The Laboratory of Shared Institutionality

The Laboratory of Shared Institutionalism (LIC in its Spanish acronym) is a space for research and collective work through which the Museo Reina Sofía develops advocacy tools together with the cultural ecosystem. To this end, three core strands serve as working horizons, all encompassing a commitment for structural impact on different scales, spanning from collaboration with other institutions in European spheres to work with local associationism. These horizons are climate justice and ecological transformation, a recalibrated cultural infrastructure, and cultural rights and accessibility, with each strand unfolding through different practices, devices, tools, and methodologies.  

In recent decades, the Museo has experimented with different forms of political and institutional advocacy by supporting citizen demands and those of the art sector, in addition to consolidating a networked working methodology which is key to acknowledging the role of the museum as part of a broader cultural fabric. The LIC draws on these experiences to continue operating in a trans-scale way, opening strategy and discussion spaces between sector organisations and promoting undertakings which are set up to transform the conditions and structures that organise the cultural ecosystem. More About LIC.

Framed in this context, recalibrating involves mounting sustained processes of reorganisation within complex structures, dealing with interdependencies on different scales and margins of action. Opposite the idea of total and immediate transformation, recalibration operates through specific interventions with the capacity to displace practices, review procedures, redistribute resources and capacities and progressively modify the conditions that organise the cultural ecosystem. Therefore, it entails developing forms of institutional knowledge and technical capacity that can be collectively actionable.

This strand addresses the material, technical and symbolic conditions that make art and cultural work possible, as well as the museum’s public and political role in contemporary society. In this vein, the Museo Reina Sofía propels long-term processes and participates in structures and alliances oriented towards the development of research themes and advocacy tools capable of contributing to normative changes for the sector and to intervene in formulating cultural policies, in both state and European spheres.

In different formats, ranging from study groups to work clinics, LIC reflects on the systemic challenges that extend across the culture sector, while examining organisational models and operational structures to test methodologies of institutional intervention, both in the Museo and in collaboration with other initiatives and networks of practice.

As a key part of culture’s system and infrastructure, art institutions are pervaded by art market circuits, real estate and urban transformation dynamics, the financialization of daily life, the  weakening of public infrastructures, the precarization of labour in culture, an the increase of different forms of inequality and a deepening eco-social crisis. This is in addition to the international rise of authoritarian and excluding politics, and an intensification of cultural wars, which have turned culture, critical knowledge and the definition of the public sphere into territories of dispute.

At the same time, cultural institutions continue to assume a series of public responsibilities: facilitating access to culture and knowledge, safeguarding cultural heritage and legacies, supporting those creating culture, upholding spaces of research and collective reflection and critically responding to social transformations. These roles cannot be understood in isolation from the material and organisational conditions of institutional life, for programming, governance, work, resources and infrastructure are interdependent dimensions of cultural practice.

At this current time in history, the traditional separation between infrastructural operations and cultural programming — the backstage and the frontstage of institutional life — is becoming increasingly less sustainable. Therefore, there is a need to design strategies that treat both aspects as mutually constitutive and which allow for the development of new institutional literacies, technical capacities and forms of cooperation between agents from the ecosystem to undertake major processes of structural transformation.