WITH LUÍSA SANTOS
JF - Permaculture begins with observing relationships rather than isolated entities. How has this shifted the way you understand art institutions, not as buildings or organisations, but as living ecosystems of relationships?
LS - Instead of seeing art institutions primarily as buildings, organisations, or administrative structures, I understand them as living ecosystems composed of relationships between people, communities, policies, environments, resources, and histories. Drawing from both Traditional Ecological Knowledge and ecological science, permaculture emphasises that no element exists in isolation; every component is shaped by its interactions with others.
Applying this perspective to art institutions reveals that they are not autonomous entities but situated systems embedded within broader social, political, economic, and environmental contexts. Just like artistic practices don’t exist in a void, the institutions that are home to those practices, are also situated and contextualised. Their actions influence and are influenced by the communities around them, urban development processes, funding structures, ecological concerns, and historical power relations.
This relational perspective also challenges the tendency to analyse institutions through isolated departments or singular issues. Much like Fukuoka criticises specialised knowledge for overlooking the complexity of ecological interactions, art institutions often address challenges such as diversity, sustainability, or economic precarity separately. Permaculture encourages a more systemic understanding, recognising that these issues are interconnected and cannot be meaningfully addressed in isolation.
The example of Tensta Konsthall, in Stockholm, illustrates this shift particularly well. Its success does not stem solely from its physical infrastructure or exhibition programme, but from the relationships it cultivates with local residents, schools, artists, community organisations, and international networks. The institution functions less as a fixed structure and more as a dynamic network of reciprocal exchanges, where knowledge, resources, and decision-making are shared. I believe that art institutions can be understood as relational ecologies rather than static organisations. Their relevance and sustainability depend not only on what they produce, but on how they nurture connections, distribute power, observe and interact with their local contexts, and contribute to the wellbeing of the broader ecosystems in which they are embedded.
JF - What are the smallest gestures of care you've encountered that have had the most profound institutional impact?
LS - One of the most exemplary gestures of care I have encountered is the approach developed by the Buro Stedelijk, under the curatorship and coordination of Rita Ouedraogo. What might seem like a small gesture (listening) has had a profound institutional impact. From its inception, the Buro began by listening to the needs of the local artistic ecosystem and building its programme from those conversations. This commitment to listening is inseparable from its horizontal structure: everyone involved is considered a collaborator, and distinctions between exhibitions, public programming, and other forms of cultural production are intentionally blurred.
For me, this openness to local artists and communities, combined with a genuine willingness to share power and create spaces of reciprocity, constitutes a powerful act of care. Rather than speaking for the artistic community, the Buro creates the conditions for artists to shape the institution itself. Such seemingly modest gestures of listening, accessibility, and horizontality can have far-reaching effects on how institutions operate, relate to their publics, and imagine their role within a local ecosystem.
JF - Resilience is often framed as endurance or survival, but in the context of adaptability and collective learning, what role do reciprocity and interdependence play in sustaining it?
LS - In the context of adaptability and collective learning, I believe that resilience emerges through relationships of reciprocity and interdependence that allow individuals, institutions, and communities to learn from one another, share resources, and generate new capacities together.
Drawing on permaculture, reciprocity appears as a generative force; and resilience could be understood as the ability of a system to produce multiple yields that benefit all its participants. These yields are not only material but also social, affective, ecological, and symbolic. They are created through networks of care, hospitality, and exchange, where giving and receiving happen simultaneously and where each contribution can generate further opportunities for others.
Whether in institutions like the Jan van Eyck Academie or The Listening Biennial, or projects like the institution(ing)s, resilience is sustained not by autonomy alone but by the recognition that institutions, artists, communities, and non-human actors depend on one another. The Jan van Eyck Academie, a post-academic residency and research institute in Maastricht, exemplifies this through its ecosystem of shared resources, collective learning, and mutual support. Residents are not simply provided with studios and funding; they contribute their knowledge, experiences, and practices to a wider community, creating conditions in which individual development becomes inseparable from collective growth.
Similarly, The Listening Biennial operates as a decentralised international network that relies on partnerships with host institutions across different geographies. Because it does not possess a permanent exhibition infrastructure of its own, it depends on local organisations to host its programmes, while those organisations benefit from being connected to a broader transnational framework of exchange. In this model, resilience emerges through reciprocity: artists, curators, institutions, and audiences collectively create the conditions that allow the project to exist and evolve.
The institution(ing)s project extends this understanding. Bringing together eight organisations of different scales, capacities, and contexts across Europe, from museums and post-academic institutions to grassroots organisations and artistic networks, it operates as a collaborative experiment in institutional transformation. Rather than seeking uniform solutions, the project embraces difference as a resource. Knowledge, methodologies, infrastructures, and experiences circulate among partners, allowing each organisation to learn from the others' situated realities. In this sense, resilience is produced through interdependence: the capacity of each institution is strengthened by its connections to others.
Importantly, this interdependence is not limited to human actors. Drawing from permaculture and ecological thinking, resilience emerges from broader relational networks that include spaces, infrastructures, materials, gardens, ecosystems, and other more-than-human actors. The Jan van Eyck garden, for example, functions as a multispecies archive sustained by ongoing relations of care between humans, plants, insects, and microorganisms. Likewise, the institution(ing)s demonstrates how different organisations, operating under very different conditions and capacities, can strengthen one another through the sharing of knowledge, resources, methodologies, and experiences. Difference itself becomes a productive condition for learning and transformation.
From this perspective, resilience is less about resisting change and more about cultivating the relationships that make change possible. Reciprocity and interdependence create the conditions for collective adaptation, enabling institutions and communities not only to withstand challenges but also to evolve, regenerate, and imagine alternative futures together.
JF - How does a more-than-human perspective alter our understanding of institutional care?
LS - The example that comes to my mind in this matter is Giulia Bellinetti’s research at the Jan van Eyck Academie. Rather than viewing cultural institutions as autonomous entities operating separately from their surroundings, Bellinetti argues that institutions should be understood as part of broader ecological systems composed of humans, non-human beings, materials, infrastructures, and planetary processes.
Drawing on her research at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Bellinetti suggests that institutional care extends beyond supporting staff, artists, or audiences. It also involves attending to the ecological relationships that sustain institutional life. This requires recognising what she describes as the institution’s “planetary presence”: its entanglement with environmental processes, multispecies communities, and the material conditions that make cultural production possible.
A key example in Bellinetti’s work is the Project Garden at the Jan van Eyck Academie. She describes the garden not simply as a green space or an artistic resource, but as a multispecies archive where plants, animals, soil, seeds, artists, and institutional histories coexist across different temporalities. Caring for the garden involves stewardship practices that acknowledge the agency of non-human actors and foster responsibility toward future generations. In this sense, care becomes a relational and ecological practice rather than an exclusively human one.
Bellinetti’s reflections also provide a useful framework for understanding projects such as Mónica de Miranda’s Seed Archive. Developed through both community gardens and a digital platform, the project preserves seeds cultivated by African and Afro-descendant communities in Lisbon while documenting the memories, agricultural knowledge, cultural practices, and relationships with the land embedded within them. The archive extends beyond the preservation of biological material: it safeguards forms of knowledge transmission, food sovereignty, and collective memory that have been sustained across generations. In this sense, the online seed archive can be understood as a more-than-human archive, where seeds are not treated as static objects but as living carriers of ecological, social, historical, and cultural relations. Much like Bellinetti’s reading of the Jan van Eyck garden as a multispecies archive, the Seed Archive foregrounds care as a practice of stewardship that connects past, present, and future communities—human and non-human alike.
Particularly significant is the fact that Mónica de Miranda’s Seed Archive exists simultaneously in physical and digital forms. While the community gardens support living ecological relationships and collective practices of cultivation and care, the online archive creates a space where these knowledges, stories, and seeds can circulate beyond their immediate locality. Rather than functioning solely as a repository of information, the digital archive becomes a platform for sustaining relationships, making visible often-overlooked histories and practices, and creating conditions for their continuity. The inclusion of fictional narratives alongside documentation further challenges purely scientific or extractive modes of knowledge production, opening space for affective, imaginative, and embodied forms of knowing: an epistemological shift that Bellinetti identifies as central to contemporary ecological thinking within art institutions.
Bellinetti further argues that a more-than-human perspective challenges the dominant institutional emphasis on productivity, acceleration, and measurable outputs. By attending to ecological rhythms of regeneration, maintenance, and reproduction, institutions can develop alternative modes of operation that prioritise reciprocity, hospitality, and long-term sustainability. The garden, for instance, introduces cyclical temporalities that contrast with the linear timelines often imposed by funding structures and organisational planning.
From Bellinetti’s perspective, institutional care therefore shifts from the management of structures and resources to the cultivation of relationships. A more-than-human approach asks institutions to create and sustain the conditions that enable diverse forms of life, knowledge, and temporalities to coexist. Care becomes an ongoing practice of recognising interdependence and of understanding the institution itself as embedded within, and responsible to, a wider ecological world.
JF - What existing institutional habits or assumptions need to be composted before new forms can emerge?
LS - As in nature, death and decay are essential in institutions for new forms to emerge. One of the most persistent is the idea that institutions should remain stable, predictable, and risk-averse. Institutions often perceive disruption as a threat to their stability and continuity. However, meaningful transformation frequently begins with small interventions that make visible what had previously remained hidden: structural inequalities, exclusions, power imbalances, or unmet needs. Like a small fissure that reveals the condition of a building beneath its surface, these moments of tension expose the underlying structures of an institution and create opportunities for reflection, learning, and change. What initially appears as a disturbance may, in fact, be the starting point for deeper processes of institutional renewal.
Another assumption that I believe that requires composting is the belief that inclusion can be achieved mostly through public programming. Outreach activities, educational programmes, and community engagement initiatives are important, but they remain superficial if they do not lead to changes in the less visible structures of the institution: governance, decision-making processes, hiring practices, resource allocation, and the distribution of power. Social inclusion cannot be reduced to representation at the level of visibility; it requires structural transformation.
Several contemporary institutional experiments demonstrate that alternative models are already being tested. At the Centro de Arte Moderna (CAM) of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, the creation of a Youth Advisory Group invited young people from different social, cultural, and professional backgrounds to contribute directly to the institution's thinking and programming. Rather than consulting audiences only after decisions have been made, this initiative biought perspectives grounded in lived experience into institutional processes, challenging assumptions about expertise, authority, and who has the legitimacy to shape cultural agendas.
A different approach can be found in General Ecology, a long-term initiative developed at the Serpentine Galleries in London. What began as a public programme focused on ecological questions gradually evolved into an institutional framework that permeates multiple areas of the organisation. Instead of treating environmental concerns as a thematic subject for exhibitions and events, General Ecology encouraged the institution to reconsider its infrastructures, partnerships, networks, and operational practices through an ecological lens. In doing so, it demonstrated how a topic initially addressed in public programming can become embedded within the institution's internal structures and long-term vision.
The Buro Stedelijk, an experimental platform operating within the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, under the coordination of Rita Ouedraogo (until early this year), offers yet another model. Since its inception, the Buro has built its programme through processes of listening to local artists, cultural workers, and communities. Its organisational structure intentionally emphasises horizontality, referring to all participants as collaborators and avoiding rigid distinctions between exhibitions, public programmes, publications, research, and studio practice. By questioning conventional hierarchies and creating more fluid relationships between different forms of cultural production, the Buro opens up possibilities for a more reciprocal and accessible institutional culture.
Although these initiatives operate in very different contexts, they share a common commitment: moving beyond symbolic gestures of inclusion towards changes that affect how institutions make decisions, distribute resources, produce knowledge, and relate to the communities they serve. They suggest that institutional transformation does not necessarily begin with large-scale reform, but often through practices that redistribute attention, participation, and power.
I don’t think that institutions are autonomous entities. On the contrary, they are relational ecosystems embedded within broader social, cultural, political, and ecological networks. Composting the myth of institutional autonomy could open space for practices based on reciprocity, interdependence, listening, and shared responsibility.
In this sense, composting is not about destruction. It is a process of transformation through which obsolete structures, habits, and assumptions decompose and become nutrients for new institutional imaginaries. The cracks are not signs of failure; they are often the conditions through which different futures become possible.
JF - If an institution truly embraced the ethics of relationship, reciprocity, and resilience, how would people feel when they entered it?
LS - I believe that if an institution truly embraced the ethics of relationship, reciprocity, and resilience, people would feel less like visitors entering a system and more like participants entering a living ecosystem. They would feel welcomed not only as audiences or consumers of culture, but as individuals whose experiences, knowledge, and presence matter and shape the institution.
Such an institution would be characterised by a culture of listening. Listening not as a symbolic gesture or consultation exercise, but as a genuine willingness to be affected by others. People would feel that their perspectives could shape the institution, rather than merely being accommodated within pre-existing structures. This requires recognising that expertise does not belong exclusively to professionals, curators, or directors, but also emerges from lived experience, community knowledge, and everyday encounters.
Reciprocity would also be visible in how relationships are built. Instead of extracting stories, participation, or legitimacy from communities, the institution would cultivate mutual exchange. Visitors, artists, staff, neighbours, and collaborators would all contribute to and benefit from the relationships that sustain the institution. The experience would resemble a shared table more than a stage: a space where giving and receiving are constantly negotiated through care, generosity, and collective responsibility.
Drawing from practices such as Mirna Bamieh’s participatory projects around food, storytelling, and hospitality, one could imagine an institution where people encounter not only exhibitions and events, but also opportunities for conviviality, conversation, experimenting and shared experience. Food, storytelling, collective learning, and informal encounters would not be considered secondary to artistic production but integral to it. People would feel invited to stay, to contribute, and to encounter others, rather than simply to observe.
Resilience, in this context, would not be experienced as rigidity or permanence. Instead, it would be felt through the institution's capacity to adapt, learn, experiment and transform in response to changing circumstances. People would sense that the institution is not afraid of uncertainty, disagreement, or experimentation. Rather than protecting itself from disruption, it would recognise moments of tension as opportunities for reflection and growth.
Relationships between artists, communities, institutions, places, histories, and even more-than-human worlds would be acknowledged and nurtured. Entering such a space would mean entering an environment where care extends beyond individual transactions and becomes a shared practice of sustaining collective life.
In short, I believe that people would feel trusted, listened to, and valued. They would leave with the sense that the institution is not simply a place that presents culture, but a place where relationships are cultivated and where different futures can be imagined and built together.
Permacultures of Care. Imagining New Narratives. Routledge, 2026, by Luísa Santos is out now.
JF - Permaculture begins with observing relationships rather than isolated entities. How has this shifted the way you understand art institutions, not as buildings or organisations, but as living ecosystems of relationships?
LS - Instead of seeing art institutions primarily as buildings, organisations, or administrative structures, I understand them as living ecosystems composed of relationships between people, communities, policies, environments, resources, and histories. Drawing from both Traditional Ecological Knowledge and ecological science, permaculture emphasises that no element exists in isolation; every component is shaped by its interactions with others.
Applying this perspective to art institutions reveals that they are not autonomous entities but situated systems embedded within broader social, political, economic, and environmental contexts. Just like artistic practices don’t exist in a void, the institutions that are home to those practices, are also situated and contextualised. Their actions influence and are influenced by the communities around them, urban development processes, funding structures, ecological concerns, and historical power relations.
This relational perspective also challenges the tendency to analyse institutions through isolated departments or singular issues. Much like Fukuoka criticises specialised knowledge for overlooking the complexity of ecological interactions, art institutions often address challenges such as diversity, sustainability, or economic precarity separately. Permaculture encourages a more systemic understanding, recognising that these issues are interconnected and cannot be meaningfully addressed in isolation.
The example of Tensta Konsthall, in Stockholm, illustrates this shift particularly well. Its success does not stem solely from its physical infrastructure or exhibition programme, but from the relationships it cultivates with local residents, schools, artists, community organisations, and international networks. The institution functions less as a fixed structure and more as a dynamic network of reciprocal exchanges, where knowledge, resources, and decision-making are shared. I believe that art institutions can be understood as relational ecologies rather than static organisations. Their relevance and sustainability depend not only on what they produce, but on how they nurture connections, distribute power, observe and interact with their local contexts, and contribute to the wellbeing of the broader ecosystems in which they are embedded.
JF - What are the smallest gestures of care you've encountered that have had the most profound institutional impact?
LS - One of the most exemplary gestures of care I have encountered is the approach developed by the Buro Stedelijk, under the curatorship and coordination of Rita Ouedraogo. What might seem like a small gesture (listening) has had a profound institutional impact. From its inception, the Buro began by listening to the needs of the local artistic ecosystem and building its programme from those conversations. This commitment to listening is inseparable from its horizontal structure: everyone involved is considered a collaborator, and distinctions between exhibitions, public programming, and other forms of cultural production are intentionally blurred.
For me, this openness to local artists and communities, combined with a genuine willingness to share power and create spaces of reciprocity, constitutes a powerful act of care. Rather than speaking for the artistic community, the Buro creates the conditions for artists to shape the institution itself. Such seemingly modest gestures of listening, accessibility, and horizontality can have far-reaching effects on how institutions operate, relate to their publics, and imagine their role within a local ecosystem.
JF - Resilience is often framed as endurance or survival, but in the context of adaptability and collective learning, what role do reciprocity and interdependence play in sustaining it?
LS - In the context of adaptability and collective learning, I believe that resilience emerges through relationships of reciprocity and interdependence that allow individuals, institutions, and communities to learn from one another, share resources, and generate new capacities together.
Drawing on permaculture, reciprocity appears as a generative force; and resilience could be understood as the ability of a system to produce multiple yields that benefit all its participants. These yields are not only material but also social, affective, ecological, and symbolic. They are created through networks of care, hospitality, and exchange, where giving and receiving happen simultaneously and where each contribution can generate further opportunities for others.
Whether in institutions like the Jan van Eyck Academie or The Listening Biennial, or projects like the institution(ing)s, resilience is sustained not by autonomy alone but by the recognition that institutions, artists, communities, and non-human actors depend on one another. The Jan van Eyck Academie, a post-academic residency and research institute in Maastricht, exemplifies this through its ecosystem of shared resources, collective learning, and mutual support. Residents are not simply provided with studios and funding; they contribute their knowledge, experiences, and practices to a wider community, creating conditions in which individual development becomes inseparable from collective growth.
Similarly, The Listening Biennial operates as a decentralised international network that relies on partnerships with host institutions across different geographies. Because it does not possess a permanent exhibition infrastructure of its own, it depends on local organisations to host its programmes, while those organisations benefit from being connected to a broader transnational framework of exchange. In this model, resilience emerges through reciprocity: artists, curators, institutions, and audiences collectively create the conditions that allow the project to exist and evolve.
The institution(ing)s project extends this understanding. Bringing together eight organisations of different scales, capacities, and contexts across Europe, from museums and post-academic institutions to grassroots organisations and artistic networks, it operates as a collaborative experiment in institutional transformation. Rather than seeking uniform solutions, the project embraces difference as a resource. Knowledge, methodologies, infrastructures, and experiences circulate among partners, allowing each organisation to learn from the others' situated realities. In this sense, resilience is produced through interdependence: the capacity of each institution is strengthened by its connections to others.
Importantly, this interdependence is not limited to human actors. Drawing from permaculture and ecological thinking, resilience emerges from broader relational networks that include spaces, infrastructures, materials, gardens, ecosystems, and other more-than-human actors. The Jan van Eyck garden, for example, functions as a multispecies archive sustained by ongoing relations of care between humans, plants, insects, and microorganisms. Likewise, the institution(ing)s demonstrates how different organisations, operating under very different conditions and capacities, can strengthen one another through the sharing of knowledge, resources, methodologies, and experiences. Difference itself becomes a productive condition for learning and transformation.
From this perspective, resilience is less about resisting change and more about cultivating the relationships that make change possible. Reciprocity and interdependence create the conditions for collective adaptation, enabling institutions and communities not only to withstand challenges but also to evolve, regenerate, and imagine alternative futures together.
JF - How does a more-than-human perspective alter our understanding of institutional care?
LS - The example that comes to my mind in this matter is Giulia Bellinetti’s research at the Jan van Eyck Academie. Rather than viewing cultural institutions as autonomous entities operating separately from their surroundings, Bellinetti argues that institutions should be understood as part of broader ecological systems composed of humans, non-human beings, materials, infrastructures, and planetary processes.
Drawing on her research at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Bellinetti suggests that institutional care extends beyond supporting staff, artists, or audiences. It also involves attending to the ecological relationships that sustain institutional life. This requires recognising what she describes as the institution’s “planetary presence”: its entanglement with environmental processes, multispecies communities, and the material conditions that make cultural production possible.
A key example in Bellinetti’s work is the Project Garden at the Jan van Eyck Academie. She describes the garden not simply as a green space or an artistic resource, but as a multispecies archive where plants, animals, soil, seeds, artists, and institutional histories coexist across different temporalities. Caring for the garden involves stewardship practices that acknowledge the agency of non-human actors and foster responsibility toward future generations. In this sense, care becomes a relational and ecological practice rather than an exclusively human one.
Bellinetti’s reflections also provide a useful framework for understanding projects such as Mónica de Miranda’s Seed Archive. Developed through both community gardens and a digital platform, the project preserves seeds cultivated by African and Afro-descendant communities in Lisbon while documenting the memories, agricultural knowledge, cultural practices, and relationships with the land embedded within them. The archive extends beyond the preservation of biological material: it safeguards forms of knowledge transmission, food sovereignty, and collective memory that have been sustained across generations. In this sense, the online seed archive can be understood as a more-than-human archive, where seeds are not treated as static objects but as living carriers of ecological, social, historical, and cultural relations. Much like Bellinetti’s reading of the Jan van Eyck garden as a multispecies archive, the Seed Archive foregrounds care as a practice of stewardship that connects past, present, and future communities—human and non-human alike.
Particularly significant is the fact that Mónica de Miranda’s Seed Archive exists simultaneously in physical and digital forms. While the community gardens support living ecological relationships and collective practices of cultivation and care, the online archive creates a space where these knowledges, stories, and seeds can circulate beyond their immediate locality. Rather than functioning solely as a repository of information, the digital archive becomes a platform for sustaining relationships, making visible often-overlooked histories and practices, and creating conditions for their continuity. The inclusion of fictional narratives alongside documentation further challenges purely scientific or extractive modes of knowledge production, opening space for affective, imaginative, and embodied forms of knowing: an epistemological shift that Bellinetti identifies as central to contemporary ecological thinking within art institutions.
Bellinetti further argues that a more-than-human perspective challenges the dominant institutional emphasis on productivity, acceleration, and measurable outputs. By attending to ecological rhythms of regeneration, maintenance, and reproduction, institutions can develop alternative modes of operation that prioritise reciprocity, hospitality, and long-term sustainability. The garden, for instance, introduces cyclical temporalities that contrast with the linear timelines often imposed by funding structures and organisational planning.
From Bellinetti’s perspective, institutional care therefore shifts from the management of structures and resources to the cultivation of relationships. A more-than-human approach asks institutions to create and sustain the conditions that enable diverse forms of life, knowledge, and temporalities to coexist. Care becomes an ongoing practice of recognising interdependence and of understanding the institution itself as embedded within, and responsible to, a wider ecological world.
JF - What existing institutional habits or assumptions need to be composted before new forms can emerge?
LS - As in nature, death and decay are essential in institutions for new forms to emerge. One of the most persistent is the idea that institutions should remain stable, predictable, and risk-averse. Institutions often perceive disruption as a threat to their stability and continuity. However, meaningful transformation frequently begins with small interventions that make visible what had previously remained hidden: structural inequalities, exclusions, power imbalances, or unmet needs. Like a small fissure that reveals the condition of a building beneath its surface, these moments of tension expose the underlying structures of an institution and create opportunities for reflection, learning, and change. What initially appears as a disturbance may, in fact, be the starting point for deeper processes of institutional renewal.
Another assumption that I believe that requires composting is the belief that inclusion can be achieved mostly through public programming. Outreach activities, educational programmes, and community engagement initiatives are important, but they remain superficial if they do not lead to changes in the less visible structures of the institution: governance, decision-making processes, hiring practices, resource allocation, and the distribution of power. Social inclusion cannot be reduced to representation at the level of visibility; it requires structural transformation.
Several contemporary institutional experiments demonstrate that alternative models are already being tested. At the Centro de Arte Moderna (CAM) of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, the creation of a Youth Advisory Group invited young people from different social, cultural, and professional backgrounds to contribute directly to the institution's thinking and programming. Rather than consulting audiences only after decisions have been made, this initiative biought perspectives grounded in lived experience into institutional processes, challenging assumptions about expertise, authority, and who has the legitimacy to shape cultural agendas.
A different approach can be found in General Ecology, a long-term initiative developed at the Serpentine Galleries in London. What began as a public programme focused on ecological questions gradually evolved into an institutional framework that permeates multiple areas of the organisation. Instead of treating environmental concerns as a thematic subject for exhibitions and events, General Ecology encouraged the institution to reconsider its infrastructures, partnerships, networks, and operational practices through an ecological lens. In doing so, it demonstrated how a topic initially addressed in public programming can become embedded within the institution's internal structures and long-term vision.
The Buro Stedelijk, an experimental platform operating within the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, under the coordination of Rita Ouedraogo (until early this year), offers yet another model. Since its inception, the Buro has built its programme through processes of listening to local artists, cultural workers, and communities. Its organisational structure intentionally emphasises horizontality, referring to all participants as collaborators and avoiding rigid distinctions between exhibitions, public programmes, publications, research, and studio practice. By questioning conventional hierarchies and creating more fluid relationships between different forms of cultural production, the Buro opens up possibilities for a more reciprocal and accessible institutional culture.
Although these initiatives operate in very different contexts, they share a common commitment: moving beyond symbolic gestures of inclusion towards changes that affect how institutions make decisions, distribute resources, produce knowledge, and relate to the communities they serve. They suggest that institutional transformation does not necessarily begin with large-scale reform, but often through practices that redistribute attention, participation, and power.
I don’t think that institutions are autonomous entities. On the contrary, they are relational ecosystems embedded within broader social, cultural, political, and ecological networks. Composting the myth of institutional autonomy could open space for practices based on reciprocity, interdependence, listening, and shared responsibility.
In this sense, composting is not about destruction. It is a process of transformation through which obsolete structures, habits, and assumptions decompose and become nutrients for new institutional imaginaries. The cracks are not signs of failure; they are often the conditions through which different futures become possible.
JF - If an institution truly embraced the ethics of relationship, reciprocity, and resilience, how would people feel when they entered it?
LS - I believe that if an institution truly embraced the ethics of relationship, reciprocity, and resilience, people would feel less like visitors entering a system and more like participants entering a living ecosystem. They would feel welcomed not only as audiences or consumers of culture, but as individuals whose experiences, knowledge, and presence matter and shape the institution.
Such an institution would be characterised by a culture of listening. Listening not as a symbolic gesture or consultation exercise, but as a genuine willingness to be affected by others. People would feel that their perspectives could shape the institution, rather than merely being accommodated within pre-existing structures. This requires recognising that expertise does not belong exclusively to professionals, curators, or directors, but also emerges from lived experience, community knowledge, and everyday encounters.
Reciprocity would also be visible in how relationships are built. Instead of extracting stories, participation, or legitimacy from communities, the institution would cultivate mutual exchange. Visitors, artists, staff, neighbours, and collaborators would all contribute to and benefit from the relationships that sustain the institution. The experience would resemble a shared table more than a stage: a space where giving and receiving are constantly negotiated through care, generosity, and collective responsibility.
Drawing from practices such as Mirna Bamieh’s participatory projects around food, storytelling, and hospitality, one could imagine an institution where people encounter not only exhibitions and events, but also opportunities for conviviality, conversation, experimenting and shared experience. Food, storytelling, collective learning, and informal encounters would not be considered secondary to artistic production but integral to it. People would feel invited to stay, to contribute, and to encounter others, rather than simply to observe.
Resilience, in this context, would not be experienced as rigidity or permanence. Instead, it would be felt through the institution's capacity to adapt, learn, experiment and transform in response to changing circumstances. People would sense that the institution is not afraid of uncertainty, disagreement, or experimentation. Rather than protecting itself from disruption, it would recognise moments of tension as opportunities for reflection and growth.
Relationships between artists, communities, institutions, places, histories, and even more-than-human worlds would be acknowledged and nurtured. Entering such a space would mean entering an environment where care extends beyond individual transactions and becomes a shared practice of sustaining collective life.
In short, I believe that people would feel trusted, listened to, and valued. They would leave with the sense that the institution is not simply a place that presents culture, but a place where relationships are cultivated and where different futures can be imagined and built together.
Permacultures of Care. Imagining New Narratives. Routledge, 2026, by Luísa Santos is out now.
Luísa Santos is an Associate Professor and Researcher in Culture Studies / Artistic Studies at the Faculty of Human Sciences of the Universidade Católica Portuguesa, in Lisbon. She holds a PhD in Culture Studies from the Humboldt & Viadrina School of Governance in Berlin, and MA in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art in London. Between 2016 and 2019, she was awarded with a Gulbenkian Professorship. An independent curator since 2009, she conducted research in curatorial practices at the Konstfack in Stockholm in 2013. Since 2019, she has been a research fellow at The European School of Governance (EUSG) and since 2023, she is a Teaching Fellow at the EUROPAEUM. At the CECC, where she is a senior researcher, she takes the roles of coordinator and artistic director of the Institution(ing)s which she has initiated with a consortium of eight European institutions since 2024, headquartered at the CAM-Gulbenkian, in Lisbon. Her main areas of research are contemporary art and social systems.
WITH LUÍSA SANTOS
JF - Permaculture begins with observing relationships rather than isolated entities. How has this shifted the way you understand art institutions, not as buildings or organisations, but as living ecosystems of relationships?
LS - Instead of seeing art institutions primarily as buildings, organisations, or administrative structures, I understand them as living ecosystems composed of relationships between people, communities, policies, environments, resources, and histories. Drawing from both Traditional Ecological Knowledge and ecological science, permaculture emphasises that no element exists in isolation; every component is shaped by its interactions with others.
Applying this perspective to art institutions reveals that they are not autonomous entities but situated systems embedded within broader social, political, economic, and environmental contexts. Just like artistic practices don’t exist in a void, the institutions that are home to those practices, are also situated and contextualised. Their actions influence and are influenced by the communities around them, urban development processes, funding structures, ecological concerns, and historical power relations.
This relational perspective also challenges the tendency to analyse institutions through isolated departments or singular issues. Much like Fukuoka criticises specialised knowledge for overlooking the complexity of ecological interactions, art institutions often address challenges such as diversity, sustainability, or economic precarity separately. Permaculture encourages a more systemic understanding, recognising that these issues are interconnected and cannot be meaningfully addressed in isolation.
The example of Tensta Konsthall, in Stockholm, illustrates this shift particularly well. Its success does not stem solely from its physical infrastructure or exhibition programme, but from the relationships it cultivates with local residents, schools, artists, community organisations, and international networks. The institution functions less as a fixed structure and more as a dynamic network of reciprocal exchanges, where knowledge, resources, and decision-making are shared. I believe that art institutions can be understood as relational ecologies rather than static organisations. Their relevance and sustainability depend not only on what they produce, but on how they nurture connections, distribute power, observe and interact with their local contexts, and contribute to the wellbeing of the broader ecosystems in which they are embedded.
JF - What are the smallest gestures of care you've encountered that have had the most profound institutional impact?
LS - One of the most exemplary gestures of care I have encountered is the approach developed by the Buro Stedelijk, under the curatorship and coordination of Rita Ouedraogo. What might seem like a small gesture (listening) has had a profound institutional impact. From its inception, the Buro began by listening to the needs of the local artistic ecosystem and building its programme from those conversations. This commitment to listening is inseparable from its horizontal structure: everyone involved is considered a collaborator, and distinctions between exhibitions, public programming, and other forms of cultural production are intentionally blurred.
For me, this openness to local artists and communities, combined with a genuine willingness to share power and create spaces of reciprocity, constitutes a powerful act of care. Rather than speaking for the artistic community, the Buro creates the conditions for artists to shape the institution itself. Such seemingly modest gestures of listening, accessibility, and horizontality can have far-reaching effects on how institutions operate, relate to their publics, and imagine their role within a local ecosystem.
JF - Resilience is often framed as endurance or survival, but in the context of adaptability and collective learning, what role do reciprocity and interdependence play in sustaining it?
LS - In the context of adaptability and collective learning, I believe that resilience emerges through relationships of reciprocity and interdependence that allow individuals, institutions, and communities to learn from one another, share resources, and generate new capacities together.
Drawing on permaculture, reciprocity appears as a generative force; and resilience could be understood as the ability of a system to produce multiple yields that benefit all its participants. These yields are not only material but also social, affective, ecological, and symbolic. They are created through networks of care, hospitality, and exchange, where giving and receiving happen simultaneously and where each contribution can generate further opportunities for others.
Whether in institutions like the Jan van Eyck Academie or The Listening Biennial, or projects like the institution(ing)s, resilience is sustained not by autonomy alone but by the recognition that institutions, artists, communities, and non-human actors depend on one another. The Jan van Eyck Academie, a post-academic residency and research institute in Maastricht, exemplifies this through its ecosystem of shared resources, collective learning, and mutual support. Residents are not simply provided with studios and funding; they contribute their knowledge, experiences, and practices to a wider community, creating conditions in which individual development becomes inseparable from collective growth.
Similarly, The Listening Biennial operates as a decentralised international network that relies on partnerships with host institutions across different geographies. Because it does not possess a permanent exhibition infrastructure of its own, it depends on local organisations to host its programmes, while those organisations benefit from being connected to a broader transnational framework of exchange. In this model, resilience emerges through reciprocity: artists, curators, institutions, and audiences collectively create the conditions that allow the project to exist and evolve.
The institution(ing)s project extends this understanding. Bringing together eight organisations of different scales, capacities, and contexts across Europe, from museums and post-academic institutions to grassroots organisations and artistic networks, it operates as a collaborative experiment in institutional transformation. Rather than seeking uniform solutions, the project embraces difference as a resource. Knowledge, methodologies, infrastructures, and experiences circulate among partners, allowing each organisation to learn from the others' situated realities. In this sense, resilience is produced through interdependence: the capacity of each institution is strengthened by its connections to others.
Importantly, this interdependence is not limited to human actors. Drawing from permaculture and ecological thinking, resilience emerges from broader relational networks that include spaces, infrastructures, materials, gardens, ecosystems, and other more-than-human actors. The Jan van Eyck garden, for example, functions as a multispecies archive sustained by ongoing relations of care between humans, plants, insects, and microorganisms. Likewise, the institution(ing)s demonstrates how different organisations, operating under very different conditions and capacities, can strengthen one another through the sharing of knowledge, resources, methodologies, and experiences. Difference itself becomes a productive condition for learning and transformation.
From this perspective, resilience is less about resisting change and more about cultivating the relationships that make change possible. Reciprocity and interdependence create the conditions for collective adaptation, enabling institutions and communities not only to withstand challenges but also to evolve, regenerate, and imagine alternative futures together.
JF - How does a more-than-human perspective alter our understanding of institutional care?
LS - The example that comes to my mind in this matter is Giulia Bellinetti’s research at the Jan van Eyck Academie. Rather than viewing cultural institutions as autonomous entities operating separately from their surroundings, Bellinetti argues that institutions should be understood as part of broader ecological systems composed of humans, non-human beings, materials, infrastructures, and planetary processes.
Drawing on her research at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Bellinetti suggests that institutional care extends beyond supporting staff, artists, or audiences. It also involves attending to the ecological relationships that sustain institutional life. This requires recognising what she describes as the institution’s “planetary presence”: its entanglement with environmental processes, multispecies communities, and the material conditions that make cultural production possible.
A key example in Bellinetti’s work is the Project Garden at the Jan van Eyck Academie. She describes the garden not simply as a green space or an artistic resource, but as a multispecies archive where plants, animals, soil, seeds, artists, and institutional histories coexist across different temporalities. Caring for the garden involves stewardship practices that acknowledge the agency of non-human actors and foster responsibility toward future generations. In this sense, care becomes a relational and ecological practice rather than an exclusively human one.
Bellinetti’s reflections also provide a useful framework for understanding projects such as Mónica de Miranda’s Seed Archive. Developed through both community gardens and a digital platform, the project preserves seeds cultivated by African and Afro-descendant communities in Lisbon while documenting the memories, agricultural knowledge, cultural practices, and relationships with the land embedded within them. The archive extends beyond the preservation of biological material: it safeguards forms of knowledge transmission, food sovereignty, and collective memory that have been sustained across generations. In this sense, the online seed archive can be understood as a more-than-human archive, where seeds are not treated as static objects but as living carriers of ecological, social, historical, and cultural relations. Much like Bellinetti’s reading of the Jan van Eyck garden as a multispecies archive, the Seed Archive foregrounds care as a practice of stewardship that connects past, present, and future communities—human and non-human alike.
Particularly significant is the fact that Mónica de Miranda’s Seed Archive exists simultaneously in physical and digital forms. While the community gardens support living ecological relationships and collective practices of cultivation and care, the online archive creates a space where these knowledges, stories, and seeds can circulate beyond their immediate locality. Rather than functioning solely as a repository of information, the digital archive becomes a platform for sustaining relationships, making visible often-overlooked histories and practices, and creating conditions for their continuity. The inclusion of fictional narratives alongside documentation further challenges purely scientific or extractive modes of knowledge production, opening space for affective, imaginative, and embodied forms of knowing: an epistemological shift that Bellinetti identifies as central to contemporary ecological thinking within art institutions.
Bellinetti further argues that a more-than-human perspective challenges the dominant institutional emphasis on productivity, acceleration, and measurable outputs. By attending to ecological rhythms of regeneration, maintenance, and reproduction, institutions can develop alternative modes of operation that prioritise reciprocity, hospitality, and long-term sustainability. The garden, for instance, introduces cyclical temporalities that contrast with the linear timelines often imposed by funding structures and organisational planning.
From Bellinetti’s perspective, institutional care therefore shifts from the management of structures and resources to the cultivation of relationships. A more-than-human approach asks institutions to create and sustain the conditions that enable diverse forms of life, knowledge, and temporalities to coexist. Care becomes an ongoing practice of recognising interdependence and of understanding the institution itself as embedded within, and responsible to, a wider ecological world.
JF - What existing institutional habits or assumptions need to be composted before new forms can emerge?
LS - As in nature, death and decay are essential in institutions for new forms to emerge. One of the most persistent is the idea that institutions should remain stable, predictable, and risk-averse. Institutions often perceive disruption as a threat to their stability and continuity. However, meaningful transformation frequently begins with small interventions that make visible what had previously remained hidden: structural inequalities, exclusions, power imbalances, or unmet needs. Like a small fissure that reveals the condition of a building beneath its surface, these moments of tension expose the underlying structures of an institution and create opportunities for reflection, learning, and change. What initially appears as a disturbance may, in fact, be the starting point for deeper processes of institutional renewal.
Another assumption that I believe that requires composting is the belief that inclusion can be achieved mostly through public programming. Outreach activities, educational programmes, and community engagement initiatives are important, but they remain superficial if they do not lead to changes in the less visible structures of the institution: governance, decision-making processes, hiring practices, resource allocation, and the distribution of power. Social inclusion cannot be reduced to representation at the level of visibility; it requires structural transformation.
Several contemporary institutional experiments demonstrate that alternative models are already being tested. At the Centro de Arte Moderna (CAM) of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, the creation of a Youth Advisory Group invited young people from different social, cultural, and professional backgrounds to contribute directly to the institution's thinking and programming. Rather than consulting audiences only after decisions have been made, this initiative biought perspectives grounded in lived experience into institutional processes, challenging assumptions about expertise, authority, and who has the legitimacy to shape cultural agendas.
A different approach can be found in General Ecology, a long-term initiative developed at the Serpentine Galleries in London. What began as a public programme focused on ecological questions gradually evolved into an institutional framework that permeates multiple areas of the organisation. Instead of treating environmental concerns as a thematic subject for exhibitions and events, General Ecology encouraged the institution to reconsider its infrastructures, partnerships, networks, and operational practices through an ecological lens. In doing so, it demonstrated how a topic initially addressed in public programming can become embedded within the institution's internal structures and long-term vision.
The Buro Stedelijk, an experimental platform operating within the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, under the coordination of Rita Ouedraogo (until early this year), offers yet another model. Since its inception, the Buro has built its programme through processes of listening to local artists, cultural workers, and communities. Its organisational structure intentionally emphasises horizontality, referring to all participants as collaborators and avoiding rigid distinctions between exhibitions, public programmes, publications, research, and studio practice. By questioning conventional hierarchies and creating more fluid relationships between different forms of cultural production, the Buro opens up possibilities for a more reciprocal and accessible institutional culture.
Although these initiatives operate in very different contexts, they share a common commitment: moving beyond symbolic gestures of inclusion towards changes that affect how institutions make decisions, distribute resources, produce knowledge, and relate to the communities they serve. They suggest that institutional transformation does not necessarily begin with large-scale reform, but often through practices that redistribute attention, participation, and power.
I don’t think that institutions are autonomous entities. On the contrary, they are relational ecosystems embedded within broader social, cultural, political, and ecological networks. Composting the myth of institutional autonomy could open space for practices based on reciprocity, interdependence, listening, and shared responsibility.
In this sense, composting is not about destruction. It is a process of transformation through which obsolete structures, habits, and assumptions decompose and become nutrients for new institutional imaginaries. The cracks are not signs of failure; they are often the conditions through which different futures become possible.
JF - If an institution truly embraced the ethics of relationship, reciprocity, and resilience, how would people feel when they entered it?
LS - I believe that if an institution truly embraced the ethics of relationship, reciprocity, and resilience, people would feel less like visitors entering a system and more like participants entering a living ecosystem. They would feel welcomed not only as audiences or consumers of culture, but as individuals whose experiences, knowledge, and presence matter and shape the institution.
Such an institution would be characterised by a culture of listening. Listening not as a symbolic gesture or consultation exercise, but as a genuine willingness to be affected by others. People would feel that their perspectives could shape the institution, rather than merely being accommodated within pre-existing structures. This requires recognising that expertise does not belong exclusively to professionals, curators, or directors, but also emerges from lived experience, community knowledge, and everyday encounters.
Reciprocity would also be visible in how relationships are built. Instead of extracting stories, participation, or legitimacy from communities, the institution would cultivate mutual exchange. Visitors, artists, staff, neighbours, and collaborators would all contribute to and benefit from the relationships that sustain the institution. The experience would resemble a shared table more than a stage: a space where giving and receiving are constantly negotiated through care, generosity, and collective responsibility.
Drawing from practices such as Mirna Bamieh’s participatory projects around food, storytelling, and hospitality, one could imagine an institution where people encounter not only exhibitions and events, but also opportunities for conviviality, conversation, experimenting and shared experience. Food, storytelling, collective learning, and informal encounters would not be considered secondary to artistic production but integral to it. People would feel invited to stay, to contribute, and to encounter others, rather than simply to observe.
Resilience, in this context, would not be experienced as rigidity or permanence. Instead, it would be felt through the institution's capacity to adapt, learn, experiment and transform in response to changing circumstances. People would sense that the institution is not afraid of uncertainty, disagreement, or experimentation. Rather than protecting itself from disruption, it would recognise moments of tension as opportunities for reflection and growth.
Relationships between artists, communities, institutions, places, histories, and even more-than-human worlds would be acknowledged and nurtured. Entering such a space would mean entering an environment where care extends beyond individual transactions and becomes a shared practice of sustaining collective life.
In short, I believe that people would feel trusted, listened to, and valued. They would leave with the sense that the institution is not simply a place that presents culture, but a place where relationships are cultivated and where different futures can be imagined and built together.
Permacultures of Care. Imagining New Narratives. Routledge, 2026, by Luísa Santos is out now.
JF - Permaculture begins with observing relationships rather than isolated entities. How has this shifted the way you understand art institutions, not as buildings or organisations, but as living ecosystems of relationships?
LS - Instead of seeing art institutions primarily as buildings, organisations, or administrative structures, I understand them as living ecosystems composed of relationships between people, communities, policies, environments, resources, and histories. Drawing from both Traditional Ecological Knowledge and ecological science, permaculture emphasises that no element exists in isolation; every component is shaped by its interactions with others.
Applying this perspective to art institutions reveals that they are not autonomous entities but situated systems embedded within broader social, political, economic, and environmental contexts. Just like artistic practices don’t exist in a void, the institutions that are home to those practices, are also situated and contextualised. Their actions influence and are influenced by the communities around them, urban development processes, funding structures, ecological concerns, and historical power relations.
This relational perspective also challenges the tendency to analyse institutions through isolated departments or singular issues. Much like Fukuoka criticises specialised knowledge for overlooking the complexity of ecological interactions, art institutions often address challenges such as diversity, sustainability, or economic precarity separately. Permaculture encourages a more systemic understanding, recognising that these issues are interconnected and cannot be meaningfully addressed in isolation.
The example of Tensta Konsthall, in Stockholm, illustrates this shift particularly well. Its success does not stem solely from its physical infrastructure or exhibition programme, but from the relationships it cultivates with local residents, schools, artists, community organisations, and international networks. The institution functions less as a fixed structure and more as a dynamic network of reciprocal exchanges, where knowledge, resources, and decision-making are shared. I believe that art institutions can be understood as relational ecologies rather than static organisations. Their relevance and sustainability depend not only on what they produce, but on how they nurture connections, distribute power, observe and interact with their local contexts, and contribute to the wellbeing of the broader ecosystems in which they are embedded.
JF - What are the smallest gestures of care you've encountered that have had the most profound institutional impact?
LS - One of the most exemplary gestures of care I have encountered is the approach developed by the Buro Stedelijk, under the curatorship and coordination of Rita Ouedraogo. What might seem like a small gesture (listening) has had a profound institutional impact. From its inception, the Buro began by listening to the needs of the local artistic ecosystem and building its programme from those conversations. This commitment to listening is inseparable from its horizontal structure: everyone involved is considered a collaborator, and distinctions between exhibitions, public programming, and other forms of cultural production are intentionally blurred.
For me, this openness to local artists and communities, combined with a genuine willingness to share power and create spaces of reciprocity, constitutes a powerful act of care. Rather than speaking for the artistic community, the Buro creates the conditions for artists to shape the institution itself. Such seemingly modest gestures of listening, accessibility, and horizontality can have far-reaching effects on how institutions operate, relate to their publics, and imagine their role within a local ecosystem.
JF - Resilience is often framed as endurance or survival, but in the context of adaptability and collective learning, what role do reciprocity and interdependence play in sustaining it?
LS - In the context of adaptability and collective learning, I believe that resilience emerges through relationships of reciprocity and interdependence that allow individuals, institutions, and communities to learn from one another, share resources, and generate new capacities together.
Drawing on permaculture, reciprocity appears as a generative force; and resilience could be understood as the ability of a system to produce multiple yields that benefit all its participants. These yields are not only material but also social, affective, ecological, and symbolic. They are created through networks of care, hospitality, and exchange, where giving and receiving happen simultaneously and where each contribution can generate further opportunities for others.
Whether in institutions like the Jan van Eyck Academie or The Listening Biennial, or projects like the institution(ing)s, resilience is sustained not by autonomy alone but by the recognition that institutions, artists, communities, and non-human actors depend on one another. The Jan van Eyck Academie, a post-academic residency and research institute in Maastricht, exemplifies this through its ecosystem of shared resources, collective learning, and mutual support. Residents are not simply provided with studios and funding; they contribute their knowledge, experiences, and practices to a wider community, creating conditions in which individual development becomes inseparable from collective growth.
Similarly, The Listening Biennial operates as a decentralised international network that relies on partnerships with host institutions across different geographies. Because it does not possess a permanent exhibition infrastructure of its own, it depends on local organisations to host its programmes, while those organisations benefit from being connected to a broader transnational framework of exchange. In this model, resilience emerges through reciprocity: artists, curators, institutions, and audiences collectively create the conditions that allow the project to exist and evolve.
The institution(ing)s project extends this understanding. Bringing together eight organisations of different scales, capacities, and contexts across Europe, from museums and post-academic institutions to grassroots organisations and artistic networks, it operates as a collaborative experiment in institutional transformation. Rather than seeking uniform solutions, the project embraces difference as a resource. Knowledge, methodologies, infrastructures, and experiences circulate among partners, allowing each organisation to learn from the others' situated realities. In this sense, resilience is produced through interdependence: the capacity of each institution is strengthened by its connections to others.
Importantly, this interdependence is not limited to human actors. Drawing from permaculture and ecological thinking, resilience emerges from broader relational networks that include spaces, infrastructures, materials, gardens, ecosystems, and other more-than-human actors. The Jan van Eyck garden, for example, functions as a multispecies archive sustained by ongoing relations of care between humans, plants, insects, and microorganisms. Likewise, the institution(ing)s demonstrates how different organisations, operating under very different conditions and capacities, can strengthen one another through the sharing of knowledge, resources, methodologies, and experiences. Difference itself becomes a productive condition for learning and transformation.
From this perspective, resilience is less about resisting change and more about cultivating the relationships that make change possible. Reciprocity and interdependence create the conditions for collective adaptation, enabling institutions and communities not only to withstand challenges but also to evolve, regenerate, and imagine alternative futures together.
JF - How does a more-than-human perspective alter our understanding of institutional care?
LS - The example that comes to my mind in this matter is Giulia Bellinetti’s research at the Jan van Eyck Academie. Rather than viewing cultural institutions as autonomous entities operating separately from their surroundings, Bellinetti argues that institutions should be understood as part of broader ecological systems composed of humans, non-human beings, materials, infrastructures, and planetary processes.
Drawing on her research at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Bellinetti suggests that institutional care extends beyond supporting staff, artists, or audiences. It also involves attending to the ecological relationships that sustain institutional life. This requires recognising what she describes as the institution’s “planetary presence”: its entanglement with environmental processes, multispecies communities, and the material conditions that make cultural production possible.
A key example in Bellinetti’s work is the Project Garden at the Jan van Eyck Academie. She describes the garden not simply as a green space or an artistic resource, but as a multispecies archive where plants, animals, soil, seeds, artists, and institutional histories coexist across different temporalities. Caring for the garden involves stewardship practices that acknowledge the agency of non-human actors and foster responsibility toward future generations. In this sense, care becomes a relational and ecological practice rather than an exclusively human one.
Bellinetti’s reflections also provide a useful framework for understanding projects such as Mónica de Miranda’s Seed Archive. Developed through both community gardens and a digital platform, the project preserves seeds cultivated by African and Afro-descendant communities in Lisbon while documenting the memories, agricultural knowledge, cultural practices, and relationships with the land embedded within them. The archive extends beyond the preservation of biological material: it safeguards forms of knowledge transmission, food sovereignty, and collective memory that have been sustained across generations. In this sense, the online seed archive can be understood as a more-than-human archive, where seeds are not treated as static objects but as living carriers of ecological, social, historical, and cultural relations. Much like Bellinetti’s reading of the Jan van Eyck garden as a multispecies archive, the Seed Archive foregrounds care as a practice of stewardship that connects past, present, and future communities—human and non-human alike.
Particularly significant is the fact that Mónica de Miranda’s Seed Archive exists simultaneously in physical and digital forms. While the community gardens support living ecological relationships and collective practices of cultivation and care, the online archive creates a space where these knowledges, stories, and seeds can circulate beyond their immediate locality. Rather than functioning solely as a repository of information, the digital archive becomes a platform for sustaining relationships, making visible often-overlooked histories and practices, and creating conditions for their continuity. The inclusion of fictional narratives alongside documentation further challenges purely scientific or extractive modes of knowledge production, opening space for affective, imaginative, and embodied forms of knowing: an epistemological shift that Bellinetti identifies as central to contemporary ecological thinking within art institutions.
Bellinetti further argues that a more-than-human perspective challenges the dominant institutional emphasis on productivity, acceleration, and measurable outputs. By attending to ecological rhythms of regeneration, maintenance, and reproduction, institutions can develop alternative modes of operation that prioritise reciprocity, hospitality, and long-term sustainability. The garden, for instance, introduces cyclical temporalities that contrast with the linear timelines often imposed by funding structures and organisational planning.
From Bellinetti’s perspective, institutional care therefore shifts from the management of structures and resources to the cultivation of relationships. A more-than-human approach asks institutions to create and sustain the conditions that enable diverse forms of life, knowledge, and temporalities to coexist. Care becomes an ongoing practice of recognising interdependence and of understanding the institution itself as embedded within, and responsible to, a wider ecological world.
JF - What existing institutional habits or assumptions need to be composted before new forms can emerge?
LS - As in nature, death and decay are essential in institutions for new forms to emerge. One of the most persistent is the idea that institutions should remain stable, predictable, and risk-averse. Institutions often perceive disruption as a threat to their stability and continuity. However, meaningful transformation frequently begins with small interventions that make visible what had previously remained hidden: structural inequalities, exclusions, power imbalances, or unmet needs. Like a small fissure that reveals the condition of a building beneath its surface, these moments of tension expose the underlying structures of an institution and create opportunities for reflection, learning, and change. What initially appears as a disturbance may, in fact, be the starting point for deeper processes of institutional renewal.
Another assumption that I believe that requires composting is the belief that inclusion can be achieved mostly through public programming. Outreach activities, educational programmes, and community engagement initiatives are important, but they remain superficial if they do not lead to changes in the less visible structures of the institution: governance, decision-making processes, hiring practices, resource allocation, and the distribution of power. Social inclusion cannot be reduced to representation at the level of visibility; it requires structural transformation.
Several contemporary institutional experiments demonstrate that alternative models are already being tested. At the Centro de Arte Moderna (CAM) of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, the creation of a Youth Advisory Group invited young people from different social, cultural, and professional backgrounds to contribute directly to the institution's thinking and programming. Rather than consulting audiences only after decisions have been made, this initiative biought perspectives grounded in lived experience into institutional processes, challenging assumptions about expertise, authority, and who has the legitimacy to shape cultural agendas.
A different approach can be found in General Ecology, a long-term initiative developed at the Serpentine Galleries in London. What began as a public programme focused on ecological questions gradually evolved into an institutional framework that permeates multiple areas of the organisation. Instead of treating environmental concerns as a thematic subject for exhibitions and events, General Ecology encouraged the institution to reconsider its infrastructures, partnerships, networks, and operational practices through an ecological lens. In doing so, it demonstrated how a topic initially addressed in public programming can become embedded within the institution's internal structures and long-term vision.
The Buro Stedelijk, an experimental platform operating within the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, under the coordination of Rita Ouedraogo (until early this year), offers yet another model. Since its inception, the Buro has built its programme through processes of listening to local artists, cultural workers, and communities. Its organisational structure intentionally emphasises horizontality, referring to all participants as collaborators and avoiding rigid distinctions between exhibitions, public programmes, publications, research, and studio practice. By questioning conventional hierarchies and creating more fluid relationships between different forms of cultural production, the Buro opens up possibilities for a more reciprocal and accessible institutional culture.
Although these initiatives operate in very different contexts, they share a common commitment: moving beyond symbolic gestures of inclusion towards changes that affect how institutions make decisions, distribute resources, produce knowledge, and relate to the communities they serve. They suggest that institutional transformation does not necessarily begin with large-scale reform, but often through practices that redistribute attention, participation, and power.
I don’t think that institutions are autonomous entities. On the contrary, they are relational ecosystems embedded within broader social, cultural, political, and ecological networks. Composting the myth of institutional autonomy could open space for practices based on reciprocity, interdependence, listening, and shared responsibility.
In this sense, composting is not about destruction. It is a process of transformation through which obsolete structures, habits, and assumptions decompose and become nutrients for new institutional imaginaries. The cracks are not signs of failure; they are often the conditions through which different futures become possible.
JF - If an institution truly embraced the ethics of relationship, reciprocity, and resilience, how would people feel when they entered it?
LS - I believe that if an institution truly embraced the ethics of relationship, reciprocity, and resilience, people would feel less like visitors entering a system and more like participants entering a living ecosystem. They would feel welcomed not only as audiences or consumers of culture, but as individuals whose experiences, knowledge, and presence matter and shape the institution.
Such an institution would be characterised by a culture of listening. Listening not as a symbolic gesture or consultation exercise, but as a genuine willingness to be affected by others. People would feel that their perspectives could shape the institution, rather than merely being accommodated within pre-existing structures. This requires recognising that expertise does not belong exclusively to professionals, curators, or directors, but also emerges from lived experience, community knowledge, and everyday encounters.
Reciprocity would also be visible in how relationships are built. Instead of extracting stories, participation, or legitimacy from communities, the institution would cultivate mutual exchange. Visitors, artists, staff, neighbours, and collaborators would all contribute to and benefit from the relationships that sustain the institution. The experience would resemble a shared table more than a stage: a space where giving and receiving are constantly negotiated through care, generosity, and collective responsibility.
Drawing from practices such as Mirna Bamieh’s participatory projects around food, storytelling, and hospitality, one could imagine an institution where people encounter not only exhibitions and events, but also opportunities for conviviality, conversation, experimenting and shared experience. Food, storytelling, collective learning, and informal encounters would not be considered secondary to artistic production but integral to it. People would feel invited to stay, to contribute, and to encounter others, rather than simply to observe.
Resilience, in this context, would not be experienced as rigidity or permanence. Instead, it would be felt through the institution's capacity to adapt, learn, experiment and transform in response to changing circumstances. People would sense that the institution is not afraid of uncertainty, disagreement, or experimentation. Rather than protecting itself from disruption, it would recognise moments of tension as opportunities for reflection and growth.
Relationships between artists, communities, institutions, places, histories, and even more-than-human worlds would be acknowledged and nurtured. Entering such a space would mean entering an environment where care extends beyond individual transactions and becomes a shared practice of sustaining collective life.
In short, I believe that people would feel trusted, listened to, and valued. They would leave with the sense that the institution is not simply a place that presents culture, but a place where relationships are cultivated and where different futures can be imagined and built together.
Permacultures of Care. Imagining New Narratives. Routledge, 2026, by Luísa Santos is out now.
Luísa Santos is an Associate Professor and Researcher in Culture Studies / Artistic Studies at the Faculty of Human Sciences of the Universidade Católica Portuguesa, in Lisbon. She holds a PhD in Culture Studies from the Humboldt & Viadrina School of Governance in Berlin, and MA in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art in London. Between 2016 and 2019, she was awarded with a Gulbenkian Professorship. An independent curator since 2009, she conducted research in curatorial practices at the Konstfack in Stockholm in 2013. Since 2019, she has been a research fellow at The European School of Governance (EUSG) and since 2023, she is a Teaching Fellow at the EUROPAEUM. At the CECC, where she is a senior researcher, she takes the roles of coordinator and artistic director of the Institution(ing)s which she has initiated with a consortium of eight European institutions since 2024, headquartered at the CAM-Gulbenkian, in Lisbon. Her main areas of research are contemporary art and social systems.
WITH LUÍSA SANTOS
JF - Permaculture begins with observing relationships rather than isolated entities. How has this shifted the way you understand art institutions, not as buildings or organisations, but as living ecosystems of relationships?
LS - Instead of seeing art institutions primarily as buildings, organisations, or administrative structures, I understand them as living ecosystems composed of relationships between people, communities, policies, environments, resources, and histories. Drawing from both Traditional Ecological Knowledge and ecological science, permaculture emphasises that no element exists in isolation; every component is shaped by its interactions with others.
Applying this perspective to art institutions reveals that they are not autonomous entities but situated systems embedded within broader social, political, economic, and environmental contexts. Just like artistic practices don’t exist in a void, the institutions that are home to those practices, are also situated and contextualised. Their actions influence and are influenced by the communities around them, urban development processes, funding structures, ecological concerns, and historical power relations.
This relational perspective also challenges the tendency to analyse institutions through isolated departments or singular issues. Much like Fukuoka criticises specialised knowledge for overlooking the complexity of ecological interactions, art institutions often address challenges such as diversity, sustainability, or economic precarity separately. Permaculture encourages a more systemic understanding, recognising that these issues are interconnected and cannot be meaningfully addressed in isolation.
The example of Tensta Konsthall, in Stockholm, illustrates this shift particularly well. Its success does not stem solely from its physical infrastructure or exhibition programme, but from the relationships it cultivates with local residents, schools, artists, community organisations, and international networks. The institution functions less as a fixed structure and more as a dynamic network of reciprocal exchanges, where knowledge, resources, and decision-making are shared. I believe that art institutions can be understood as relational ecologies rather than static organisations. Their relevance and sustainability depend not only on what they produce, but on how they nurture connections, distribute power, observe and interact with their local contexts, and contribute to the wellbeing of the broader ecosystems in which they are embedded.
JF - What are the smallest gestures of care you've encountered that have had the most profound institutional impact?
LS - One of the most exemplary gestures of care I have encountered is the approach developed by the Buro Stedelijk, under the curatorship and coordination of Rita Ouedraogo. What might seem like a small gesture (listening) has had a profound institutional impact. From its inception, the Buro began by listening to the needs of the local artistic ecosystem and building its programme from those conversations. This commitment to listening is inseparable from its horizontal structure: everyone involved is considered a collaborator, and distinctions between exhibitions, public programming, and other forms of cultural production are intentionally blurred.
For me, this openness to local artists and communities, combined with a genuine willingness to share power and create spaces of reciprocity, constitutes a powerful act of care. Rather than speaking for the artistic community, the Buro creates the conditions for artists to shape the institution itself. Such seemingly modest gestures of listening, accessibility, and horizontality can have far-reaching effects on how institutions operate, relate to their publics, and imagine their role within a local ecosystem.
JF - Resilience is often framed as endurance or survival, but in the context of adaptability and collective learning, what role do reciprocity and interdependence play in sustaining it?
LS - In the context of adaptability and collective learning, I believe that resilience emerges through relationships of reciprocity and interdependence that allow individuals, institutions, and communities to learn from one another, share resources, and generate new capacities together.
Drawing on permaculture, reciprocity appears as a generative force; and resilience could be understood as the ability of a system to produce multiple yields that benefit all its participants. These yields are not only material but also social, affective, ecological, and symbolic. They are created through networks of care, hospitality, and exchange, where giving and receiving happen simultaneously and where each contribution can generate further opportunities for others.
Whether in institutions like the Jan van Eyck Academie or The Listening Biennial, or projects like the institution(ing)s, resilience is sustained not by autonomy alone but by the recognition that institutions, artists, communities, and non-human actors depend on one another. The Jan van Eyck Academie, a post-academic residency and research institute in Maastricht, exemplifies this through its ecosystem of shared resources, collective learning, and mutual support. Residents are not simply provided with studios and funding; they contribute their knowledge, experiences, and practices to a wider community, creating conditions in which individual development becomes inseparable from collective growth.
Similarly, The Listening Biennial operates as a decentralised international network that relies on partnerships with host institutions across different geographies. Because it does not possess a permanent exhibition infrastructure of its own, it depends on local organisations to host its programmes, while those organisations benefit from being connected to a broader transnational framework of exchange. In this model, resilience emerges through reciprocity: artists, curators, institutions, and audiences collectively create the conditions that allow the project to exist and evolve.
The institution(ing)s project extends this understanding. Bringing together eight organisations of different scales, capacities, and contexts across Europe, from museums and post-academic institutions to grassroots organisations and artistic networks, it operates as a collaborative experiment in institutional transformation. Rather than seeking uniform solutions, the project embraces difference as a resource. Knowledge, methodologies, infrastructures, and experiences circulate among partners, allowing each organisation to learn from the others' situated realities. In this sense, resilience is produced through interdependence: the capacity of each institution is strengthened by its connections to others.
Importantly, this interdependence is not limited to human actors. Drawing from permaculture and ecological thinking, resilience emerges from broader relational networks that include spaces, infrastructures, materials, gardens, ecosystems, and other more-than-human actors. The Jan van Eyck garden, for example, functions as a multispecies archive sustained by ongoing relations of care between humans, plants, insects, and microorganisms. Likewise, the institution(ing)s demonstrates how different organisations, operating under very different conditions and capacities, can strengthen one another through the sharing of knowledge, resources, methodologies, and experiences. Difference itself becomes a productive condition for learning and transformation.
From this perspective, resilience is less about resisting change and more about cultivating the relationships that make change possible. Reciprocity and interdependence create the conditions for collective adaptation, enabling institutions and communities not only to withstand challenges but also to evolve, regenerate, and imagine alternative futures together.
JF - How does a more-than-human perspective alter our understanding of institutional care?
LS - The example that comes to my mind in this matter is Giulia Bellinetti’s research at the Jan van Eyck Academie. Rather than viewing cultural institutions as autonomous entities operating separately from their surroundings, Bellinetti argues that institutions should be understood as part of broader ecological systems composed of humans, non-human beings, materials, infrastructures, and planetary processes.
Drawing on her research at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Bellinetti suggests that institutional care extends beyond supporting staff, artists, or audiences. It also involves attending to the ecological relationships that sustain institutional life. This requires recognising what she describes as the institution’s “planetary presence”: its entanglement with environmental processes, multispecies communities, and the material conditions that make cultural production possible.
A key example in Bellinetti’s work is the Project Garden at the Jan van Eyck Academie. She describes the garden not simply as a green space or an artistic resource, but as a multispecies archive where plants, animals, soil, seeds, artists, and institutional histories coexist across different temporalities. Caring for the garden involves stewardship practices that acknowledge the agency of non-human actors and foster responsibility toward future generations. In this sense, care becomes a relational and ecological practice rather than an exclusively human one.
Bellinetti’s reflections also provide a useful framework for understanding projects such as Mónica de Miranda’s Seed Archive. Developed through both community gardens and a digital platform, the project preserves seeds cultivated by African and Afro-descendant communities in Lisbon while documenting the memories, agricultural knowledge, cultural practices, and relationships with the land embedded within them. The archive extends beyond the preservation of biological material: it safeguards forms of knowledge transmission, food sovereignty, and collective memory that have been sustained across generations. In this sense, the online seed archive can be understood as a more-than-human archive, where seeds are not treated as static objects but as living carriers of ecological, social, historical, and cultural relations. Much like Bellinetti’s reading of the Jan van Eyck garden as a multispecies archive, the Seed Archive foregrounds care as a practice of stewardship that connects past, present, and future communities—human and non-human alike.
Particularly significant is the fact that Mónica de Miranda’s Seed Archive exists simultaneously in physical and digital forms. While the community gardens support living ecological relationships and collective practices of cultivation and care, the online archive creates a space where these knowledges, stories, and seeds can circulate beyond their immediate locality. Rather than functioning solely as a repository of information, the digital archive becomes a platform for sustaining relationships, making visible often-overlooked histories and practices, and creating conditions for their continuity. The inclusion of fictional narratives alongside documentation further challenges purely scientific or extractive modes of knowledge production, opening space for affective, imaginative, and embodied forms of knowing: an epistemological shift that Bellinetti identifies as central to contemporary ecological thinking within art institutions.
Bellinetti further argues that a more-than-human perspective challenges the dominant institutional emphasis on productivity, acceleration, and measurable outputs. By attending to ecological rhythms of regeneration, maintenance, and reproduction, institutions can develop alternative modes of operation that prioritise reciprocity, hospitality, and long-term sustainability. The garden, for instance, introduces cyclical temporalities that contrast with the linear timelines often imposed by funding structures and organisational planning.
From Bellinetti’s perspective, institutional care therefore shifts from the management of structures and resources to the cultivation of relationships. A more-than-human approach asks institutions to create and sustain the conditions that enable diverse forms of life, knowledge, and temporalities to coexist. Care becomes an ongoing practice of recognising interdependence and of understanding the institution itself as embedded within, and responsible to, a wider ecological world.
JF - What existing institutional habits or assumptions need to be composted before new forms can emerge?
LS - As in nature, death and decay are essential in institutions for new forms to emerge. One of the most persistent is the idea that institutions should remain stable, predictable, and risk-averse. Institutions often perceive disruption as a threat to their stability and continuity. However, meaningful transformation frequently begins with small interventions that make visible what had previously remained hidden: structural inequalities, exclusions, power imbalances, or unmet needs. Like a small fissure that reveals the condition of a building beneath its surface, these moments of tension expose the underlying structures of an institution and create opportunities for reflection, learning, and change. What initially appears as a disturbance may, in fact, be the starting point for deeper processes of institutional renewal.
Another assumption that I believe that requires composting is the belief that inclusion can be achieved mostly through public programming. Outreach activities, educational programmes, and community engagement initiatives are important, but they remain superficial if they do not lead to changes in the less visible structures of the institution: governance, decision-making processes, hiring practices, resource allocation, and the distribution of power. Social inclusion cannot be reduced to representation at the level of visibility; it requires structural transformation.
Several contemporary institutional experiments demonstrate that alternative models are already being tested. At the Centro de Arte Moderna (CAM) of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, the creation of a Youth Advisory Group invited young people from different social, cultural, and professional backgrounds to contribute directly to the institution's thinking and programming. Rather than consulting audiences only after decisions have been made, this initiative biought perspectives grounded in lived experience into institutional processes, challenging assumptions about expertise, authority, and who has the legitimacy to shape cultural agendas.
A different approach can be found in General Ecology, a long-term initiative developed at the Serpentine Galleries in London. What began as a public programme focused on ecological questions gradually evolved into an institutional framework that permeates multiple areas of the organisation. Instead of treating environmental concerns as a thematic subject for exhibitions and events, General Ecology encouraged the institution to reconsider its infrastructures, partnerships, networks, and operational practices through an ecological lens. In doing so, it demonstrated how a topic initially addressed in public programming can become embedded within the institution's internal structures and long-term vision.
The Buro Stedelijk, an experimental platform operating within the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, under the coordination of Rita Ouedraogo (until early this year), offers yet another model. Since its inception, the Buro has built its programme through processes of listening to local artists, cultural workers, and communities. Its organisational structure intentionally emphasises horizontality, referring to all participants as collaborators and avoiding rigid distinctions between exhibitions, public programmes, publications, research, and studio practice. By questioning conventional hierarchies and creating more fluid relationships between different forms of cultural production, the Buro opens up possibilities for a more reciprocal and accessible institutional culture.
Although these initiatives operate in very different contexts, they share a common commitment: moving beyond symbolic gestures of inclusion towards changes that affect how institutions make decisions, distribute resources, produce knowledge, and relate to the communities they serve. They suggest that institutional transformation does not necessarily begin with large-scale reform, but often through practices that redistribute attention, participation, and power.
I don’t think that institutions are autonomous entities. On the contrary, they are relational ecosystems embedded within broader social, cultural, political, and ecological networks. Composting the myth of institutional autonomy could open space for practices based on reciprocity, interdependence, listening, and shared responsibility.
In this sense, composting is not about destruction. It is a process of transformation through which obsolete structures, habits, and assumptions decompose and become nutrients for new institutional imaginaries. The cracks are not signs of failure; they are often the conditions through which different futures become possible.
JF - If an institution truly embraced the ethics of relationship, reciprocity, and resilience, how would people feel when they entered it?
LS - I believe that if an institution truly embraced the ethics of relationship, reciprocity, and resilience, people would feel less like visitors entering a system and more like participants entering a living ecosystem. They would feel welcomed not only as audiences or consumers of culture, but as individuals whose experiences, knowledge, and presence matter and shape the institution.
Such an institution would be characterised by a culture of listening. Listening not as a symbolic gesture or consultation exercise, but as a genuine willingness to be affected by others. People would feel that their perspectives could shape the institution, rather than merely being accommodated within pre-existing structures. This requires recognising that expertise does not belong exclusively to professionals, curators, or directors, but also emerges from lived experience, community knowledge, and everyday encounters.
Reciprocity would also be visible in how relationships are built. Instead of extracting stories, participation, or legitimacy from communities, the institution would cultivate mutual exchange. Visitors, artists, staff, neighbours, and collaborators would all contribute to and benefit from the relationships that sustain the institution. The experience would resemble a shared table more than a stage: a space where giving and receiving are constantly negotiated through care, generosity, and collective responsibility.
Drawing from practices such as Mirna Bamieh’s participatory projects around food, storytelling, and hospitality, one could imagine an institution where people encounter not only exhibitions and events, but also opportunities for conviviality, conversation, experimenting and shared experience. Food, storytelling, collective learning, and informal encounters would not be considered secondary to artistic production but integral to it. People would feel invited to stay, to contribute, and to encounter others, rather than simply to observe.
Resilience, in this context, would not be experienced as rigidity or permanence. Instead, it would be felt through the institution's capacity to adapt, learn, experiment and transform in response to changing circumstances. People would sense that the institution is not afraid of uncertainty, disagreement, or experimentation. Rather than protecting itself from disruption, it would recognise moments of tension as opportunities for reflection and growth.
Relationships between artists, communities, institutions, places, histories, and even more-than-human worlds would be acknowledged and nurtured. Entering such a space would mean entering an environment where care extends beyond individual transactions and becomes a shared practice of sustaining collective life.
In short, I believe that people would feel trusted, listened to, and valued. They would leave with the sense that the institution is not simply a place that presents culture, but a place where relationships are cultivated and where different futures can be imagined and built together.
Permacultures of Care. Imagining New Narratives. Routledge, 2026, by Luísa Santos is out now.
JF - Permaculture begins with observing relationships rather than isolated entities. How has this shifted the way you understand art institutions, not as buildings or organisations, but as living ecosystems of relationships?
LS - Instead of seeing art institutions primarily as buildings, organisations, or administrative structures, I understand them as living ecosystems composed of relationships between people, communities, policies, environments, resources, and histories. Drawing from both Traditional Ecological Knowledge and ecological science, permaculture emphasises that no element exists in isolation; every component is shaped by its interactions with others.
Applying this perspective to art institutions reveals that they are not autonomous entities but situated systems embedded within broader social, political, economic, and environmental contexts. Just like artistic practices don’t exist in a void, the institutions that are home to those practices, are also situated and contextualised. Their actions influence and are influenced by the communities around them, urban development processes, funding structures, ecological concerns, and historical power relations.
This relational perspective also challenges the tendency to analyse institutions through isolated departments or singular issues. Much like Fukuoka criticises specialised knowledge for overlooking the complexity of ecological interactions, art institutions often address challenges such as diversity, sustainability, or economic precarity separately. Permaculture encourages a more systemic understanding, recognising that these issues are interconnected and cannot be meaningfully addressed in isolation.
The example of Tensta Konsthall, in Stockholm, illustrates this shift particularly well. Its success does not stem solely from its physical infrastructure or exhibition programme, but from the relationships it cultivates with local residents, schools, artists, community organisations, and international networks. The institution functions less as a fixed structure and more as a dynamic network of reciprocal exchanges, where knowledge, resources, and decision-making are shared. I believe that art institutions can be understood as relational ecologies rather than static organisations. Their relevance and sustainability depend not only on what they produce, but on how they nurture connections, distribute power, observe and interact with their local contexts, and contribute to the wellbeing of the broader ecosystems in which they are embedded.
JF - What are the smallest gestures of care you've encountered that have had the most profound institutional impact?
LS - One of the most exemplary gestures of care I have encountered is the approach developed by the Buro Stedelijk, under the curatorship and coordination of Rita Ouedraogo. What might seem like a small gesture (listening) has had a profound institutional impact. From its inception, the Buro began by listening to the needs of the local artistic ecosystem and building its programme from those conversations. This commitment to listening is inseparable from its horizontal structure: everyone involved is considered a collaborator, and distinctions between exhibitions, public programming, and other forms of cultural production are intentionally blurred.
For me, this openness to local artists and communities, combined with a genuine willingness to share power and create spaces of reciprocity, constitutes a powerful act of care. Rather than speaking for the artistic community, the Buro creates the conditions for artists to shape the institution itself. Such seemingly modest gestures of listening, accessibility, and horizontality can have far-reaching effects on how institutions operate, relate to their publics, and imagine their role within a local ecosystem.
JF - Resilience is often framed as endurance or survival, but in the context of adaptability and collective learning, what role do reciprocity and interdependence play in sustaining it?
LS - In the context of adaptability and collective learning, I believe that resilience emerges through relationships of reciprocity and interdependence that allow individuals, institutions, and communities to learn from one another, share resources, and generate new capacities together.
Drawing on permaculture, reciprocity appears as a generative force; and resilience could be understood as the ability of a system to produce multiple yields that benefit all its participants. These yields are not only material but also social, affective, ecological, and symbolic. They are created through networks of care, hospitality, and exchange, where giving and receiving happen simultaneously and where each contribution can generate further opportunities for others.
Whether in institutions like the Jan van Eyck Academie or The Listening Biennial, or projects like the institution(ing)s, resilience is sustained not by autonomy alone but by the recognition that institutions, artists, communities, and non-human actors depend on one another. The Jan van Eyck Academie, a post-academic residency and research institute in Maastricht, exemplifies this through its ecosystem of shared resources, collective learning, and mutual support. Residents are not simply provided with studios and funding; they contribute their knowledge, experiences, and practices to a wider community, creating conditions in which individual development becomes inseparable from collective growth.
Similarly, The Listening Biennial operates as a decentralised international network that relies on partnerships with host institutions across different geographies. Because it does not possess a permanent exhibition infrastructure of its own, it depends on local organisations to host its programmes, while those organisations benefit from being connected to a broader transnational framework of exchange. In this model, resilience emerges through reciprocity: artists, curators, institutions, and audiences collectively create the conditions that allow the project to exist and evolve.
The institution(ing)s project extends this understanding. Bringing together eight organisations of different scales, capacities, and contexts across Europe, from museums and post-academic institutions to grassroots organisations and artistic networks, it operates as a collaborative experiment in institutional transformation. Rather than seeking uniform solutions, the project embraces difference as a resource. Knowledge, methodologies, infrastructures, and experiences circulate among partners, allowing each organisation to learn from the others' situated realities. In this sense, resilience is produced through interdependence: the capacity of each institution is strengthened by its connections to others.
Importantly, this interdependence is not limited to human actors. Drawing from permaculture and ecological thinking, resilience emerges from broader relational networks that include spaces, infrastructures, materials, gardens, ecosystems, and other more-than-human actors. The Jan van Eyck garden, for example, functions as a multispecies archive sustained by ongoing relations of care between humans, plants, insects, and microorganisms. Likewise, the institution(ing)s demonstrates how different organisations, operating under very different conditions and capacities, can strengthen one another through the sharing of knowledge, resources, methodologies, and experiences. Difference itself becomes a productive condition for learning and transformation.
From this perspective, resilience is less about resisting change and more about cultivating the relationships that make change possible. Reciprocity and interdependence create the conditions for collective adaptation, enabling institutions and communities not only to withstand challenges but also to evolve, regenerate, and imagine alternative futures together.
JF - How does a more-than-human perspective alter our understanding of institutional care?
LS - The example that comes to my mind in this matter is Giulia Bellinetti’s research at the Jan van Eyck Academie. Rather than viewing cultural institutions as autonomous entities operating separately from their surroundings, Bellinetti argues that institutions should be understood as part of broader ecological systems composed of humans, non-human beings, materials, infrastructures, and planetary processes.
Drawing on her research at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Bellinetti suggests that institutional care extends beyond supporting staff, artists, or audiences. It also involves attending to the ecological relationships that sustain institutional life. This requires recognising what she describes as the institution’s “planetary presence”: its entanglement with environmental processes, multispecies communities, and the material conditions that make cultural production possible.
A key example in Bellinetti’s work is the Project Garden at the Jan van Eyck Academie. She describes the garden not simply as a green space or an artistic resource, but as a multispecies archive where plants, animals, soil, seeds, artists, and institutional histories coexist across different temporalities. Caring for the garden involves stewardship practices that acknowledge the agency of non-human actors and foster responsibility toward future generations. In this sense, care becomes a relational and ecological practice rather than an exclusively human one.
Bellinetti’s reflections also provide a useful framework for understanding projects such as Mónica de Miranda’s Seed Archive. Developed through both community gardens and a digital platform, the project preserves seeds cultivated by African and Afro-descendant communities in Lisbon while documenting the memories, agricultural knowledge, cultural practices, and relationships with the land embedded within them. The archive extends beyond the preservation of biological material: it safeguards forms of knowledge transmission, food sovereignty, and collective memory that have been sustained across generations. In this sense, the online seed archive can be understood as a more-than-human archive, where seeds are not treated as static objects but as living carriers of ecological, social, historical, and cultural relations. Much like Bellinetti’s reading of the Jan van Eyck garden as a multispecies archive, the Seed Archive foregrounds care as a practice of stewardship that connects past, present, and future communities—human and non-human alike.
Particularly significant is the fact that Mónica de Miranda’s Seed Archive exists simultaneously in physical and digital forms. While the community gardens support living ecological relationships and collective practices of cultivation and care, the online archive creates a space where these knowledges, stories, and seeds can circulate beyond their immediate locality. Rather than functioning solely as a repository of information, the digital archive becomes a platform for sustaining relationships, making visible often-overlooked histories and practices, and creating conditions for their continuity. The inclusion of fictional narratives alongside documentation further challenges purely scientific or extractive modes of knowledge production, opening space for affective, imaginative, and embodied forms of knowing: an epistemological shift that Bellinetti identifies as central to contemporary ecological thinking within art institutions.
Bellinetti further argues that a more-than-human perspective challenges the dominant institutional emphasis on productivity, acceleration, and measurable outputs. By attending to ecological rhythms of regeneration, maintenance, and reproduction, institutions can develop alternative modes of operation that prioritise reciprocity, hospitality, and long-term sustainability. The garden, for instance, introduces cyclical temporalities that contrast with the linear timelines often imposed by funding structures and organisational planning.
From Bellinetti’s perspective, institutional care therefore shifts from the management of structures and resources to the cultivation of relationships. A more-than-human approach asks institutions to create and sustain the conditions that enable diverse forms of life, knowledge, and temporalities to coexist. Care becomes an ongoing practice of recognising interdependence and of understanding the institution itself as embedded within, and responsible to, a wider ecological world.
JF - What existing institutional habits or assumptions need to be composted before new forms can emerge?
LS - As in nature, death and decay are essential in institutions for new forms to emerge. One of the most persistent is the idea that institutions should remain stable, predictable, and risk-averse. Institutions often perceive disruption as a threat to their stability and continuity. However, meaningful transformation frequently begins with small interventions that make visible what had previously remained hidden: structural inequalities, exclusions, power imbalances, or unmet needs. Like a small fissure that reveals the condition of a building beneath its surface, these moments of tension expose the underlying structures of an institution and create opportunities for reflection, learning, and change. What initially appears as a disturbance may, in fact, be the starting point for deeper processes of institutional renewal.
Another assumption that I believe that requires composting is the belief that inclusion can be achieved mostly through public programming. Outreach activities, educational programmes, and community engagement initiatives are important, but they remain superficial if they do not lead to changes in the less visible structures of the institution: governance, decision-making processes, hiring practices, resource allocation, and the distribution of power. Social inclusion cannot be reduced to representation at the level of visibility; it requires structural transformation.
Several contemporary institutional experiments demonstrate that alternative models are already being tested. At the Centro de Arte Moderna (CAM) of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, the creation of a Youth Advisory Group invited young people from different social, cultural, and professional backgrounds to contribute directly to the institution's thinking and programming. Rather than consulting audiences only after decisions have been made, this initiative biought perspectives grounded in lived experience into institutional processes, challenging assumptions about expertise, authority, and who has the legitimacy to shape cultural agendas.
A different approach can be found in General Ecology, a long-term initiative developed at the Serpentine Galleries in London. What began as a public programme focused on ecological questions gradually evolved into an institutional framework that permeates multiple areas of the organisation. Instead of treating environmental concerns as a thematic subject for exhibitions and events, General Ecology encouraged the institution to reconsider its infrastructures, partnerships, networks, and operational practices through an ecological lens. In doing so, it demonstrated how a topic initially addressed in public programming can become embedded within the institution's internal structures and long-term vision.
The Buro Stedelijk, an experimental platform operating within the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, under the coordination of Rita Ouedraogo (until early this year), offers yet another model. Since its inception, the Buro has built its programme through processes of listening to local artists, cultural workers, and communities. Its organisational structure intentionally emphasises horizontality, referring to all participants as collaborators and avoiding rigid distinctions between exhibitions, public programmes, publications, research, and studio practice. By questioning conventional hierarchies and creating more fluid relationships between different forms of cultural production, the Buro opens up possibilities for a more reciprocal and accessible institutional culture.
Although these initiatives operate in very different contexts, they share a common commitment: moving beyond symbolic gestures of inclusion towards changes that affect how institutions make decisions, distribute resources, produce knowledge, and relate to the communities they serve. They suggest that institutional transformation does not necessarily begin with large-scale reform, but often through practices that redistribute attention, participation, and power.
I don’t think that institutions are autonomous entities. On the contrary, they are relational ecosystems embedded within broader social, cultural, political, and ecological networks. Composting the myth of institutional autonomy could open space for practices based on reciprocity, interdependence, listening, and shared responsibility.
In this sense, composting is not about destruction. It is a process of transformation through which obsolete structures, habits, and assumptions decompose and become nutrients for new institutional imaginaries. The cracks are not signs of failure; they are often the conditions through which different futures become possible.
JF - If an institution truly embraced the ethics of relationship, reciprocity, and resilience, how would people feel when they entered it?
LS - I believe that if an institution truly embraced the ethics of relationship, reciprocity, and resilience, people would feel less like visitors entering a system and more like participants entering a living ecosystem. They would feel welcomed not only as audiences or consumers of culture, but as individuals whose experiences, knowledge, and presence matter and shape the institution.
Such an institution would be characterised by a culture of listening. Listening not as a symbolic gesture or consultation exercise, but as a genuine willingness to be affected by others. People would feel that their perspectives could shape the institution, rather than merely being accommodated within pre-existing structures. This requires recognising that expertise does not belong exclusively to professionals, curators, or directors, but also emerges from lived experience, community knowledge, and everyday encounters.
Reciprocity would also be visible in how relationships are built. Instead of extracting stories, participation, or legitimacy from communities, the institution would cultivate mutual exchange. Visitors, artists, staff, neighbours, and collaborators would all contribute to and benefit from the relationships that sustain the institution. The experience would resemble a shared table more than a stage: a space where giving and receiving are constantly negotiated through care, generosity, and collective responsibility.
Drawing from practices such as Mirna Bamieh’s participatory projects around food, storytelling, and hospitality, one could imagine an institution where people encounter not only exhibitions and events, but also opportunities for conviviality, conversation, experimenting and shared experience. Food, storytelling, collective learning, and informal encounters would not be considered secondary to artistic production but integral to it. People would feel invited to stay, to contribute, and to encounter others, rather than simply to observe.
Resilience, in this context, would not be experienced as rigidity or permanence. Instead, it would be felt through the institution's capacity to adapt, learn, experiment and transform in response to changing circumstances. People would sense that the institution is not afraid of uncertainty, disagreement, or experimentation. Rather than protecting itself from disruption, it would recognise moments of tension as opportunities for reflection and growth.
Relationships between artists, communities, institutions, places, histories, and even more-than-human worlds would be acknowledged and nurtured. Entering such a space would mean entering an environment where care extends beyond individual transactions and becomes a shared practice of sustaining collective life.
In short, I believe that people would feel trusted, listened to, and valued. They would leave with the sense that the institution is not simply a place that presents culture, but a place where relationships are cultivated and where different futures can be imagined and built together.
Permacultures of Care. Imagining New Narratives. Routledge, 2026, by Luísa Santos is out now.
Luísa Santos is an Associate Professor and Researcher in Culture Studies / Artistic Studies at the Faculty of Human Sciences of the Universidade Católica Portuguesa, in Lisbon. She holds a PhD in Culture Studies from the Humboldt & Viadrina School of Governance in Berlin, and MA in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art in London. Between 2016 and 2019, she was awarded with a Gulbenkian Professorship. An independent curator since 2009, she conducted research in curatorial practices at the Konstfack in Stockholm in 2013. Since 2019, she has been a research fellow at The European School of Governance (EUSG) and since 2023, she is a Teaching Fellow at the EUROPAEUM. At the CECC, where she is a senior researcher, she takes the roles of coordinator and artistic director of the Institution(ing)s which she has initiated with a consortium of eight European institutions since 2024, headquartered at the CAM-Gulbenkian, in Lisbon. Her main areas of research are contemporary art and social systems.
WITH LUÍSA SANTOS
JF - Permaculture begins with observing relationships rather than isolated entities. How has this shifted the way you understand art institutions, not as buildings or organisations, but as living ecosystems of relationships?
LS - Instead of seeing art institutions primarily as buildings, organisations, or administrative structures, I understand them as living ecosystems composed of relationships between people, communities, policies, environments, resources, and histories. Drawing from both Traditional Ecological Knowledge and ecological science, permaculture emphasises that no element exists in isolation; every component is shaped by its interactions with others.
Applying this perspective to art institutions reveals that they are not autonomous entities but situated systems embedded within broader social, political, economic, and environmental contexts. Just like artistic practices don’t exist in a void, the institutions that are home to those practices, are also situated and contextualised. Their actions influence and are influenced by the communities around them, urban development processes, funding structures, ecological concerns, and historical power relations.
This relational perspective also challenges the tendency to analyse institutions through isolated departments or singular issues. Much like Fukuoka criticises specialised knowledge for overlooking the complexity of ecological interactions, art institutions often address challenges such as diversity, sustainability, or economic precarity separately. Permaculture encourages a more systemic understanding, recognising that these issues are interconnected and cannot be meaningfully addressed in isolation.
The example of Tensta Konsthall, in Stockholm, illustrates this shift particularly well. Its success does not stem solely from its physical infrastructure or exhibition programme, but from the relationships it cultivates with local residents, schools, artists, community organisations, and international networks. The institution functions less as a fixed structure and more as a dynamic network of reciprocal exchanges, where knowledge, resources, and decision-making are shared. I believe that art institutions can be understood as relational ecologies rather than static organisations. Their relevance and sustainability depend not only on what they produce, but on how they nurture connections, distribute power, observe and interact with their local contexts, and contribute to the wellbeing of the broader ecosystems in which they are embedded.
JF - What are the smallest gestures of care you've encountered that have had the most profound institutional impact?
LS - One of the most exemplary gestures of care I have encountered is the approach developed by the Buro Stedelijk, under the curatorship and coordination of Rita Ouedraogo. What might seem like a small gesture (listening) has had a profound institutional impact. From its inception, the Buro began by listening to the needs of the local artistic ecosystem and building its programme from those conversations. This commitment to listening is inseparable from its horizontal structure: everyone involved is considered a collaborator, and distinctions between exhibitions, public programming, and other forms of cultural production are intentionally blurred.
For me, this openness to local artists and communities, combined with a genuine willingness to share power and create spaces of reciprocity, constitutes a powerful act of care. Rather than speaking for the artistic community, the Buro creates the conditions for artists to shape the institution itself. Such seemingly modest gestures of listening, accessibility, and horizontality can have far-reaching effects on how institutions operate, relate to their publics, and imagine their role within a local ecosystem.
JF - Resilience is often framed as endurance or survival, but in the context of adaptability and collective learning, what role do reciprocity and interdependence play in sustaining it?
LS - In the context of adaptability and collective learning, I believe that resilience emerges through relationships of reciprocity and interdependence that allow individuals, institutions, and communities to learn from one another, share resources, and generate new capacities together.
Drawing on permaculture, reciprocity appears as a generative force; and resilience could be understood as the ability of a system to produce multiple yields that benefit all its participants. These yields are not only material but also social, affective, ecological, and symbolic. They are created through networks of care, hospitality, and exchange, where giving and receiving happen simultaneously and where each contribution can generate further opportunities for others.
Whether in institutions like the Jan van Eyck Academie or The Listening Biennial, or projects like the institution(ing)s, resilience is sustained not by autonomy alone but by the recognition that institutions, artists, communities, and non-human actors depend on one another. The Jan van Eyck Academie, a post-academic residency and research institute in Maastricht, exemplifies this through its ecosystem of shared resources, collective learning, and mutual support. Residents are not simply provided with studios and funding; they contribute their knowledge, experiences, and practices to a wider community, creating conditions in which individual development becomes inseparable from collective growth.
Similarly, The Listening Biennial operates as a decentralised international network that relies on partnerships with host institutions across different geographies. Because it does not possess a permanent exhibition infrastructure of its own, it depends on local organisations to host its programmes, while those organisations benefit from being connected to a broader transnational framework of exchange. In this model, resilience emerges through reciprocity: artists, curators, institutions, and audiences collectively create the conditions that allow the project to exist and evolve.
The institution(ing)s project extends this understanding. Bringing together eight organisations of different scales, capacities, and contexts across Europe, from museums and post-academic institutions to grassroots organisations and artistic networks, it operates as a collaborative experiment in institutional transformation. Rather than seeking uniform solutions, the project embraces difference as a resource. Knowledge, methodologies, infrastructures, and experiences circulate among partners, allowing each organisation to learn from the others' situated realities. In this sense, resilience is produced through interdependence: the capacity of each institution is strengthened by its connections to others.
Importantly, this interdependence is not limited to human actors. Drawing from permaculture and ecological thinking, resilience emerges from broader relational networks that include spaces, infrastructures, materials, gardens, ecosystems, and other more-than-human actors. The Jan van Eyck garden, for example, functions as a multispecies archive sustained by ongoing relations of care between humans, plants, insects, and microorganisms. Likewise, the institution(ing)s demonstrates how different organisations, operating under very different conditions and capacities, can strengthen one another through the sharing of knowledge, resources, methodologies, and experiences. Difference itself becomes a productive condition for learning and transformation.
From this perspective, resilience is less about resisting change and more about cultivating the relationships that make change possible. Reciprocity and interdependence create the conditions for collective adaptation, enabling institutions and communities not only to withstand challenges but also to evolve, regenerate, and imagine alternative futures together.
JF - How does a more-than-human perspective alter our understanding of institutional care?
LS - The example that comes to my mind in this matter is Giulia Bellinetti’s research at the Jan van Eyck Academie. Rather than viewing cultural institutions as autonomous entities operating separately from their surroundings, Bellinetti argues that institutions should be understood as part of broader ecological systems composed of humans, non-human beings, materials, infrastructures, and planetary processes.
Drawing on her research at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Bellinetti suggests that institutional care extends beyond supporting staff, artists, or audiences. It also involves attending to the ecological relationships that sustain institutional life. This requires recognising what she describes as the institution’s “planetary presence”: its entanglement with environmental processes, multispecies communities, and the material conditions that make cultural production possible.
A key example in Bellinetti’s work is the Project Garden at the Jan van Eyck Academie. She describes the garden not simply as a green space or an artistic resource, but as a multispecies archive where plants, animals, soil, seeds, artists, and institutional histories coexist across different temporalities. Caring for the garden involves stewardship practices that acknowledge the agency of non-human actors and foster responsibility toward future generations. In this sense, care becomes a relational and ecological practice rather than an exclusively human one.
Bellinetti’s reflections also provide a useful framework for understanding projects such as Mónica de Miranda’s Seed Archive. Developed through both community gardens and a digital platform, the project preserves seeds cultivated by African and Afro-descendant communities in Lisbon while documenting the memories, agricultural knowledge, cultural practices, and relationships with the land embedded within them. The archive extends beyond the preservation of biological material: it safeguards forms of knowledge transmission, food sovereignty, and collective memory that have been sustained across generations. In this sense, the online seed archive can be understood as a more-than-human archive, where seeds are not treated as static objects but as living carriers of ecological, social, historical, and cultural relations. Much like Bellinetti’s reading of the Jan van Eyck garden as a multispecies archive, the Seed Archive foregrounds care as a practice of stewardship that connects past, present, and future communities—human and non-human alike.
Particularly significant is the fact that Mónica de Miranda’s Seed Archive exists simultaneously in physical and digital forms. While the community gardens support living ecological relationships and collective practices of cultivation and care, the online archive creates a space where these knowledges, stories, and seeds can circulate beyond their immediate locality. Rather than functioning solely as a repository of information, the digital archive becomes a platform for sustaining relationships, making visible often-overlooked histories and practices, and creating conditions for their continuity. The inclusion of fictional narratives alongside documentation further challenges purely scientific or extractive modes of knowledge production, opening space for affective, imaginative, and embodied forms of knowing: an epistemological shift that Bellinetti identifies as central to contemporary ecological thinking within art institutions.
Bellinetti further argues that a more-than-human perspective challenges the dominant institutional emphasis on productivity, acceleration, and measurable outputs. By attending to ecological rhythms of regeneration, maintenance, and reproduction, institutions can develop alternative modes of operation that prioritise reciprocity, hospitality, and long-term sustainability. The garden, for instance, introduces cyclical temporalities that contrast with the linear timelines often imposed by funding structures and organisational planning.
From Bellinetti’s perspective, institutional care therefore shifts from the management of structures and resources to the cultivation of relationships. A more-than-human approach asks institutions to create and sustain the conditions that enable diverse forms of life, knowledge, and temporalities to coexist. Care becomes an ongoing practice of recognising interdependence and of understanding the institution itself as embedded within, and responsible to, a wider ecological world.
JF - What existing institutional habits or assumptions need to be composted before new forms can emerge?
LS - As in nature, death and decay are essential in institutions for new forms to emerge. One of the most persistent is the idea that institutions should remain stable, predictable, and risk-averse. Institutions often perceive disruption as a threat to their stability and continuity. However, meaningful transformation frequently begins with small interventions that make visible what had previously remained hidden: structural inequalities, exclusions, power imbalances, or unmet needs. Like a small fissure that reveals the condition of a building beneath its surface, these moments of tension expose the underlying structures of an institution and create opportunities for reflection, learning, and change. What initially appears as a disturbance may, in fact, be the starting point for deeper processes of institutional renewal.
Another assumption that I believe that requires composting is the belief that inclusion can be achieved mostly through public programming. Outreach activities, educational programmes, and community engagement initiatives are important, but they remain superficial if they do not lead to changes in the less visible structures of the institution: governance, decision-making processes, hiring practices, resource allocation, and the distribution of power. Social inclusion cannot be reduced to representation at the level of visibility; it requires structural transformation.
Several contemporary institutional experiments demonstrate that alternative models are already being tested. At the Centro de Arte Moderna (CAM) of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, the creation of a Youth Advisory Group invited young people from different social, cultural, and professional backgrounds to contribute directly to the institution's thinking and programming. Rather than consulting audiences only after decisions have been made, this initiative biought perspectives grounded in lived experience into institutional processes, challenging assumptions about expertise, authority, and who has the legitimacy to shape cultural agendas.
A different approach can be found in General Ecology, a long-term initiative developed at the Serpentine Galleries in London. What began as a public programme focused on ecological questions gradually evolved into an institutional framework that permeates multiple areas of the organisation. Instead of treating environmental concerns as a thematic subject for exhibitions and events, General Ecology encouraged the institution to reconsider its infrastructures, partnerships, networks, and operational practices through an ecological lens. In doing so, it demonstrated how a topic initially addressed in public programming can become embedded within the institution's internal structures and long-term vision.
The Buro Stedelijk, an experimental platform operating within the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, under the coordination of Rita Ouedraogo (until early this year), offers yet another model. Since its inception, the Buro has built its programme through processes of listening to local artists, cultural workers, and communities. Its organisational structure intentionally emphasises horizontality, referring to all participants as collaborators and avoiding rigid distinctions between exhibitions, public programmes, publications, research, and studio practice. By questioning conventional hierarchies and creating more fluid relationships between different forms of cultural production, the Buro opens up possibilities for a more reciprocal and accessible institutional culture.
Although these initiatives operate in very different contexts, they share a common commitment: moving beyond symbolic gestures of inclusion towards changes that affect how institutions make decisions, distribute resources, produce knowledge, and relate to the communities they serve. They suggest that institutional transformation does not necessarily begin with large-scale reform, but often through practices that redistribute attention, participation, and power.
I don’t think that institutions are autonomous entities. On the contrary, they are relational ecosystems embedded within broader social, cultural, political, and ecological networks. Composting the myth of institutional autonomy could open space for practices based on reciprocity, interdependence, listening, and shared responsibility.
In this sense, composting is not about destruction. It is a process of transformation through which obsolete structures, habits, and assumptions decompose and become nutrients for new institutional imaginaries. The cracks are not signs of failure; they are often the conditions through which different futures become possible.
JF - If an institution truly embraced the ethics of relationship, reciprocity, and resilience, how would people feel when they entered it?
LS - I believe that if an institution truly embraced the ethics of relationship, reciprocity, and resilience, people would feel less like visitors entering a system and more like participants entering a living ecosystem. They would feel welcomed not only as audiences or consumers of culture, but as individuals whose experiences, knowledge, and presence matter and shape the institution.
Such an institution would be characterised by a culture of listening. Listening not as a symbolic gesture or consultation exercise, but as a genuine willingness to be affected by others. People would feel that their perspectives could shape the institution, rather than merely being accommodated within pre-existing structures. This requires recognising that expertise does not belong exclusively to professionals, curators, or directors, but also emerges from lived experience, community knowledge, and everyday encounters.
Reciprocity would also be visible in how relationships are built. Instead of extracting stories, participation, or legitimacy from communities, the institution would cultivate mutual exchange. Visitors, artists, staff, neighbours, and collaborators would all contribute to and benefit from the relationships that sustain the institution. The experience would resemble a shared table more than a stage: a space where giving and receiving are constantly negotiated through care, generosity, and collective responsibility.
Drawing from practices such as Mirna Bamieh’s participatory projects around food, storytelling, and hospitality, one could imagine an institution where people encounter not only exhibitions and events, but also opportunities for conviviality, conversation, experimenting and shared experience. Food, storytelling, collective learning, and informal encounters would not be considered secondary to artistic production but integral to it. People would feel invited to stay, to contribute, and to encounter others, rather than simply to observe.
Resilience, in this context, would not be experienced as rigidity or permanence. Instead, it would be felt through the institution's capacity to adapt, learn, experiment and transform in response to changing circumstances. People would sense that the institution is not afraid of uncertainty, disagreement, or experimentation. Rather than protecting itself from disruption, it would recognise moments of tension as opportunities for reflection and growth.
Relationships between artists, communities, institutions, places, histories, and even more-than-human worlds would be acknowledged and nurtured. Entering such a space would mean entering an environment where care extends beyond individual transactions and becomes a shared practice of sustaining collective life.
In short, I believe that people would feel trusted, listened to, and valued. They would leave with the sense that the institution is not simply a place that presents culture, but a place where relationships are cultivated and where different futures can be imagined and built together.
Permacultures of Care. Imagining New Narratives. Routledge, 2026, by Luísa Santos is out now.
JF - Permaculture begins with observing relationships rather than isolated entities. How has this shifted the way you understand art institutions, not as buildings or organisations, but as living ecosystems of relationships?
LS - Instead of seeing art institutions primarily as buildings, organisations, or administrative structures, I understand them as living ecosystems composed of relationships between people, communities, policies, environments, resources, and histories. Drawing from both Traditional Ecological Knowledge and ecological science, permaculture emphasises that no element exists in isolation; every component is shaped by its interactions with others.
Applying this perspective to art institutions reveals that they are not autonomous entities but situated systems embedded within broader social, political, economic, and environmental contexts. Just like artistic practices don’t exist in a void, the institutions that are home to those practices, are also situated and contextualised. Their actions influence and are influenced by the communities around them, urban development processes, funding structures, ecological concerns, and historical power relations.
This relational perspective also challenges the tendency to analyse institutions through isolated departments or singular issues. Much like Fukuoka criticises specialised knowledge for overlooking the complexity of ecological interactions, art institutions often address challenges such as diversity, sustainability, or economic precarity separately. Permaculture encourages a more systemic understanding, recognising that these issues are interconnected and cannot be meaningfully addressed in isolation.
The example of Tensta Konsthall, in Stockholm, illustrates this shift particularly well. Its success does not stem solely from its physical infrastructure or exhibition programme, but from the relationships it cultivates with local residents, schools, artists, community organisations, and international networks. The institution functions less as a fixed structure and more as a dynamic network of reciprocal exchanges, where knowledge, resources, and decision-making are shared. I believe that art institutions can be understood as relational ecologies rather than static organisations. Their relevance and sustainability depend not only on what they produce, but on how they nurture connections, distribute power, observe and interact with their local contexts, and contribute to the wellbeing of the broader ecosystems in which they are embedded.
JF - What are the smallest gestures of care you've encountered that have had the most profound institutional impact?
LS - One of the most exemplary gestures of care I have encountered is the approach developed by the Buro Stedelijk, under the curatorship and coordination of Rita Ouedraogo. What might seem like a small gesture (listening) has had a profound institutional impact. From its inception, the Buro began by listening to the needs of the local artistic ecosystem and building its programme from those conversations. This commitment to listening is inseparable from its horizontal structure: everyone involved is considered a collaborator, and distinctions between exhibitions, public programming, and other forms of cultural production are intentionally blurred.
For me, this openness to local artists and communities, combined with a genuine willingness to share power and create spaces of reciprocity, constitutes a powerful act of care. Rather than speaking for the artistic community, the Buro creates the conditions for artists to shape the institution itself. Such seemingly modest gestures of listening, accessibility, and horizontality can have far-reaching effects on how institutions operate, relate to their publics, and imagine their role within a local ecosystem.
JF - Resilience is often framed as endurance or survival, but in the context of adaptability and collective learning, what role do reciprocity and interdependence play in sustaining it?
LS - In the context of adaptability and collective learning, I believe that resilience emerges through relationships of reciprocity and interdependence that allow individuals, institutions, and communities to learn from one another, share resources, and generate new capacities together.
Drawing on permaculture, reciprocity appears as a generative force; and resilience could be understood as the ability of a system to produce multiple yields that benefit all its participants. These yields are not only material but also social, affective, ecological, and symbolic. They are created through networks of care, hospitality, and exchange, where giving and receiving happen simultaneously and where each contribution can generate further opportunities for others.
Whether in institutions like the Jan van Eyck Academie or The Listening Biennial, or projects like the institution(ing)s, resilience is sustained not by autonomy alone but by the recognition that institutions, artists, communities, and non-human actors depend on one another. The Jan van Eyck Academie, a post-academic residency and research institute in Maastricht, exemplifies this through its ecosystem of shared resources, collective learning, and mutual support. Residents are not simply provided with studios and funding; they contribute their knowledge, experiences, and practices to a wider community, creating conditions in which individual development becomes inseparable from collective growth.
Similarly, The Listening Biennial operates as a decentralised international network that relies on partnerships with host institutions across different geographies. Because it does not possess a permanent exhibition infrastructure of its own, it depends on local organisations to host its programmes, while those organisations benefit from being connected to a broader transnational framework of exchange. In this model, resilience emerges through reciprocity: artists, curators, institutions, and audiences collectively create the conditions that allow the project to exist and evolve.
The institution(ing)s project extends this understanding. Bringing together eight organisations of different scales, capacities, and contexts across Europe, from museums and post-academic institutions to grassroots organisations and artistic networks, it operates as a collaborative experiment in institutional transformation. Rather than seeking uniform solutions, the project embraces difference as a resource. Knowledge, methodologies, infrastructures, and experiences circulate among partners, allowing each organisation to learn from the others' situated realities. In this sense, resilience is produced through interdependence: the capacity of each institution is strengthened by its connections to others.
Importantly, this interdependence is not limited to human actors. Drawing from permaculture and ecological thinking, resilience emerges from broader relational networks that include spaces, infrastructures, materials, gardens, ecosystems, and other more-than-human actors. The Jan van Eyck garden, for example, functions as a multispecies archive sustained by ongoing relations of care between humans, plants, insects, and microorganisms. Likewise, the institution(ing)s demonstrates how different organisations, operating under very different conditions and capacities, can strengthen one another through the sharing of knowledge, resources, methodologies, and experiences. Difference itself becomes a productive condition for learning and transformation.
From this perspective, resilience is less about resisting change and more about cultivating the relationships that make change possible. Reciprocity and interdependence create the conditions for collective adaptation, enabling institutions and communities not only to withstand challenges but also to evolve, regenerate, and imagine alternative futures together.
JF - How does a more-than-human perspective alter our understanding of institutional care?
LS - The example that comes to my mind in this matter is Giulia Bellinetti’s research at the Jan van Eyck Academie. Rather than viewing cultural institutions as autonomous entities operating separately from their surroundings, Bellinetti argues that institutions should be understood as part of broader ecological systems composed of humans, non-human beings, materials, infrastructures, and planetary processes.
Drawing on her research at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Bellinetti suggests that institutional care extends beyond supporting staff, artists, or audiences. It also involves attending to the ecological relationships that sustain institutional life. This requires recognising what she describes as the institution’s “planetary presence”: its entanglement with environmental processes, multispecies communities, and the material conditions that make cultural production possible.
A key example in Bellinetti’s work is the Project Garden at the Jan van Eyck Academie. She describes the garden not simply as a green space or an artistic resource, but as a multispecies archive where plants, animals, soil, seeds, artists, and institutional histories coexist across different temporalities. Caring for the garden involves stewardship practices that acknowledge the agency of non-human actors and foster responsibility toward future generations. In this sense, care becomes a relational and ecological practice rather than an exclusively human one.
Bellinetti’s reflections also provide a useful framework for understanding projects such as Mónica de Miranda’s Seed Archive. Developed through both community gardens and a digital platform, the project preserves seeds cultivated by African and Afro-descendant communities in Lisbon while documenting the memories, agricultural knowledge, cultural practices, and relationships with the land embedded within them. The archive extends beyond the preservation of biological material: it safeguards forms of knowledge transmission, food sovereignty, and collective memory that have been sustained across generations. In this sense, the online seed archive can be understood as a more-than-human archive, where seeds are not treated as static objects but as living carriers of ecological, social, historical, and cultural relations. Much like Bellinetti’s reading of the Jan van Eyck garden as a multispecies archive, the Seed Archive foregrounds care as a practice of stewardship that connects past, present, and future communities—human and non-human alike.
Particularly significant is the fact that Mónica de Miranda’s Seed Archive exists simultaneously in physical and digital forms. While the community gardens support living ecological relationships and collective practices of cultivation and care, the online archive creates a space where these knowledges, stories, and seeds can circulate beyond their immediate locality. Rather than functioning solely as a repository of information, the digital archive becomes a platform for sustaining relationships, making visible often-overlooked histories and practices, and creating conditions for their continuity. The inclusion of fictional narratives alongside documentation further challenges purely scientific or extractive modes of knowledge production, opening space for affective, imaginative, and embodied forms of knowing: an epistemological shift that Bellinetti identifies as central to contemporary ecological thinking within art institutions.
Bellinetti further argues that a more-than-human perspective challenges the dominant institutional emphasis on productivity, acceleration, and measurable outputs. By attending to ecological rhythms of regeneration, maintenance, and reproduction, institutions can develop alternative modes of operation that prioritise reciprocity, hospitality, and long-term sustainability. The garden, for instance, introduces cyclical temporalities that contrast with the linear timelines often imposed by funding structures and organisational planning.
From Bellinetti’s perspective, institutional care therefore shifts from the management of structures and resources to the cultivation of relationships. A more-than-human approach asks institutions to create and sustain the conditions that enable diverse forms of life, knowledge, and temporalities to coexist. Care becomes an ongoing practice of recognising interdependence and of understanding the institution itself as embedded within, and responsible to, a wider ecological world.
JF - What existing institutional habits or assumptions need to be composted before new forms can emerge?
LS - As in nature, death and decay are essential in institutions for new forms to emerge. One of the most persistent is the idea that institutions should remain stable, predictable, and risk-averse. Institutions often perceive disruption as a threat to their stability and continuity. However, meaningful transformation frequently begins with small interventions that make visible what had previously remained hidden: structural inequalities, exclusions, power imbalances, or unmet needs. Like a small fissure that reveals the condition of a building beneath its surface, these moments of tension expose the underlying structures of an institution and create opportunities for reflection, learning, and change. What initially appears as a disturbance may, in fact, be the starting point for deeper processes of institutional renewal.
Another assumption that I believe that requires composting is the belief that inclusion can be achieved mostly through public programming. Outreach activities, educational programmes, and community engagement initiatives are important, but they remain superficial if they do not lead to changes in the less visible structures of the institution: governance, decision-making processes, hiring practices, resource allocation, and the distribution of power. Social inclusion cannot be reduced to representation at the level of visibility; it requires structural transformation.
Several contemporary institutional experiments demonstrate that alternative models are already being tested. At the Centro de Arte Moderna (CAM) of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, the creation of a Youth Advisory Group invited young people from different social, cultural, and professional backgrounds to contribute directly to the institution's thinking and programming. Rather than consulting audiences only after decisions have been made, this initiative biought perspectives grounded in lived experience into institutional processes, challenging assumptions about expertise, authority, and who has the legitimacy to shape cultural agendas.
A different approach can be found in General Ecology, a long-term initiative developed at the Serpentine Galleries in London. What began as a public programme focused on ecological questions gradually evolved into an institutional framework that permeates multiple areas of the organisation. Instead of treating environmental concerns as a thematic subject for exhibitions and events, General Ecology encouraged the institution to reconsider its infrastructures, partnerships, networks, and operational practices through an ecological lens. In doing so, it demonstrated how a topic initially addressed in public programming can become embedded within the institution's internal structures and long-term vision.
The Buro Stedelijk, an experimental platform operating within the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, under the coordination of Rita Ouedraogo (until early this year), offers yet another model. Since its inception, the Buro has built its programme through processes of listening to local artists, cultural workers, and communities. Its organisational structure intentionally emphasises horizontality, referring to all participants as collaborators and avoiding rigid distinctions between exhibitions, public programmes, publications, research, and studio practice. By questioning conventional hierarchies and creating more fluid relationships between different forms of cultural production, the Buro opens up possibilities for a more reciprocal and accessible institutional culture.
Although these initiatives operate in very different contexts, they share a common commitment: moving beyond symbolic gestures of inclusion towards changes that affect how institutions make decisions, distribute resources, produce knowledge, and relate to the communities they serve. They suggest that institutional transformation does not necessarily begin with large-scale reform, but often through practices that redistribute attention, participation, and power.
I don’t think that institutions are autonomous entities. On the contrary, they are relational ecosystems embedded within broader social, cultural, political, and ecological networks. Composting the myth of institutional autonomy could open space for practices based on reciprocity, interdependence, listening, and shared responsibility.
In this sense, composting is not about destruction. It is a process of transformation through which obsolete structures, habits, and assumptions decompose and become nutrients for new institutional imaginaries. The cracks are not signs of failure; they are often the conditions through which different futures become possible.
JF - If an institution truly embraced the ethics of relationship, reciprocity, and resilience, how would people feel when they entered it?
LS - I believe that if an institution truly embraced the ethics of relationship, reciprocity, and resilience, people would feel less like visitors entering a system and more like participants entering a living ecosystem. They would feel welcomed not only as audiences or consumers of culture, but as individuals whose experiences, knowledge, and presence matter and shape the institution.
Such an institution would be characterised by a culture of listening. Listening not as a symbolic gesture or consultation exercise, but as a genuine willingness to be affected by others. People would feel that their perspectives could shape the institution, rather than merely being accommodated within pre-existing structures. This requires recognising that expertise does not belong exclusively to professionals, curators, or directors, but also emerges from lived experience, community knowledge, and everyday encounters.
Reciprocity would also be visible in how relationships are built. Instead of extracting stories, participation, or legitimacy from communities, the institution would cultivate mutual exchange. Visitors, artists, staff, neighbours, and collaborators would all contribute to and benefit from the relationships that sustain the institution. The experience would resemble a shared table more than a stage: a space where giving and receiving are constantly negotiated through care, generosity, and collective responsibility.
Drawing from practices such as Mirna Bamieh’s participatory projects around food, storytelling, and hospitality, one could imagine an institution where people encounter not only exhibitions and events, but also opportunities for conviviality, conversation, experimenting and shared experience. Food, storytelling, collective learning, and informal encounters would not be considered secondary to artistic production but integral to it. People would feel invited to stay, to contribute, and to encounter others, rather than simply to observe.
Resilience, in this context, would not be experienced as rigidity or permanence. Instead, it would be felt through the institution's capacity to adapt, learn, experiment and transform in response to changing circumstances. People would sense that the institution is not afraid of uncertainty, disagreement, or experimentation. Rather than protecting itself from disruption, it would recognise moments of tension as opportunities for reflection and growth.
Relationships between artists, communities, institutions, places, histories, and even more-than-human worlds would be acknowledged and nurtured. Entering such a space would mean entering an environment where care extends beyond individual transactions and becomes a shared practice of sustaining collective life.
In short, I believe that people would feel trusted, listened to, and valued. They would leave with the sense that the institution is not simply a place that presents culture, but a place where relationships are cultivated and where different futures can be imagined and built together.
Permacultures of Care. Imagining New Narratives. Routledge, 2026, by Luísa Santos is out now.
Luísa Santos is an Associate Professor and Researcher in Culture Studies / Artistic Studies at the Faculty of Human Sciences of the Universidade Católica Portuguesa, in Lisbon. She holds a PhD in Culture Studies from the Humboldt & Viadrina School of Governance in Berlin, and MA in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art in London. Between 2016 and 2019, she was awarded with a Gulbenkian Professorship. An independent curator since 2009, she conducted research in curatorial practices at the Konstfack in Stockholm in 2013. Since 2019, she has been a research fellow at The European School of Governance (EUSG) and since 2023, she is a Teaching Fellow at the EUROPAEUM. At the CECC, where she is a senior researcher, she takes the roles of coordinator and artistic director of the Institution(ing)s which she has initiated with a consortium of eight European institutions since 2024, headquartered at the CAM-Gulbenkian, in Lisbon. Her main areas of research are contemporary art and social systems.