This article explores the ways in which emergent cultural space-making practices—particularly practices of “instituting,” “blurring,” and “monstrous space-making”—challenge and ephemerally unsettle political and economic systems. It focuses on the history of the cultural space, EIGHT Critical Institute for Arts and Politics, in Athens, Greece. The concept of “instituting” is discussed as a form of space-making that refuses structuralization, while “blurring” signifies a process of dissolving boundaries and categories to create fluid, unpredictable spaces that resist fixed identities. The notion of “monstrous space-making” is introduced as a method of excess and refusal, capable of disrupting dominant political economies. The article argues that these practices, rooted in modes of “militant curating” and critical spatial interventions, operate as performative acts of reconfiguration—offering ways to produce new relations, economies, and imaginaries within contested landscapes. It suggests modes of continuous, open-ended spatial interventions that do not seek to fix existing systems but to deform and reimagine them from within.
Articles by Gigi Argyropoulou
Gigi Argyropoulou is a curator, theorist, researcher, and director working in the fields of performance and cultural practice based in NYC and Athens. She is a founding member of EIGHT/Το Οχτώ – critical Institute of Arts and Politics in Athens, and numerous other grassroots and research initiatives. She is co-editor of Performance Research’s issue “On Institutions” (2015) and the upcoming “On Land/scapes” (2026) as well as the book Instituting: Space-making, Refusal and Organising in Arts and Beyond (2022). She was a member of the curatorial and editorial board of Haus der Kulturen der Welt’s New Alphabet School and publishes regularly in journals and books.