Colloquium “Artistic self-organisation"
December 4, 15:00 - 17:00 Panel Discussion
“Self-organised spaces and initiatives run by artists play a crucial role in the arts and culture in many countries. They exist in a wide variety of forms, and their characteristics, agendas and interrelationships can be understood as responses to the specific social, political and economic conditions that artists face. Through their collective appropriation and use of places, groups of artists and cultural workers claim and create spaces for the emergence, interconnection and visibility of artistic practice, as well as for interaction and networking. Claiming space is crucial to artistic freedom and cultural diversity. At the same time, such collective initiatives are often driven by precarious working and living conditions with which many individual artists are confronted. At the colloquium “Artistic self-organisation and networks of solidarity in times of crisis” we will address important issues of artistic self-organisation, in particular by illuminating questions of (forced) mobility. Today, a growing number of artists are forced to leave their homes and are displaced elsewhere because of wars, conflicts, political persecution or economic crises.”
Department of Cultural Management und Gender Studies (IKM)
Seminarraum E0101
mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna
Anton-von-Webern Platz 1
1030 Vienna
Solidarity as Process and Reciprocity
Illustration: Martin Breindl, EUROPEAN IDENTITY, varnish on found object, wood glass, 104,5 x 167 x 4 cm, 2025, photo by Ksenia Yurkova
AIR InSILo is an artist-run initiative, a residency project, and a research space created primarily as a project of solidarity. Over five years, we have noticed that the word solidarity is used in many different ways, and sometimes even in opposite ways. At times, it is used to mean nepotism or loyalty to a small group. Often, it becomes an empty phrase or a way of showing virtue, more about appearing good than actually doing the work of solidarity. We have also seen situations where our idea of solidarity was understood in a service-like way, following what Jodi Dean calls the “politics of demand”. In this view, identity alone seems to justify support, rather than recognising the effort, activity, struggle, and change that real solidarity requires.
This misses the main point: solidarity is a reciprocal effort among equals. By equals we do not mean social position, but the recognition of each other as equals. The shared effort and the work invested by everyone involved are central.
We realised that our understanding of this type of relationship needed explanation, so we decided to make our position clear. This became even more important after we participated in the conference “Artistic Self-Organisation and Networks of Solidarity in Times of Crisis”, held on 3– 4 December 2025 at the mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna.
Given the current cuts to cultural funding, and with further reductions expected due to Austria’s austerity policies and the wider European turn towards militarisation, we want to be open and clear about our goals, aims, and the realities of our work. We hope that sharing this will be helpful to the wider community.
Illustration: still from Alain Resnais
What escapes the archive? What lingers in its margins, what refuses to be named or ordered? Shadow Index is a curatorial exploration unfolding in Hollabrunn, shaped by fragments, tensions, and material traces: ceramic vessels, amethyst veins, layered landscapes, ghostly forests. It looks for memory outside of language — in objects, stones, silences, gaps. Drawing on Jacques Derrida and Alain Resnais, it turns toward archival voids and omissions, treating them not as absence but as spaces of potential. During the seven-week residency, Agata Ciastoń will work with different registers of memory to develop the idea of a future open call. Not a theme defined in advance, but one that emerges from the place itself, through attention, research, and time. The Shadow Index is not a fixed theme. It is an evolving question: how do we work with what resists capture, and what forms of knowledge arise in its place?
Agata Ciastoń is a freelance curator, researcher, and author based in Wrocław, Poland, with a PhD in cultural studies. Her work explores borders, memory, and territories through archival materials and visual narratives, focusing on ambiguous landscapes and relationships between humans and animals, plants, and things.
Curator-In-residence Agata Ciastoń