Rewriting the history of art and activism in Milan: New forms of sociality and the radical imaginary
Aria Spinelli

Milan:  Macao, Isola Arts Centre, Fabrica di Communcazione

In 1976, a 12-meter-long air balloon was placed in front of an abandoned church in the heart of Brera District in Milan. This artwork, Riappropriazione Chiesa di San Carpoforo (1976) by Franco Mazzucchelli is well-known as a legendary shield against police harassment,..

Destituent spaces and improvised institutions between collectivity and critique
Gigi Argyropoulou

Athens: Green Park, Embros Theatre

Fugitive publics do not need to be restored. ?hey need to be conserved, which is to say moved, hidden, restarted with the same joke, the same story, always elsewhere...

On the passage of a few people through a relatively vast space called the Midwest
Brian Holmes

US Midwest: Compass, the Midwest Raical Cultural Corridor 

It’s hilarious that such a tightly exclusive, intensely ideological and relentlessly Parisian vanguard as the Situationists should have had a lasting influence on generations of equality-oriented and ecology-minded American artists....

Editorial: Patainstitutional research. On thought sustaining environments.
By special issue editor Kuba Szreder

The term ‘patainstitutionalism’ is coined in relation to Alfred Jarry, a 19th century bohemian writer and proto-surrealist, who in his novel Exploits & Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, Pataphysician (1898 / 1996) describes pataphysics as a science of exception and uniqueness, of poetry and heightened stances of perception...However, this legacy is only of secondary importance to our current inquiries, as the very notion of patainstitutionalism, as proposed and used here, is a result of curatorial innovation and creative translation. ‘Patainstitutionalism’ is an English translation of the Polish term ‘patainstytutcjonalizm’, a neologism created to denote the plethora of ‘mock institutions’ (Sholette 2011), ‘institutions of exodus’ and ‘institutent practices’ (Raunig 2009), ‘monster institutions’ (Universidad Nomada 2009), ‘plausible art worlds’ (Basekamp Group & Friends 2013)...

Alter-institutions and art. Between governance and autonomy.
Marco Baravalle

Venice: S.a.L.E. Docs

"Alter-institutions emerge from collective processes, following a similar pattern: the squatting of a space followed by establishing a model of self-management that harks back to the macro-field of autonomous politics"

Three metonyms for Critical Practice: Jig, Foam and Yield
Marsha Bradfield, Amy McDonnell, Neil Cummings

London: Critical Practice Research Cluster

I think we’re caught in a linguistic binary between public and private that isn’t representative of the world we live in....

Asociación de Arte Útil a nomadic and multiform platform for usership
John Byrne, Gemma Medina Estupiñán, Alessandra Saviotti

Various Locations: Asociación de Arte Útil  

Since 2014 the Asociación has focused on the dissemination of multiple projects and information related to Arte Útil, and it functioned as a space for research and exchange...this text will illustrate how the Asociación offers an ideal cultural and artistic ground to activate users in order to raise up, speak and act.

Publisher's Note

When Kuba approached us to see if the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest could get behind and publish the Patainstitutional project you are now looking at that he'd initially conceptualized for the Journal for Research Cultures, we had just finished our 11th issue... With its focus on how ways that institutions self-institute and form in relation to immediate insistencies, we found this project to be an excellent mirror to our issue. We'd always understood the idea of "culture beside itself" to be a bit of a theoretical joke- culture can only be itself, and it is definitionally not not itself- it is what it is or there is the other.