Gall Ball and the Waltz of Institutions: The Collective Making of Institution(ings)
Institution(ings) is a collaborative project bringing together several European institutions across differing scales, scopes, and modes of action to collectively reflect on how the “houses” of art and culture might become more present within the flows of collective life, responding to the successive social, political, and technological transformations that shape new relational configurations between humanity and the world. Linking the Universidade Católica Portuguesa, HANGAR, the Modern Art Centre (CAM) of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the Jan van Eyck Academie, Tensta Konsthall, the Museum of Impossible Forms, the Listening Academy, and HDK-Valand, the project blurs the (already thin) lines between academia and cultural institutions, exploring the permeability between spaces and agents in order to question and reassess the roles institutions might play within common life.
Led by Luísa Santos from UCP, where she is a professor, Institution(ings) finds its first iteration in Portugal in Gall Ball. This solo exhibition by Francisco Trêpa at the CAM Gulbenkian set the tone for our conversation in the project’s public library, in the same venue. Interweaving subjective perceptions—impressions both of the project itself and of the current state of the arts and culture, to which the project is also a form of action-reaction—with interventions and quotations from the curator Luísa Santos, this conversation-text begins at the root in order to understand the tree, navigating the principles and paradoxes of a project described as “a collaborative, cumulative, ongoing experiment.”
It is from the CAM in Lisbon, now transformed into a laboratory of curatorial, educational, and relational practices, that the project begins to question hegemonic institutional models, and where we encounter the first node of an extensive (institutional and conceptual) network. As Luísa Santos explains, “it’s about speculating on futures: how institutions might become, and how other models might emerge beyond existing ones, more grounded in sharing and collaboration”—always with a sharp awareness of differences in access to material and structural conditions (the curator mentions, for instance, her Ukrainian partners and their limited hours of access to electricity), but also to institutions themselves and to their languages.
Francisco Trêpa’s exhibition Gall Ball is a curious, unusual museological proposal, particularly in its communal, horizontal approach to curating, undertaken by Luísa Santos’s students from the MA in Culture Studies at Universidade Católica. The collective (and pedagogical) process was as important as the outcome: “They set out to consider what curating an exhibition can be, what a wall text is, how labels are written, and how one might conceive an exhibition in progress,” explains the curator in her role as teacher. The model that emerged is that of “an exhibition under construction, almost a choreography,” where Trêpa’s ceramic pieces enter and leave the space in accordance with the stages of their making: they shift and mutate over time as they are slowly fired, glazed, fired again, gradually becoming themselves through each journey and each visit. There are no labels in the conventional museological sense, but rather short fictions written by the student-curators from the perspective of the figures inhabiting the ballroom—“as if the pieces had a voice,” says Luísa. In these small collective gestures, preconceptions of what curating is begin to dissolve, recalling Beatrice von Bismarck’s notion of the “curatorial condition”: a form of relationality between bodies based on the fluid dynamics of constellation, transposition, and hospitality.
Trêpa’s deliberate choice for the starting point of the programme arose from a convergence of intentions to experiment with alternative exhibition formats. The bugalho (oak gall) is formed when a wasp pierces an oak tree and deposits eggs and toxins that alter the tree’s genetic code, producing a small spherical growth. Unlike the acorn, it does not enable propagation; instead, it serves as a nest for the wasp larva, and later as refuge for other animals and organisms. From this starting point, the artist explores (as he notes in an interview with Mattia Tosti) the multiplicity of a relationship that, “although parasitic, and even violent in certain respects, also reveals a dimension of generosity and biological empathy.”1 In turn, Luísa Santos draws a parallel between the exhibition and the project itself: “Institution(ings) is exactly that—a reaction to several external aggressions, recognising that while institutions must change, they can also become places of refuge for smaller, independent ones.”
Attentive in its listening and careful in its detail, this approach to curating is evident even in the space itself, designed to host multiple activations that will unfold over the next three years. Indeed, the exhibition structure, created by architecture students from Universidade Autónoma, was based on a seemingly simple premise: “They couldn’t use new materials, they couldn’t buy anything; they had to use only materials that already existed.” The result is a flexible modular structure built from the remains of previous exhibitions where spaces can be opened and closed, allowing up to six artists in residence simultaneously. This spatial fluidity accommodates multiple activities and formats—from library to exhibition, from studios to educational workshops—offering a generative way of thinking about the museum in which walls become shelves, rooms unfold into laboratories, and everything happens alongside the choreography of the pieces, which depart and return, each time more refined for the ball.
The space itself is open to critique and actively invites it from a range of voices, in an ongoing process of testing, error, criticism, and reformulation, accompanied by the architecture students responsible for its design. The collective A Avó Veio Trabalhar has been invited to inhabit and use the space in 2027—an invitation also extended to the communities with whom they have collaborated—in order to identify possible shortcomings in its real accessibility and in how it attends to all its visitors. Later this year, a materials laboratory with Antecâmara (Alessia Alegri, Pedro Campos Costa, and Iván Prego) will open the space to reflection on the end-of-life of exhibition structures, the huge ecological footprint of exhibitions, and how institutions might become more conscious in their choices and (re)use of materials.
A corner of comfortable sofas is flanked by a small collective library which continues to grow through the suggestions of all those participating in the project, thereby creating a site of cumulative permanence within a space of flux. The walls retain traces and memories of what has taken place there—workshop posters, mental maps, or a video by Apparatus22, the collective in residence during December. What remains is eventually replaced by something new, a new action, but everything is archived: small publications are produced for each activity (all available on the project’s website)—such as the one accompanying Trêpa’s exhibition, which will include essays by the students, an interview, and even some poems that André Tecedeiro read to the pieces. The project will also be complemented by a collective Glossary developed through an open call for contributions (texts, videos, and any other submissions, provided they follow the code of conduct), forming a living, collaborative archive of a conceptual constellation woven through the threads of a trans-European network of critical exchange.
Alongside Trêpa’s exhibition, another group of students is working on an upcoming exhibition based on the CAM collection, tentatively conceived as an exercise in critical deconstruction. Through a consciously pedagogical approach, Luísa Santos encouraged them to question how prejudice permeates acts of collecting and displaying, and how curating might remain attentive to it: “How is it done? Why is it done? Is it done consciously or unconsciously? And if it’s unconsciously, then what can be done to unlearn that unconsciousness?” Having collectively arrived at the concept of “fragility,” the curatorial process also involves considering how sensitivity is communicated, even proposing to invite diverse audiences (including children) to share their readings of the works and the exhibition.
After the project’s first year, its assessment remains necessarily complex. Luísa Santos nonetheless emphasises the need to counter unequal power dynamics between institutions of different scales (and reach, and means), and to manage the asymmetries between the nodes of this network, treating tensions as fertile ground for questioning the crystallised ways in which many institutions are established. Institution(ings) seeks to function as a gall within a deeply rooted institutional tree: a creative and collective action-reaction to external aggressions (such as ecological crises and colonial legacies) and internal ones (such as the rigidity and exclusion of institutional models), offering—and presenting itself as—a space-time in which other forms of existence can be tested. Built by many hands, through an accumulation of clay, workspaces, shelves, and books, it unfolds as a choreography of curatorial, pedagogical, experimental, and artistic gestures that attempts to sketch, in the present, a future institution: one without rigid walls, attentive of its own exclusions, both a refuge and a laboratory for microorganisms (artists, curators, architects, audiences) to co-create “a more just, more transparent, more welcoming ecosystem.”
Francisco Trêpa, Baile dos Bugalhos. Exhibition view at Centro de Arte Moderna / Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, 2025. Photos: Pedro Pina. Courtesy CAM/Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian.