{"id":18981,"date":"2026-06-08T12:57:13","date_gmt":"2026-06-08T10:57:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/editorialconcreta.org\/?p=18981"},"modified":"2026-06-10T11:23:55","modified_gmt":"2026-06-10T09:23:55","slug":"foreword-disturbing-the-institution-between-hydras-and-brambles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/editorialconcreta.org\/en\/concreta-journal\/foreword-disturbing-the-institution-between-hydras-and-brambles\/","title":{"rendered":"FOREWORD<\/span> Disturbing the Institution, Between Hydras and Brambles"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tLaura Vall\u00e9s V\u00edlchez\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/h6>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCuradora, editora e investigadora. Fundadora de Concreta, explora las…\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tNuria Enguita Mayo\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/h6>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tHistoriadora del arte, editora y curadora. Fundadora y editora de…\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n

FOREWORD<\/h2>\n\n

To speak of apparatuses, institutions, and infrastructures is to speak of forms of power that shape ways of life. At a moment marked by the exhaustion of democratic institutions, technological concentration, the expansion of artificial intelligence, the financialization of the economy, ecological collapse, and ever more sophisticated forms of necropolitics, power multiplies like a hydra and enters our bodies in subtle and persistent ways. <\/p>\n\n

For Giorgio Agamben, following Michel Foucault, an apparatus<\/em> is anything capable of capturing, orienting, or shaping gestures, behaviors, and discourses: from a prison or a hospital to an algorithm or language itself. If the apparatus is the tool of capture, the institution is the structure that stabilizes it; infrastructure is the set of material, economic, technological, affective, and territorial conditions that make its functioning possible. Far from being a mere support, infrastructures organize circulation, distribute resources, and produce forms of dependence. But if, as Ursula K. Le Guin wrote, the first human technology was a container before it was a spear, perhaps we should think of infrastructures as that which makes it possible to contain, transmit, and care when the conditions of collective life are increasingly difficult to guarantee. <\/p>\n\n

This is what Concreta 27<\/em> is about. But it is also about imagining other ways of instituting, inhabiting the cracks in the system, and disturbing the habits of the police-institution<\/em>, to put it with Ranci\u00e8re. For us, these questions are not merely an object of study. Since 2012, Concreta<\/em> has been a magazine, but also an editorial platform, an informal school, a dispersed archive, and an unlikely cultural infrastructure sustained by care and persistence. Lia Perjovschi\u2019s contribution maps this ecology of dependencies, and from it a question emerges: what infrastructures truly sustain cultural life? How can we continue to build them when the conditions for doing so are deteriorating? <\/p>\n\n

We know this, even if at times we seem to forget it. We claim political agency for art while overlooking, as Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz, Paul Gilroy, and Guy Wou\u00e9t\u00e9 remind us, that Western modernity was built upon a systematically silenced underside: slavery, whose economic, social, and political matrix was the plantation. More than an economic unit, the plantation constituted a social technology based on exploitation, extractivism, violence, and the appropriation of bodies. And many contemporary cultural infrastructures continue to reproduce those patterns: the extraction of peripheral knowledges, precarious labor, Eurocentric hierarchies, and exoticization. For this reason, Durante Blais-Billie analyzes how the representation of difference can become a fa\u00e7ade that reproduces structural inequalities and mechanisms of exclusion. <\/p>\n\n

As BNV Producciones also remind us, the risk lies in forgetting that demand, site of responsibility, and resources must recognize one another if promises of the future are not to remain suspended as unreachable horizons. Thus, Paul Gilroy insists on the need to recover imagination and courage in order to build new forms of coexistence. In the face of advancing authoritarianisms, together with Laurence Rassel and Peggy Pierrot he proposes redistributing resources and knowledges, strengthening collective experience, and rebuilding public spaces. Because the experiences gathered in this issue share that concern: how to institute without crystallizing, and how to sustain structures without reproducing the logics of extraction and domination. From an art school, an editorial project, or a neighborhood community, all of them test sensitive forms of organization capable of responding to their contexts. <\/p>\n\n

Organizations such as La Escocesa, in Barcelona; Robida, in Topol\u00f2\/Topolove; WAKA, between Cameroon and France; La Casa de los Engarces, in the Ricote Valley; and S\u00e0n Art, in Ho Chi Minh, appear here as spaces where learning is not separated from work, survival, or everyday gestures. Thus, Wou\u00e9t\u00e9 describes WAKA as an attempt to institute from the margins of the plantation. Vida Rucli and Alba Colomo reflect on forms of belonging based on relational ecologies rather than on property or permanence, proposing an image of the institution as a bramble. Lorenzo Sandoval and Zineb Achoubie present La Casa de los Engarces as a form of organization inspired by the connection between Sufi thought and ecology. And Zoe Butt advocates a situated, sensitive, and interdisciplinary curatorship. <\/p>\n\n

In the dossiers, while Tania Safura Adam Mogne reconstructs scenes of the common from Black archives that challenge official narratives, M\u00f3nica de Miranda imagines invisible gardens between Angola, Portugal, and the geographies of the African diaspora as spaces of resistance against migration policies, gentrification, and touristification. And from there Pedro G. Romero moves through Rosal\u00eda, Lorca, mysticism, and popular culture to pose a fundamental question: how to exercise real agency in an era dominated by spectacle. His journey recalls that mystical traditions were historically closer to community and mutual aid than to isolated genius; closer, in short, to the institution understood as an interdependent collective practice than as an apparatus of power. <\/p>\n\n

Perhaps that is the question that runs through this issue: not how to escape institutions, but how to transform them and build infrastructures capable of sustaining what they have ceased to protect. The practices gathered here are situated between critique and construction. So too is Concreta itself, which continues to search, between hydras and brambles, for how to get away unscathed while still confronting spectacle from a position of agency. <\/p>\n\n

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<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Concreta 27 addresses other ways of instituting, inhabiting the cracks in the system, and disturbing the habits of the institution. The issue is edited by Nuria Enguita and Laura Vall\u00e9s V\u00edlchez and features contributions by Paul Gilroy, Laurence Rassel, Peggy Pierrot, Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz, BNV Producciones, Durante Blais-Billie, Zoe Butt, Tania Safura Adam Mogne, M\u00f3nica de Miranda, Alba Colomo, Vida Rucli, Guy Wouet\u00e9, Zineb Achoubie, Lorenzo Sandoval, Pedro G. Romero and Lia Perjovschi. \n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":18978,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"csco_singular_sidebar":"","csco_page_header_type":"","csco_custom_appearance":"","csco_disable_excerpt_posts_layout":false,"csco_page_load_nextpost":"","csco_post_video_location":[],"csco_post_video_location_hash":"","csco_post_video_url":"","csco_post_video_bg_start_time":0,"csco_post_video_bg_end_time":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[717,141],"tags":[157],"ppma_author":[86,95],"class_list":["post-18981","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-concreta-27","category-concreta-journal","tag-nuevo-numero-en","cs-entry","cs-video-wrap"],"authors":[{"term_id":86,"user_id":33,"is_guest":0,"slug":"laura-valles-vilchez","display_name":"Laura Vall\u00e9s V\u00edlchez","avatar_url":{"url":"https:\/\/editorialconcreta.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/avatar-author_L.jpg","url2x":"https:\/\/editorialconcreta.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/avatar-author_L.jpg"},"author_category":"","first_name":"Laura","last_name":"Vall\u00e9s V\u00edlchez","user_url":"","job_title":"","description":"Curadora, editora e investigadora. Fundadora de Concreta, explora las intersecciones entre pedagog\u00eda, curadur\u00eda y edici\u00f3n. Actualmente es Senior Tutor en el Royal College of Art, donde ha dirigido proyectos europeos como 4Cs: From Conflict to Conviviality through Creativity and Culture (2021). Ha desarrollado programas de estudios como Articulacions en el IVAM (2021\u20132024), dirigido bienales como Mitos del futuro pr\u00f3ximo en TEA (2019\u20132020) y Arte Vivo en Pueblo Museo (2025\u20132026), y colaborado con instituciones como MACBA, Artium, Tabakalera o Centro Bot\u00edn. Anteriormente trabaj\u00f3 en Afterall y el MoCP, y ha impartido conferencias en la China Academy of Arts-ICAST y SOAS. Tambi\u00e9n ha traducido a Isabelle Stengers, Donna Haraway, Moyra Davey y Paul B. Preciado."},{"term_id":95,"user_id":42,"is_guest":0,"slug":"nuria-enguita-mayo","display_name":"Nuria Enguita Mayo","avatar_url":{"url":"https:\/\/editorialconcreta.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/avatar-author_N.jpg","url2x":"https:\/\/editorialconcreta.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/avatar-author_N.jpg"},"author_category":"","first_name":"Nuria","last_name":"Enguita Mayo","user_url":"","job_title":"","description":"Historiadora del arte, editora y curadora. Fundadora y editora de Concreta, desde 2024 es directora art\u00edstica del MAC\/CCB de Lisboa. Anteriormente dirigi\u00f3 el IVAM-Institut Valenci\u00e0 d\u2019Art Modern (2020\u20132024), el Centro de Arte Bombas Gens de Valencia (2015\u20132020) y la Fundaci\u00f3 Antoni T\u00e0pies (1998\u20132008). Ha sido editora de Afterall Journal, profesora invitada en la UNIA-Universidad Internacional de Andaluc\u00eda y curadora de proyectos internacionales como la 31.\u00aa Bienal de S\u00e3o Paulo, el Encuentro Internacional de Medell\u00edn y Manifesta 4. Su trayectoria combina pr\u00e1ctica curatorial, edici\u00f3n y gesti\u00f3n institucional, con especial atenci\u00f3n a aquellas pr\u00e1cticas art\u00edsticas situadas en los m\u00e1rgenes de las narrativas oficiales y de la modernidad can\u00f3nica."}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/editorialconcreta.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18981","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/editorialconcreta.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/editorialconcreta.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/editorialconcreta.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/editorialconcreta.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18981"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/editorialconcreta.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18981\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19015,"href":"https:\/\/editorialconcreta.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18981\/revisions\/19015"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/editorialconcreta.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18978"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/editorialconcreta.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/editorialconcreta.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/editorialconcreta.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18981"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/editorialconcreta.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=18981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}