De-speaking institutions: three rehearsals. Rehearsal 1

Seminar with Olivier Marboeuf

Olivier Marboeuf, Le Musée du souffle. Peupler la solitude des objets, inventer un lieu qui parle, 2022. Cortesía del artista

Olivier Marboeuf, Le Musée du souffle. Peupler la solitude des objets, inventer un lieu qui parle, 2022

Courtesy of the artist

The study seminar De-speaking institutions: three rehearsals takes place within the framework of Olivier Marboeuf’s year-long research residency, titled The Mutineer and the Witch: Essays on Cultural and Institutional Mediation. The seminar consists of a total of six sessions, structured around three essays developed over the course of a year. These sessions complement, inform, and engage in dialogue with the other activities that make up Studies Constellation 2026–2027. 

This study seminar is proposed as a space of collective discussion, exchange and bricolage around institutional imagination and craft. The proposition here is to take the experience and learnings of mediation as a vantage point from which to project, deflect, speculate and hallucinate other models and matters of cultural institutionality: forms capable of rehearsing alternative visions of site, work organisation, production, artistic practice and the circulation of knowledge, while redistributing interpretative and institutional agency. 

If we are to understand mediation as a bewitched practice that produces negotiated interpretations and narratives in which conditions of presence, interruption, recognition, representation and autonomy are brought into play through interwoven stories and visions, we need to reckon with it as a practice of institutional invention: a practice shaping who may appear, speak, interpret and narrate; which histories become legible; and which forms of opacity, refusal, dissonance and relation may endure. This understanding draws on long-standing traditions of storytelling, particularly Caribbean storytelling, understood as a collective practice of transmission and transformation through which dispersed histories, spectral presences and interrupted experiences are brought together again in situated ways. Each telling is a repetition with a difference, a reprise située: the past is reactivated, altered through the conditions of the present and returned to collective interpretation. 

Repetition, reprise, and rehearsal emerge here as a central methodological thread. Rehearsal is approached as a mode of knowledge produced through situated repetition, in which each rehearsal registers the material, historical and political conditions that enable a form to emerge, the forces that interrupt it, reinterpreted it, displace it —and the transformations required for its return. The attention is here on the political choreographies of these forms of circulation, negotiation and reappearance request, and what shape an institution that becomes the scene in which stories are retold and contested can take. 

Other methods and devices that animate this research are the interpretative community, the archive, and collective hallucination. Communities of interpretation are approached as a collective formation coalescing around stories, objects, archives and problems; a group committed to their interpretation, transmission and consequences through disagreement, partial understanding, and the coexistence of irreducible positions. Interpretation here becomes a collective practice of composition, sustained through duration, responsibility, and return. In turn, archiving will be approached as a living practice in which minor, diasporic and interrupted histories persist in voices, gestures, rumors, silences, objects, landscapes, songs; activated through the act of telling, when dispersed traces are brought into relation in the present. Additionally, collective hallucination offers another method for institutional imagination. Hallucination is understood as a collective alteration of the conditions of perception, emerging from specific histories, debts, bodies and conflicts, and producing other ways of sensing what an institution may become. 

The seminar will further explore Marboeuf’s notion of déparler, or de-speaking, developed in relation to cinema and extended here toward institutional and research practice. To déparler is to undo the authority of instituted speech, disorganise dominant codes of legibility and allow voices to deviate from the identities and positions assigned to them. A déparlante institution thus interrupts the confidence of its own language and makes room for noise, hesitation, multilingualism, opacity, contradiction and embodied knowledge, making room for plural and self-displaced modes of address. This movement is in turn connected to cacophony, as a mode of composition in which voices retain their differences, tensions and unequal positions, sustaining plurality without dissolving conflict and allowing disagreement to become part of the institutional form itself. Through this perspective, other rhythms of facilitation, governance and duration are incorporated, and a space for narratives that remain adjacent without becoming interchangeable is open. 

By bringing together experiences from different territories, this seminar aims to imagine non-extractive institutional forms that promote autonomy, while exploring how these might be translated and interpreted in different cultural contexts and economies. To institute, here, means composing a situation, sustaining a relation, activating a latent history, hosting an interruption and producing the conditions under which something can be told again. An art space may therefore emerge with or without walls: as a temporary gathering, a community of interpretation, a living archive, a mobile infrastructure, a wake, a souffle, a rehearsal or a circulation of stories, tools and obligations. 

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Inside the framework of

Studies Constellation. Olivier Marboeuf

Organised by

Museo Reina Sofía

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