on a daily basis, as well as during holidays and summer breaks, for a minimum of two to five years, depending on ability, commitment, and financial circumstances. A whole economy of teachers and university candidates as customers, developed for decades as a necessary parallel to the public, free educational system. This para-educational system served the interests of both over-competitive parents and private agents that developed such centers, creating a market that flourished during these years, gradually affecting the public educational system.

I was firm in my decision to pursue the arts in practice, a study that at the time was not available within the university system. Despite my parents’ disappointment—that a good student like me would “go to waste” and live a life of starvation—the rebellious seventeen-year-old me was not going to give in. So, I refused to be part of this economy. I never went to frontistiria, but this freedom soon backfired. I was missing out on social life: my classmates’ lives were structured around the schedules of these centers, and I could never shake off a sense of awkwardness and guilt every time someone asked me about my future plans. And, nevertheless, to graduate with a high school diploma, I had to choose one of the four strands. I chose the fourth: economics and sociology, which included the study of political economy.

The majority of public-school teachers—most of whom were permanent public servants—during my school years were rather bored and uninspired. Probably underpaid, and faced with classrooms full of students who had already studied the subject and memorized the material at frontistiria, they were not very motivated to engage in teaching. At the final written exam for high school graduation (prior to the university entrance exams) on political economy, I found myself rather puzzled. I seemed unable to answer one of the three questions although I had studied all the material. No matter how much I struggled to answer it using my notes and by trying to recall the material I had studied, I could not answer it. I handed in my exam sheet incomplete.

Later, I discovered that this question referred to a part of the book we had not yet covered in class—so it was not part of the material we were supposed to be examined on. I had no idea what happened—maybe our teacher copied last year’s exam topics, or maybe she forgot how far we had progressed that year. I consequently did not perform well in political economy. As the only student in my class who did not attend frontistiria, I could not really form alliances to appeal the situation. My consistent annual grades balanced out the poor result in the final test, and I graduated with an okay grade in political economy, along with my other subjects. I did not perform as well as I could have, but what I intimately experienced back then was that it is hard to escape a system and its economies.

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The term “political economy” derives from the Greek words polis, meaning “city” or “state,” and oikonomia, meaning “the laws/rules of the house.” It refers to the field that examines how the rules of the house (its economics) affect the city (or the state) and vice versa. In recent years in Greece, lessons of political economy in relation to the urban fabric of the city became embodied during the years of the economic crisis (from 2010—2017). During these years, interrelations between the dismantling of social frameworks, austerity measures, laws, and governmentality gave rise to new fields of action and participation in the city. Cultural workers and citizens engaged directly with the political and economic conditions—giving rise to multiple grassroots forms ranging from social structures and support networks to cultural centers. Such practices refused or failed to be translated into stable, sustainable economic structures; yet they offered ways to rethink societal arrangements in practice, forming new political ecologies in between sedimented practices, institutions, policies, and the market. Although such practices marked the city, they did not manage to affect larger political economies after the debt referendum of 2015. This paradox—where ephemeral grassroots practices hold the potential to unsettle or even subvert political economies yet remain hindered by the immobility of dominant structures—continued to haunt and shape the political potentialities of that period and the present. 

In this article, I explore the possibilities of unsettling or experimenting with political economies, inhabiting this inherent tension between transformative instances and larger systems by focusing on the history of a cultural space in Athens: EIGHT Cultural Institute for Arts and Politics. This space was founded in 2019 and aimed to continue a number of emergent, large-scale cultural and political experiments that took place during the years of the economic crisis, transforming the cultural landscape, and nevertheless remained discontinuous. I will revisit “instituting,” “blurring,” and what I have elsewhere called “militant curating”¹ as specific practices that, although emerged during the years of crisis, are still relevant for space-making today. Here, instituting and modes of militant curating are discussed as “monstrous,” shared space-making practices that create their own political economies and reverse existing modes of operation. Following practices of militant curating, EIGHT also sought to test the possibilities of building continuity by maintaining a physical space in the center of Athens and thus experimenting and engaging with durable politics and economies. 

As a founding member and curator at EIGHT, my perspective is shaped by direct engagement with and reflection on such practices. Acknowledging that this account is both analytical and participatory, hopefully enriches but at times also complicates critical distance. 

Instituting

In my edited book Instituting: Space-Making, Refusal, and Organising in the Arts and Beyond (2022),² I proposed “instituting” as a potentially critical methodology in curating, art-making, and organizing—a process that generates forms and structures without necessarily establishing stable laws and modes of operation. Instituting, as I define it, refers to the practice of creating curatorial, artistic, and political forms both within and beyond institutions, while simultaneously refusing institutionalization and structuralization. Instituting, as I propose it, is differentiated from institutionalizing as it is a practice that refuses structuralization while at the same time engages critically in the making of new forms inside and outside institutional frameworks. These forms are responsive, relational, and open-ended, and in some cases question existing social frameworks and strictures while in others attempt to create new social ecologies. 

Kike España and Gerald Raunig, in their contribution to this same book, revisit the influential concept of “instituent practices”³ and explore its affinities with constituent power. They argue that every act of composition carries within it a moment of instituting—one that has a specific duration and ecology. This stands in contrast to the dominance of the project-based or non-situated artistic practices that characterize much of today’s cultural landscape.

This situatedness of artistic practice appears crucial in its relationship to political economies, legal frameworks, and the market. Instituting, then, can be understood as a situated practice, as a mode of time-based negotiation with political economies: one that entails interplay, disruption, and the possibility of doing otherwise. It becomes a continuous, improvisational practice that occasionally, in constellation with other forces, manifests in a visible form.

Theorizing instituting as a practice emerged in close relation to my experiences in Athens during the years of the economic crisis. As noted already, during these years multiple improvised, temporary, shared social structures appeared, offering alternative ways of organizing life and resources. People engaged in reimagining and remaking pre-given social forms and sought to reconstitute the very fabric of society. One such development was the emergence of the so-called solidarity economy⁴—a term that describes a set of alternative grassroots economic practices that, crucially, functioned and persisted even outside dominant economic logics.

These experiments can be understood as proto-institutional forms, and simultaneously as acts of institutional critique. They were not fixed structures, but rather, situated acts of reconfiguration, continually in dialogue with their socio-political context. Crucially, they operated in critical relation to what I call de-instituting: locating through dislocating, making and unmaking, composing and decomposing, inhabiting and fleeing, refusing and investing.

Instituting can emerge from practices I have described as “militant curating”⁵—a mode of working that engages with critical discourses already present in a specific landscape, making them visible through specific aesthetic, social, and spatial forms. Militant here points towards an engagement with urgency and relation to the politics of the here and now and its critical discourses rather than combative positioning. Rather than imposing a theme or coherence, militant curating foregrounds emergent structures that bring together diverse existing discourses in the city, creating shared constellations. Against smooth art spaces and publics, this practice develops through awkward, uncanny, and often inoperative conditions of doing and being with others in emergent and vulnerable social spaces. These practices are situated, plural, and ongoing—constituted through collective processes that unsettle dominant narratives while proposing alternative ways of being together. In this sense, militant curating does not simply reflect political realities but actively reconfigures the material and affective environment, opening up space for collective imaginaries. As Butler reminds us, the opposite of precarity is not security but “the struggle for an egalitarian social and political order in which a livable interdependency becomes possible.”⁶ It is precisely through the production of these unfinished, monstrous, and awkward publics that militant curating places a claim in public, challenging romanticized notions of cooperation and distinguishing itself from more instrumental approaches to the social and political turn in the arts.

España and Raunig argue that the crisis we have experienced in recent years is a multi-faceted one that includes “a crisis of institutions and most of all a crisis of subjectivation.”⁷ They suggest that “institutional critique just does not suffice, if it is fixated on the institution or even on a mere takeover of the institution,” because, as they argue, “providing new content, but keeping the institutional form would not be enough.”⁸ Experimentation with form is what was achieved by practices of militant curating—which emerged during the years of the economic crisis—both by grassroots large-scale spatial interventions such as the activation of Embros Theatre (2011) and Green Park (2015), as well as by ensuing practices such as EIGHT Cultural Institute for Arts and Politics that I will discuss in the following section. What happens though to such emergent practices of militant curating and instituting that seek to experiment with, and at times refuse or unsettle, existing practices and economies when they persist in time? How might they find ways to negotiate with durable politics and sedimented practices, and with other economies of the city? How might they structurally affect the cultural and political landscape?

Blurring

EIGHT Cultural Institute for Arts and Politics is a collective space in the center of Athens, founded in 2019 as an attempt to continue emergent militant practices of curating and performance that had emerged during the years of crisis in the city. “It appeared eight years after the beginning of the Greek economic crisis, which produced radical transformations in social and cultural frameworks alongside a range of public mobilizations. These included cultural and political experiments and occupations, activist and direct interventions, DIY contexts and spaces, and public programmes such as the occupations of Embros Theatre (2011) and Green Park (2015). After such experiments, and in a different socio-political landscape, the space of EIGHT attempted to explore the possibilities of continuity through ongoing situations of study and intervention. It is located at number 8 of Polytechniou Street, opposite the Polytechnic University of Athens—the site of the biggest student uprising in Greece in 1973 against the military junta—and next to a building that once hosted one of the oldest cultural occupations in the city of Athens in the 1980s. Bringing together forms of artistic, political, and theoretical production, urban research, and social action, the space aimed to explore how a critical intervention might operate in an ever-changing precarious landscape by investigating forms of continuity and instituting. EIGHT sought to explore how practices of militant curating might give rise to instances of instituting—as a new space that remains unexpected and unpredictable.

During the last six years, EIGHT has produced and curated exhibitions and public programs, as well as workshops and laboratories, lectures, performances, and social gatherings, while also hosting myriad activities. For example, a residency program titled “City at EIGHT” offered new ways to engage with existing discourses in Athens, while also presenting new works to local audiences. Annual exhibitions and public programs following practices of militant curating reflected on critical discourses and emerging issues in the city. Screenings, queer archives, parties, feminist hack meetings, regular talks, lectures, symposia, and discussions took place—organized both by the collective that founded the space as well as many others—keeping the space fluid and unexpected.

The space itself changes its configuration regularly to host different activities: from performances to parties, and from discussions to visual arts exhibitions—accommodating widely different audiences and scales. The collective has sought to continue to explore what an intervention in the here and now might look like. Thus, apart from exploring artistic forms and methods, it has also directly engaged with, supported, or initiated modes of political organizing and responses to urgent issues.

Continuing a tradition of free activities for audiences and also of spaces as open platforms for makers, curators, and groups to meet, work, or present, the space attempted over these years to negotiate between macro- and micro-economies—maintain the space open-endedly while also facing the necessary economies of a rented space. The space has operated without any formal structural support, relying solely on project-based funding for exhibitions. Participants and events that take place are hosted without a designated contribution fee, and on a pay-what-you-can basis. Dependent on ability and generosity, this economic fluidity appeared at times functional and at others not. The continuation of the space has been made possible through unpaid work by members of the EIGHT collective in other projects. Defined by the limits of the bodies that make it possible, the activities of the space invited participants to organize their own activities with some support. Navigating between intentions and necessities, such discussions, as well as the continuity of the space, appear as ongoing and incomplete processes. 

Seeking to create a shared space that remains unpredictable and resists structuralization and institutionalization, in a continuous process of instituting EIGHT has blurred the boundaries between artistic and social space, continuity and visibility, belonging and being shared, openness and form. Experimenting, and thus unsettling—or unsettling and thus experimenting—as a questioning of personal and collective methods and sedimented practices, can also create blurred interplays between different social forms and categories. It is in this context that Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s idea of the “blurred form” becomes especially resonant. Harney and Moten write that the blurred form suggests “something in excess, a refusal to be straightened, a syncopation in the rhythm that kills, a collapse of our ordering in spacetime, of the linearity of space and time itself.”⁹ This refusal to be straightened resonates with the activities of EIGHT, which continually resisted fixed forms, prescribed roles, and linear trajectories. Instead, the space has operated within a blurred temporality and sociality—one that has always been “forming but never completing.”¹⁰ Rather than operating within institutional norms or market-driven logics, EIGHT has enacted a syncopated rhythm—one shaped by improvisation, contingency, and shared collective urgencies. Through its co-existence of exhibitions, organizing, screenings, talks, and performances, EIGHT has put into practice precisely this refusal to be “straightened” into a singular mode of cultural production. It refused to separate the cultural from the political, the aesthetic from the social. In doing so, it has embodied a space that has always been forming but never completing—open-ended, and insistently present. The space continues an open-ended experiment that insists on form without closure. Not a lack of form, but a refusal to settle into recognizable categories or fixed functions. 

Monstrous Space-Making

As the space was about to open in March 2019—just before the pandemic and a few years after the radical experiments of the crisis—the first new funding schemes began to emerge from the Ministry of Culture. The first-ever exhibition at EIGHT had the title “City in Pieces.”¹¹ It sought to bring into the space numerous existing artworks that took place in different contexts and spaces in the city over the last few decades. The artists were invited to present an existing artwork that had been previously presented to the public during the previous years. Including the artwork’s initial context and situation, the work was inserted into a new constellation, making new relations with other artworks. Together, these artworks and their stories formed an uncanny mapping of Athens over the last decade. In their new constellation, they formed new relations. Working with the restrictions of limited resources and lack of funding, this exhibition became viable as artists did not have to produce a new artwork altogether. At the same time, challenging the contemporary demands of artistic production that constantly seek the new and the innovative, “City in Pieces” explored past works that took place in diverse environments, conditions, and moments.

While this exhibition was in the making and the space was still under renovation, an open competition for the directorship of the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST) by the Minister of Culture, Myrsini Zorba, was introduced for the first time. This unprecedented move triggered diverse reactions across the cultural field. Until that moment, the dominant model in Greece had been one of direct political appointments: artistic directors of major public institutions such as the National Theatre and the Hellenic Festival were selected by the Minister of Culture without public process. The open call for the EMST directorship thus marked a potential shift. Zorba, in her article “Conceptualizing Greek cultural policy: the non‐democratization of public culture” (2009) argued that establishing “a cultural democracy” was of critical importance in Greece’s cultural landscape. As she wrote, the “democracy dimension is even more important for a cultural policy that aspires to contribute to the redistribution of the cultural capital in a more just way, affirming meaning and communication in the public sphere, and serving the public interest.”¹² 

As Minister of Culture Zorba appeared to attempt to implement such democratic processes in public appointments, but this approach faced significant opposition at the time. After the initial round of applications, the position remained unfilled, and a petition emerged from candidates and cultural workers criticizing shortcomings in the evaluation process, gathering signatures from the international art scene to highlight perceived procedural failures. 

EIGHT, still without an identity or even a fully functioning space, responded to the ongoing discussions and public disagreements by initiating a series of public events and discussions under the title: “On Public Processes: Institutional Models and Paradigm Shifts.”¹³ These discussions brought together cultural workers from various fields to examine organizational models for public institutions and ways to improve processes in the contemporary Greek cultural landscape. The public discussion included a wide range of participants: independent cultural workers, critics, artists, and institutional representatives—including the Minister of Culture herself. It was perhaps one of the few instances where an unaligned, self-organized space brought together different agents from the landscape in dialogue—intervening in political economies and redistributing the dynamics of power and participation. Nearly ten years earlier, the Mavili Collective—a spontaneous group of theatre makers and theorists who had later initiated the activation of Embros Theatre in 2011 and other actions—had sent a public letter, countersigned by 600 artists and educators, to then-Minister of Culture Pavlos Geroulanos, demanding a coherent cultural policy for Greece. Following this, Mavili organized public debates, conferences, and produced texts addressing cultural policies seeking to create a space for dialogue between the state and policymakers and agents of contemporary cultural production.¹⁴

On the initial day of the event for “On Public Processes,” the main room of EIGHT was filled with cultural workers, artists, institutional representatives, critics, and others. The discussion opened with a presentation by EIGHT seeking to establish a space for dialogue and asking: 

How do landscapes and procedures gradually transform? Is it always easier to react to a changing model rather than a sedimented one? What are the appropriate processes for artistic institutions? . . . How can cultural workers take part in processes, institutions, actions that form the cultural landscape? Should public art institutions operate with different procedures than those that are applied across other State structures? What is the relation between quantifiable and non-quantifiable criteria? . . . These are some of the many questions that we seek to address in this opening discussion while we are aware that public debates and dialogues need time and participation. Thus, we hope this initiative will continue to carry critical questions and produce in the next period a series of debates and texts that refuse an objective outside position but rather propose models and practices from within the specific strictures and conditions of the Greek cultural landscape.¹⁵

The discussion progressed with contributions by the invited participants: Anestis Azas (theatre director and artistic director of the Experimental Stage of National Theatre), Yiannis Constantinidis (art critic), Alexandros Mistriotis (artist), Despina Zefkili (art critic and managing editor of Athinorama magazine), and the Minister of Culture, Myrsini Zorba—followed by an open discussion with the audience. As the conversation developed, tensions arose concerning the legitimacy of institutional interventions and the openness of processes, with some participants viewing them as disruptive and others as necessary. The exchange revealed not only divergent visions but also how structural changes can be inherently challenging.

Self-evident transformations—such as the expectation that an open and democratic process would be embraced by the artistic community, particularly by small-scale agents not connected to governmental alliances or political power—elicited differing opinions. Some argued that certain qualities cannot be evaluated through standardized procedures, while others insisted on the importance of ongoing, inclusive cultural policies—a longstanding demand in Greece. A blurred, shared space that belonged to no one was created—a space that was both fruitful and uneasy. The discussion concluded without consensus, and a second series of public debates was announced. These took place in subsequent weeks, forming working groups and agendas with less participation, while during the same period the exhibition “City in Pieces” was being installed. Both the discussions and the exhibition raised similar questions, challenging easy answers regarding functional and potential relations between artistic practice and material infrastructures and how changing conditions define artistic practice in Athens. 

España and Raunig offer tools for unpacking the complicit role of cultural spaces and offer the term “monstrous complicity” to discuss ways to work through and beyond constraints. Monstrous complicity, as they define it, is a complicity that is always incomplete, generating something new by embracing the “ongoing turbulence, the everyday and every night emergence of the monster in everything.”¹⁶ España and Raunig argue that such forms of monstrous complicity demand that we, as cultural workers or organizers of such cultural spaces, do not return to the calm after the storm, to homogeneity after disruption, to a new order after unsettling—offering a possibility of a blurred positionally. On that day, as different agents and positions co-existed, the monster appeared between such positions in this space in the making. And the monster could not go back to the norm after the storm. The monster did not seek a resolution but to make evident the incompatibility of different positions as another monster in the room. Is it possible that the majority of cultural workers—many of whom often find themselves in smooth cultural spaces—live in a monstrous public? Monstrous complicity as a way to both relate to existing structures and unsettle them seems a possible method, yet not a comfortable situation. Ongoing storms break buildings, houses, and cities, but can we stay with such forces without returning to the calm? What forms of cultural production might this entail? Despite these attempts, shortly after these discussions, a governmental shift occurred, with a new Minister of Culture appointing a director for the Museum of Contemporary Art following the old model.

EIGHT, on the other hand, through such instances and numerous other actions repeatedly blurred the limits of the art space, categorizations, and expectations, and gave rise to instances of monstrous complicity. At times, it functioned as this critical middle that unsettled and allowed the monster to perform. Whether by bringing artworks from different contexts, creating a space that brings together unexpected agents or hosting different forms and desires, EIGHT experimented with durable politics and economies, and established a site that for seven years remained unpredictable and emerging; instituting through blurring, space-making through modes of militant curating, allowing the monster to appear at times in the here and now, in and out of storms of sorts. How might such monstrous space-making affect the landscape? Today, EIGHT remains in the same building, constantly precarious, resisting the touristification and commodification of Athens and its cultural industries. It is not a position that can be maintained from a place of powerlessness for long, as new capital flows and hegemonic urban forces seek to take over and rewrite the city. And yet, as these powers advance, other monstrous instances and spaces will emerge—or so we hope.

Reversing Political Economies? 

Instituting, blurring, and monstrosity are not separate phases or frameworks but overlapping strategies of becoming with a landscape. EIGHT operates till today through a continuous movement across existing practices in the landscape. The monstrous, here, is not a metaphor but a method—a figure of excess, refusal, and potential. It allows for modes of instituting that remain open-ended, refuse to stabilize, and resist recuperation. In this sense, monstrous space-making becomes both a political stance and a strategy: a way to engage with instituting and the necessity of an infrastructure, creating the conditions for shared space-making that is precarious and unexpected yet situated.

Such monstrous space-making can intervene in political economies and offer curatorial methods and spaces that foreground improvisation, responsiveness, and relation with the landscape. The question, however, remains: can such monstrous space-making continue through bodies and spaces to unsettle political economies of the landscape? While EIGHT’s practices exemplify the potential of monstrous space-making, they also reveal the persistent limitations of such strategies. Perhaps, though, the monstrous space-making, militant curating, and instituting do not insist on fixing the form, and thus accept that landscapes are formed by multiple forces. Perhaps to stay with the monster and not go back to the calm refers to staying with the problem, the insistent practice of making such instances and spaces that propose different logics of being together, dialogue, and artistic practice as a way of resistance; a reality where the desire is not to simply change the landscape and its shortcomings but by finding new ways to unsettle what is there and produce new relations in the here and now.In the opening anecdote, escaping political economies seemed impossible. Back then, the refusal to engage with existing economies was shaped by the very conditions I sought to resist. Through examples like EIGHT, perhaps intervening can be seen as instances of reconfiguration. Turbulent moments in the middle of things that allow the monster to appear. Thus, perhaps, spaces like EIGHT offer a performative response to political economy. Modes of doing that play with expectations and can affect the ways systems work. Such interventions might not be able to translate into stable structures but can continue as figurative instances that form constellations of doing otherwise. In their making, they highlight potential gaps, fractures, and breaks of systems and economies, opening new places to inhabit—physically and metaphorically. Sites of questioning that open up new ways in which artistic practices might re-pose or respond to them To reverse political economies, then, is not to step outside them, but to continuously seek to intervene in them and in sedimented practices—to perform and deform them, to work with temporary cracks through which new forms might emerge. In this open-endedness lies the political force of instituting otherwise—not a model to replicate, but a rhythm to inhabit against and with the political strictures and economies of our times.