 This symposium, and then of course the exhibition itself, is around the idea of not just who am we to re-quote Doho Sir, but what can museums do to help us answer that question? And given that we're looking at museum as practice, I think it felt entirely appropriate for us to end with two people who are practitioners of the museum. So the structure of the next 45 minutes or so is going to be the following. I have asked both Alastair and Charles to introduce their practice to us, and then we've been bouncing around a number of questions around how museums can show friendships. What museums do in terms of exhibitions and collections in narrating nation and interrupting those narrations? And what does the position in Eindhoven and Manchester allow for these sorts of positions? As I'm sure both of you already know, Alastair Hudson, on my left, is the newly appointed director well, it's no longer new, it was in the year or period of both Maastricht Gallery and the Whitworth, previously of Mima, Milksborough, and then an institution that we've referred to a couple of times, Grisdale Arts. So I think there's some sort of interesting connections to draw out as, of course, the sort of commitment to the idea of useful art in the museum in the useful space. Charles Esche is the director of the Van Aben Museum, but also a professor at the University of Arts London and a curator of large exhibitions all over the world, and somebody who's been really, sort of, I think, playing a pivotal role in sort of the project of provincializing Europe. So I think there are some of these things that we will pick up. But what I wanted to start off with, and maybe Alastair, if you can take us off, is you have five minutes to tell us about your practice, as the director of the Van Aben Museum. I might not cover it all, but what I thought I would do is I've got ten slides, and I thought I would do a CV in buildings. Perfect. So basically, I'm going to show ten slides of ten, the ten buildings I have worked in as an employee, but where basically I have been considering basically not only how you work in a building, but how you work on it. And something that I've, I mean, I trained as both an artist and as an art historian, so I always had this sort of muddled idea of what the hell I was doing. And I think this idea of thinking of the museum, the art gallery institution, as a process in time and space, not as a fixed autonomous entity is very key, but also one that any institution is created by basically the sum of its constituencies of usership. So every institution is created by a set of relationships, some of whom have more power at certain times than others and have more interest at certain times than others on very different scales. So to illustrate this, this is my first job, which is this is the Henrymore Institute in Needs, which this constituent group is primarily art historians. If I'm cynical, the public can never go to it. It's designed to look like a castle. It is the fortress of art. The next place was, this is the British Pavilion in Venice, which was, yeah, it was only 90s Richard Hamilton, but yes, this being a constituent group of this building being primarily the art world and in reality the art market for the most part. This is all rather serendipitous, this was first brought by Richard DeMarco of Joseph Boyce and an Audi outside the Anthony Doffey Gallery with Sandy Nair and Jaime Bastia and the Art Dina and Anthony Doffey and the widow there. I worked here for quite a longish time, which obviously is a commercial gallery, then one of the biggest commercial galleries in the world, dealing with big blue chip artists, big names, with a constituent group of people who buy art, the 1% everyone wants to describe that, and this is very informative for me about what I wasn't interested in in some ways, as well as what I was interested in. So the lead from that was this building, which is the UK Government Home Office headquarters, which I worked on with the architect Terry Farrell as an employee of the Government Art Collection on a scheme with the artist Ian Gillick and a number of artists to do a public art strategy and just being a building wasn't an art gallery and it was basically a building that was largely closed off to the public, although it had to use art in order to communicate to the public and was in effect a project about how we get government to think about itself aesthetically. And also this idea of a working environment filtered over to the next chapter of this decade of working at Brise-Dell Arts and the Lake District. This is the headquarters of Lawson Park Farm, again, not a building that's open to the public and not a gallery, it is a work space and it was interesting hearing about the ethics of LYC as being founded on work and a lot of what we developed at Brise-Dell was the idea of an institution that worked within constituent frameworks of that particular village, that particular community in the Lake District, working with international artists from China, US, Africa, wherever, but also with local practitioners, whether they be artists, craftspeople, farmers, cookie-rug makers, lace makers, builders, electricians, they were all considered part of the project and this really was about the institution operating in ordinary life and doing things that were useful. As an antidote to the usual rural, fantasist residency about escape, it was about coming to a place to work and to make a contribution, whatever that might be, and it was a bit funny seeing LYC, the mended wall. It kind of brought back memories of trying to hold this 13th century, 12th house together in lots of different ways. And this is also really where, I suppose, this idea was developing around useful art or artic util, as we kind of also referred to it, art as a tool, which is sort of where we had an introduction to Charles and that led on to the things that Charles might talk about as well, but really developing this international network of like-minded people that were interested in breaking art outside of its 1% constituency and into everyday life. That led on to working in this building, which was in the same village in Coniston, which is the Coniston Mechanics Institute, which was John Ruskin's early staff at a kind of varied art and life institute. So this was basically a museum collection library, a bathhouse with a miner's community kitchen, lace making, wood carving, copper repusade, craft workshop, hybrid, built in the kind of 1870s, which we then set about rediscovering this history, which became very important in terms of, again, a lot of the things that we might discuss in a minute. The job from that was really to here, it's the Middlesbrit Institute of Modern Art, a brand-new, stark-tech Dutch-designed building with a regeneration agenda in probably one of the most deprived towns in the UK, or that I used to deprived in inverted commas. And the idea was to kind of how you would repurpose this building, which was designed for autonomous art world and to make this kind of community center in all the ways we've been discussing today, work in a place like Middlesbrit for people who didn't give two hoots about world of contemporary art in the whole. Then, laterally, obviously, that idea then sort of generated a body of interest, which led to the idea that we might take on, or I would take on a role here at the Manchester Art Gallery. And at the Whitworth, there's an old photograph of the Whitworth as the Whitworth Institute of Modern Art Park in Manchester. I kind of, again, kind of a useful museum of its day, which was really about, A, making a better life for people in the city, because it has a park as well, like heart, mind, lungs, all that, but was purposely about using art and a collection to turbocharge the cotton industry of Manchester to make it a more productive economy and to make people more creative. And interestingly, let's go back quickly, the Manchester Art Gallery also founded in the early 1820s was, again, a building without an art collection. It was an education center about introducing creativity into a town that was then growing into a city of the kind of central heart of L'Asie Faire capitalism. It was about a corrective about creativity. So it's not such a big jump from the LYC, I would argue, as it might think. And then finally, the building, which is under my watch, is this one, which is Platt Hall, former slave owner as mentioned in South Manchester, just beyond the Whitworths, which is up until recently the gallery of costume, but we're now repurposing as a new idea for what an art institution might be. But we are developing that with constituents or users within the local context, the village of Mossai, Faddafield, Rush Home, rather than deciding from the virtual director. Great, how's that? Great spotted history, isn't it? Charles? Yeah, I'm not very familiar with that. But what I thought I'd do is try to talk a little bit about how I see more or less 25 years, I think, of perhaps from the mid-19th, relating to certain developments, which are so parallel, I think, to developments in society or certainly in political society, I think. So when I started, I think, which was actually in trauma in Glasgow, more or less, I think one of the ideas that drove me was an idea which later came to be called New Institutions, which I really didn't like at all, because there was nothing new about it, but I wanted to define it as I would like it to be, by the way, as an experimental institution, which I think was an idea that the institution, itself the art institution, could be reshaped or refold according to, not only the needs of artists, but also according to the needs of the curatorial. And I think it was very much at that stage, where I look back at it now, it was a kind of top-down approach in which the artists and the curators, and still maybe the idea that the avant-garde lingered as a notion of an experimental area which would lead society, because we have to, the avant-garde has to know which direction the army's moving, otherwise it's not avant-garde, it's just an isolated movement. So essentially this idea of the avant-garde, I think still lingers around the idea of what I would call experimental institutions, in which I played around, I suppose, most specifically within the resume. I think the idea there was in the name of, the experiment was to create possibility which didn't exist otherwise. So to understand that, in a sense, to scan the artistic field of the institutions and how they worked, and to see what was lacking in certain sense. So the experiment was not so much simply in a formal sense or in an artistic sense. It was also to understand what might be absent and to focus on the absent. I think that's been, to some extent, of running is to go against the time, it's to go against the trend. And I think art at its best is often the thing that goes against what seems to be the most modish activity that's going on at this particular time. So I think that this experimentalisticism kind of segwayed into me when I first started in Van Aben Museum, which was now 15 years ago, so a long time ago, was something that I referred to at the time, and I'm writing PhD at the moment and sort of divides this, so that's why I'm doing it in my head. What I call democratic deviants at the time, I remember that's what I wrote my application about, that the institution should understand again what the democratic majority was wanting and trying to do the opposite in certain sense. Yet to understand that democracy is not the rule of the majority. Actually democracy is the permission of minority voices to have a public platform. And that's something I think that we're in danger of losing very often in our understanding of democracy. But it felt to me that then the public institution, I was always invested inside the republic, which was sort of old fashioned social democratic or had become sort of old fashioned instrumentalized, I would say, by social democracy as a recognition of your state funding and the fact that it was somehow not necessarily in place of the market, even in collaboration with the market, but that it offered an idea of the public as opposed to the entirely private activities that were going on in Ansley Doth here, for instance. But I think that sense of publicness not so much in that social democratic sense, but more in the sense of a platform which is open to antagonistic encounters, because the public is an antagonistic whole. We don't go together nicely most of the time. We talk about friendships and we talk about how those connections happen. But they're always rough. They're always struggling to coexist, they're struggling to coexist. And in a certain sense, that struggle to coexist can be played out in a way I think the Chantal move called at the time Friendly Enemies. So that the institution of democratic beings could be a meeting of friendly enemies. And that became to me more and more to me a meeting between the artists of the public in a certain sense, which were often friendly enemies as well, but also the institution of the artists that actually had an antagonism between the curatorial and the artistic. And that antagonism was something you shouldn't try and either smooth it over or you should try and understand the curator as a facilitator or simply as somebody who is there to serve the artist. That actually there's a curatorial and institutional position and there's an artistic position. And they need in a sense to run roughly against each other and they need to struggle and they need to fight. So this idea of democratic deviants became not only deviants from the mainstream, but also within the organization itself. Again, I think largely figured around the person of the artist and the idea of the avant-garde still, but that there should be a serrateness around those encounters and that we should push each other. And that I think produced many projects which I could talk about, but we don't really have time to go into details. I think, and to some extent I think that mirrored a society from the 90s up until we could say the financial crisis in 2007-08. In which, I think particularly my idea, which I was working on, I left the United Kingdom, well, I left Scotland, should have been the United Kingdom when I was in the U.S. But I left Scotland in 2000 or 99. So really most of this experience is really from Sweden and then also with the analysis you said, and then the Netherlands. I think there was a kind of an understanding that I remember an Indonesian artist who's now doing documentary extracts, really, but Indonesian Adedawaman who told me when he was at the RACs at the very end of the 90s, he said, you know, it's really difficult to make an article so there's nothing, there's no problems. And there's this idea, I think, in the 90s, in mainland Western Europe after 1989, and it's supposed to be a victory of a sort of liberal-democratic, which became a neoliberal version, but a liberal-democratic version of the world at the time, it's the end of history story. But there weren't really any problems to solve. There needed to be some fine tuning and there could be this and that that needed to be changed, but essentially, within Western Europe, things were sorted out. And so therefore this idea of antagonism, of friendly enemies, of democratic deviants felt like an urgent provocation to that idea that basically everybody could go along swimming and that things were all right, because it was clear that things were not all right. Already issues of climate change were up, but were present, but also inequality was exhilarating, and we know now that inequality has gone back to the time of Ruskin, with much more encircles, I think, than the iron lines of the database, you know what I'm saying. Maybe to cut the long story short, we then moved to, or I think, what happened after, particularly after the crisis, and also the cuts that came, which was a sort of driving force to rethink, I think our raison d'etre, in a way, as a public institution. Cuts in Netherlands were around about 35 to 40% at a certain point. And I know that I think you've gone through this similar kind of diversity in more recently. But in that sense, I think we began to build, and this is where Artie Thiel and the Constitution Museum come in, an idea no longer of building on this avant-garde, which had, by this stage, completely lost any sense of being in the forefront of a society that was moving in the same direction, but had really become simply a minority, which was defended only, or was defensible only in terms of its legacy, and the vague hope that maybe we might be right, but it was more or less like a speculative system in the economy, where you're trying to bet on a company that's going to be the next apple or whatever. There was no sense in which there was really an avant-garde, in which there was a whole force coming behind you to support that avant-garde. Society was going in 25 different dimensions, and it's continuing to. So that model of the avant-garde doesn't work. But I think that for us, this moved back, to be like into the body of the society. Very much was shaped by not only the cuts in the crisis, but also an understanding that that avant-garde was no longer sustainable, as a resident of that, and had become the preserve really of that one percent last year, and a sort of moneyed avant-garde, rather than anything which was ideologically loaded. And then I think the constituent museum in Arte Atil, which you've already introduced, became very much this sort of a light motif of how we might develop a program in an institution, and what that institution might mean, which means, of course, to listen, which means to understand that there are different voices, and the curator needs to take a backseat in that, no longer necessary to be ideologically driven, but to try and define what principles are, what, what, where the lines are that you draw. And I think, you know, issues of social justice, of equality, perhaps equity, are an emancipation. I think that those are sort of fundamentals that we should try and preserve from, if you like, the model. And then I think the final step, which we're in at the moment, and I'm sort of very caught up in my own thinking around this museum, and we'll talk a little bit more about it later, is the question of how to demodernize Europe. You talked about provincializing Europe. I think also one of the responses to this sort of trend for the decolonial, which I fear is a sort of temporary trend that's sort of interesting for a few months, and then Frieze will move on to something else or whatever, because you know, the decolonial fully applied means an end to patriarchy capitalism and colonialism. It's the whole system, it needs to be undone if we actually decolonize, and I don't think that's what's being proposed when Frieze did that review. So in that sense, the answer I think that we might need to do as old white men sitting here, one of the things that we can offer is an idea of the demodern, the idea of looking at the modern itself, which is presumed to be the carrier of the emancipation, equity, quality, social justice, and actually understand that it's not the carrier, it was just a convenient vessel for a certain period of time, but those qualities existed in other, and exist in other cultures and other forms of thinking, and that maybe separating those values from the modern, which is so complicit with the colonial and so complicit with the dark side of modernity as Mugnolla talks about it, that it's no longer useful for us, it might have been useful at a certain time, it's not to rewrite history and say everything was wrong, but it's to say that now the modern has become a weight in our backs, and of course, as a modern art museum, which the Van Aarhus Museum is, we can talk about that maybe a bit later, that raises a whole set of, not new set of questions about its, it's going on there, so it's right to exist. Well, thank you, and I think some of these concepts that have just been raised, so about usership, the constituent museum, about the experimental institution, about the public, I think we can also try and reframe within some of the themes that we've been running through as we apply to the NYC Museum. So if you think about the exhibition and the publication, literally as being modes of finding a public, as modes of addressing and conversing with the public, as we think about, well, we've talked about place, so put in both your formulations, place and the public that you are then conversing with or seeking to encourage to the users. And then lastly, that notion of friendship, which if you then think about, what is the role of the museum? Which child is going to go with their muddy boots into the Manchester Art Gallery, make them a cup of tea, do some drawings, and then leave? So I think if you then think about what you've just described through that lens of the NYC that we've just been looking at, it would be great to think about what that constituent museum, and we don't have to name it, but whether it's in Manchester or in Eindhoven, what would that look like? How would it function? What would it say? And what would it then like for all these users? But also I think one of the ways to think about this is against this idea of autonomy as well. That the institution, whether it's a gallery, a shed in a park, or a huge museum, is that they are part of an infrastructure that is being created socially itself. So we have to lose this idea of it being this kind of isolation chamber, this place that you step over the thresholds to somehow enter this neutral gallery space. And actually the myth of neutrality is a key challenge, I think, that we're kind of facing at the moment. But actually, if you start to create methodologies in which you can reintegrate the infrastructure, so you were involved in housing, you were involved in politics, you were involved in parking, or education for naught to five year olds, then you start to create a different value system by which you can be judged, or which you can then have those conversations and relationships on a daily basis. And instead you start to reverse the polarities, as I call it, of the normal ways of working as the Charles have described. So rather than trying to get people to come to the museum and join in art, you actually are looking for how the institution can join in society. And what is it that you can do with and for, amongst other people, just as citizens yourself, so that you're no longer the authority figure. But you're just somebody trying to have a go at making things work, just like everybody else is. And that joining in is actually, actually if we go back to this idea of work, I think a lot of projects have been involved in outside of the normal framework of the performative frame of art, or the 1%, is when you've actually shown that you're working, then you then create those relationships and those understandings that are really fundamental and very important. And I think that applies to an individual, but also to an institution as well. That if you're seen as an institution being working towards something, that you're making a contribution, is the equivalent to when somebody in a little village in North Canberra or Cumberland, says, you know, says, oh yeah, I get what you're taking out. At least you're joining in, you're contributing, you're making cakes for the village hall, or you're helping us mend the fence. It's a kind of similar mindset. I think, I mean, I want to preserve an idea of political autonomy, but not necessarily artistic autonomy. I think that's interesting. Unless it performs a role within making your own rules politically and able to construct a sort of deviance away from the democratic norm, if you like, and I think that that still has aspects of the autonomous. So I wouldn't want to lose the autonomous entirely. At the same time, I agree that the way the autonomy has been domesticated, in a sense, by modernism into this idea, this kind of playpen idea, in which you could do your art over there, but essentially it shouldn't have any impact outside of its own, its own brilliant, is highly problematic. So we need, in a sense, through those connections to actually demonstrate autonomy, which can be useful outside of its own realm. And I think that's very much what we're doing. Struggling with, I think, one example of what we're doing at the moment, which I think is quite good in that relationship, in that we're working with a group of people who are really, and I don't know whether this happens in England at all, but they are asylum seekers who've been, I'll take a question here, been processed to the point where they've been told they're not going to get residency, but they're not actually removed from the country, at least not actively. So they basically then sit in this time zone, and they can exist in there for decades, without unable to work, but at the same time able to stay. And there's a certain basic idea in the Netherlands of everybody who's in the country having a certain right to bed and board, to roof and board. And that would be something that those people we've been working with recently with a couple of our guards, basically, who are from Afghanistan, who also went through that process, but came out the other side with the mission to work. And we have a small space, a tea room, for the living room, which Sandy Hillard set up, who's a Palestinian artist. And there they serve tea and basically become a guest, which is the only moment that they have this possibility to be a guest. It's a story to be a host, rather than to be a guest, to be a cast there, that's to be somebody who gives hospitality rather than takes hospitality and demands. And I think the conversations which you're emerging out of that, it's an artistic project in the sense that it has a particular aesthetic of a cross between a kind of Ottoman, Arab, Afghan living room. But in that space, something else is starting to happen over the last period. And I think that's for people who come into the museum, it's actually a good example of what a sort of constituent museum could be because that's run relatively autonomously, I'd say, by the group themselves, who come and gather and organize themselves. And it gives a certain capacity for those random visitors who come in, who you never know who they are, who are walking through the room, to actually tell their stories, to the point that at one point, Shafiq is one of the guards, met the Dutch ambassador to Afghanistan who happened to live in Israel. Then he started talking and said, yes, I know Afghanistan quite well. And then he turned out to be the Dutch ambassador, completely coincidentally. But those kind of exchanges would never really happen without this service. So I think that's a kind of, it's an artistic project. It's, I think, a way of, it's almost the LYC museum, yeah, in a certain sense. It's this meeting of different cultures around a cup of Afghan tea, in this case, rather than a second cup. There is a difference. So I'm going to sort of the last thing and then I'll open it up. And the difference really comes from, I think something that you pointed earlier, which is that you're both sitting on collections. Yeah. And those collections, although most of them live in stores, they, those stories continue. And those stories, I think it was, Isan, we quoted John Dewey. So, you know, art makes community, community makes us. Yeah. So if, what, what responsibility does the Constituent Museum have to run those stories? I can start that. And then, because I think it sort of hits the reverse, sort of, I mean, I, you know, we're a modern art museum, essentially, I won't go through the whole history, but essentially, our history is one that was, unbindedly, I would say, imposed by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, more or less. In the first direct, it talked about model of the accused in abstract art, cover of the book, made in 1936, and adapted it for the Van Aup. And in the Netherlands, I think also, in Germany, at post-war, the American-occupied part of Europe, essentially, this was very, very common. Less so in this, perhaps because it was occupied in a different way by American culture, but we in the Netherlands were, you know, were thoroughly occupied. In many ways, you're talking about endlessly. But that process, in a sense, means that as a Museum of Modern Art, our collection is a very narrow slice of the experience, not only the 20th century, but also completely excludes the longer stories about, which could be told going way, way back. And there were other models of what the Museum of Modern Art could be. So we can put Alexander Daunert and Alfred Barr next to each other and we can understand two possible models of the Museum of Modern Art. The one-on-one was bars. We can say, and we can understand why, but maybe it's no longer the appropriate one to have only a modern art collection. And I think that for us, we're borrowing the Gaia and the Hobart, which is quite radical for us, although it's been seen very transparent by other people. But also, you know, the LYC collection with its Roman remains as part of the collection, with its, with its sort of, you know, almost you could say folk art aspects or craft elements that were coming in through the hook drugs and things like that. I think in a way that's a much more vibrant example of a collection today. And maybe ones that are actually more common in England than they are in Europe now. And I think we have a real challenge to understand what our modern collection means. A lot of our exercises to try and initially just take a distance from that modern collection and that modernity. And to try and understand that this is a history which we can respect, which we can bid farewell to in a certain way in a very polite way. It's not about insulting it, understanding it's no longer our time. It's not now. The modern is not now. And I think that process also fundamentally would affect the identity of a modern artist. And in a way that's a slightly more luxurious position, I think there's quite a few to Manchester as well with these specific collections that were built as collections on collections by different people with different interests at different times in their history. So you do have folk art, you do have textiles, you do have things from, you know, archeology. You have a whole guzzle of stuff, which is amazing, and was designed as this toolkit. It wasn't designed as the, you know, according to Bar, because you came away and resisted this idea for a long period of time. It was part of a sort of island status, to a certain extent, in a position to Europe. So that we've, in a way, accidentally landed with something close to a version of where we want to be that was already in place. So a lot of this is about uncovering actually the true intentions of these institutions that perhaps the UK has been suppressed by, you know, by the modern in order to sort of, you know, perform our regime, et cetera. And I think it's also this sort of circular time that we look at. So, you know, Raskin building a road would seem to be incredibly contemporary, if you want to call it that. So it's engaged art practice. So it's engaged art practice, yeah, that would come all the way back. There would be a long period where it was not seen in any terms, as an artistic practice. It's now come back. I think when we talk about autonomy, if you read the arguments around 1968 in our forum, you'll find these same arguments being engaged with. So these things are also not, and nothing that we're doing is new. That's why the institutionalism is rough. But the idea that these ideas come back, and maybe even the idea of the rural, I'm thinking of Captain Berge recently, but even the idea of the rural, which disappeared for a certain time, to the extent that I know the sort of English art history, you know, the YBAs have become an incredibly urban phenomenon, yeah, in a certain way. And, you know, now we're going back to look at banks and Cumbria, because that circle is coming around again, and we can look at something else. Maybe it's almost a form of resisting commodification in the same way that, you know, in socialist Europe, artists would go to, and Pavel Buchner himself, basically, when he was in Texas at Ikea, he was sitting in the end, would go to outside of Prague to make performances and make things, because that was the place where these things could happen, because in the central city, they were surveillance. So in a certain sense, the commodification of art is also a form of surveillance, you can see, in which the rural returns as a form of escape from that. But also in that, not just the rural, but also the non-metropolitan as well, because actually, once you start looking, and you start digging, and you find that LYC, you find these strands with it where it's there, but it just needs revealing. And if you think about what the, you know, the kind of Bauhaus diaspora was doing in the 1930s, and they looked at Duttington Hall, and, you know, things at Black Mountain, and even where I wasn't able to report it, it was a sort of rural off-shoot, Bauhaus off-shoot relationship between the Metacitlement in Angkotier in the 19th century with Juvian Jane Adams in Chicago. There were these networks, there were, you know, of people to basically doing this other version of art that was somehow canonized within the, you know, it was sort of adopted, or taken into capture, it's probably the right word, by the modern project. But suddenly, we're in this moment where, actually, by looking again, we just start to reveal these threads are actually something quite different. And on that moment of capture, I really want to open it up to the audience. So, we're going to continue talking for hours, but we don't have a nose. So I thought we could sort of bring in questions. I just wanted to say, I wasn't on the idea of the collection, just to put a little bit of context on that, but I want to see there was the moon, Alex, and there was the, all the way back to the sea. But there was always this use of, this Raphael soldier, a fantastic piece. It was just a very bad idea, just hanging there. Anyone who's called the chaos out there, the drawing machines and stuff, this beautiful piece. And they came around with it. I think I'll go off and work on it. Next one, I think I'll go off and work on it. I asked a story, I asked him. I had the answers. It seemed like the same story. It was right in my memory, it was in the first room, you couldn't miss it. I think it might have been the most kind of prayer. Yeah, I think it might have been the most kind of prayer. Sort of, anyway, that's what I was going to say. That's the colors of it. Yeah. And also, of course, the Flamen Museum or the Old Museums in the Netherlands are not free back here. There's sort of a huge difference. How many people walk around here or just come in, cut a cup of tea, you see some art, but in the Netherlands, we all have to pay. And it makes a very, very difference. So, and when you mentioned that about the guards and the people coming, was it in the free space? Yes, it's in the free space. Well, it has to be in the free space. I was always like... When we did the Museum of Art and Art and Art and Art and Art and Art and Museum, if you entered as a spectator, you had to pay, but if you entered as a user, it was free. We have played that a little bit. Yeah, but architecture has a lot to play, but we're a big part of the play. Because all the buildings that you're now in charge of and I don't know, it's a big kind of, you know, in this case, they are the actions of a super-talented and powerful community. Very, very different from... And if you're talking about creating that in school, creating a kind of delanarchy, which is a kind of demeshing of unlikely on our disciplines, I think architecture is massive. But it's a different thing to all of the other buildings, some of them, sometimes. But, I mean, I think that, you know, I often feel that it gets more and more interesting when, like with the Museum of Artificial Intelligence, we did together with Towningham, that there's an element of squatting that's going on. Yeah, that we're misusing the architecture, because the architecture is built for certain purposes. And if you like the repurposing of that architecture, it doesn't necessarily mean it's destruction. You can actually repurpose it, but repulsion would be to treat it with some disrespect. Yeah, but also I think people get the idea of the institutional power as well. And I think it's not just us that enjoys playing with that as well. So, I think, for example, of other projects, I think of historically, we're working with, for example, people generally trying to get legal status as a resident or a site, you know, it's people who are training. But even Tanya is Tanya Bulgaria, the artist whose project at Tatarapani Hall was renaming a building, the Lathibello building, who's a local activist, whereas the building opposite is the result of tens of millions of pounds. So I think just that kind of... But it's the same thing I was kind of moving towards, which is actually people understanding that institutions like this can be a route to talk to power. Right? So even if you are most dissatisfied or however you're sat in the position, we can create the conditions in which people can see the art institutional museum as a way to get things done or to have a voice, or, you know, who are we in question, in places where you can't do it anywhere yet. And so I think that has huge potential in terms of this usership model. But if everybody can see that they can use the institution in one way or another, it doesn't exclude anybody, including still the 1% and the collectors and the artwork, and that's still all in play, that's still there, but you have this wider range of activities as well, which you can also kind of find inroads and pathways to the institution as well. I think that's something that's marvellous about Manchester. It grew rapidly, swallowed up, things like Platthor and lots of others, even as far as Winnenshaw, and those halls are now preserved, and some are in museum use, or quite good doors on them if they're not in use at all right now. But the thing is, that's the thing about, it's not the only British city that did that, grew rapidly, which means that the places where those buildings are, are now, it's the, it's not regeneration, is it, it's the fall down bit of the inner city, it's where your immigrant communities arrive and your minority communities arrive, and they're still doing that here, and you're asylum seeking communities of course, and that means those people are all on foot. They have to be. Yeah, and that's what's great about this. The discussions we had with Platthor, for example, we're doing these sort of community discussions around the neighborhoods around, and the other idea was, it was a slave over his house, it was like, let's bend this, let's turn it, let's not deny that, let's play with it, let's kind of manipulate that from our perspective as kind of people who come from different cultures or maybe, you know. These are the people who need integrating, and I was talking with somebody who tour guides, that he couldn't seem to fathom why people from north side of Manchester, it said they've never been in the art gallery, they only lived three miles away. I said, yeah, but unless they're culturally present where they live, they can't be culturally present in the center, and that that's missing, actually, particularly from the north side of Manchester, I don't know any historic houses up that way, that might be my mistake. Green's Park, Green's Park. Oh, right, okay, but that makes a difference, whereas at least we know we've got this one at Withenshore, you know, it's getting your newer communities in through the doors, and yeah, you're right, other talk to power, but most cities can do that because of the nature of the rebuilds that happened from 1830 on. I was really talking about architecture with building buildings that have leases. I remember a pop-up museum, the Museum of the New York People, but it's very simple project, and then I guess I'm interested in the nature of the museum without the buildings, so for example, museums like Museum of Homelessness, museums in suitcase, there's kind of new interpretation on it, or like an open question of what's your kind of feeling around that kind of new iteration of the museum? I'm gonna ask you a question on the new concept because my salvation... Is it like the end of the museum? Yeah, that's it. Is that kind of without space, or with movable space? Where? I don't know. Do you know what I mean by that kind of... Yeah, I think we have to remember that museums are quite a young museum, and in a very particular, with a geographic focus that came out of, predominantly, a kind of Euro-century culture as well. There's a lot of art that's happened historically in the world without museums. So they are a product of the modern project, if we define the modern project as beginning in, I don't know, 14, 16, 17, 18. So I think we have to remember that, but we also have to remember them as being... This is why I think it's important to remind ourselves that they're not fixed, that they're constantly changing, they're constantly evolving, and they're just as fluid as any sort of pop-up or any... Things come and go and they change and they become something else, and that's okay. And, of course, you can have all those things... The world is much richer for having all those things at the same time rather than one or the other. So I think what we need to do is acknowledge the spectrum of activity, and now, of course, the balance within politics and economics is that normally the big institution has the gravitational pull, the bigger it is, the bigger the gravity. So I think we probably have to find ways to work, to accommodate those other practices, which are the... I think also it's about who gathers around those... Let's say that collection in the suitcase or something like that, the collection itself is only as good as the people who gather around it, in a sense. It's the gathering and the sometimes antagonistic relations that spark that, that spark by that, and spark by that collection. I'm sure that happens. I think that the collection itself is a wonderful tool to create the kind of antagonistic relations, which are the fundamental kind of democracy that's not the rule of the joint. So it's very important that they happen, but it's important that they're not just a phenomenon in themselves, but they have a social life. And that social life is how we could judge them. So in a sense it's the same in the museum. I think museums can be totally dead with that collection. And museums in suitcases can be totally dead as well. They can be simply individual projects. It's about what this gathering takes. But in terms of this gathering, and I think this is a question really to both of you and also because you're both operating in, well, in Manchester and Eichelden, so cities which are not the capital in countries which both, shall we say, have moments of questioning belonging. And again, those circles never go away. You think about always 50 years and seeing how, and that seems only very resonant. And so just thinking through and you've described how you're addressing the local with, say, town halls or with the Afghan refugees or these type of seekers. And I wonder what is the responsibility that you feel as people having, as practicing museums of intervening in the national conversation of belonging that we've talked about? I think we did a project a few years ago called The Coming Dutch. I think which was more of a provocation, because it was in that period, I suppose we started it before the crisis and then it ended up being just after. But it still felt like a moment where this idea of duchessence was relatively unchallenged and there were reviews of that experience which said, why are they bothering asking these questions about identity? The reviews felt rather silly because we already had a kind of a, we could say as a proto-fascist or a right populist movement already moving within Fortale and later with the head builders. So it was already underway as it was, what happened here with leading up to Brexit, I guess you could see is more or less the same thing, sort of rejection of the outside and redrawing of us and them lines. But nevertheless that was a little bit within the art world. There was still this sort of what I would characterize as complacency towards what was going on outside of that art condition. But I think the big conversation now, really internationally, is really how you get economics to work, for me in the broadest sense, so economics as in how you maintain a society. So equality, that relationship of political economy. Yeah, exactly. So for me, I suppose what I'm interested in doing here and what we're trying to do is to create projects, ways of working, where you test out models for that to work and it might be within rush code or Moss side or here in the city centre, but with particular constituent groups because you cannot generalise, you have to work in specific circumstances. But then those case studies can then be part of a national international conversation with everybody else who's trying to tackle these things and then drawing those up. But there's also an internationalism in the place that you're in and that's what I think becoming much revealed to and we recently put two maps on the wall as you go into the collection and one is the diversity of origin of the citizens of Idaho and the other is the diversity of origin of the collection and the diversity of the citizens of Idaho is far greater than the collection. What's interesting is that the narrative because I think it was a relatively small city of 200,000 of Van Abel was always that it's an international museum in a provincial place but actually this shows that the collection is far less international than the citizenry of Idaho itself. So suddenly we're a provincial museum in an international city, actually. And our collection is provincial if we talk about collection within that context of the city that we're meant to be reflecting that's also in a sense our taskmasters in a certain way. There's a wonderful parallel actually to the case that we're talking about of Cartron Paul and whose collection is sort of pride of place in his speech act where there was a political act to kind of address exactly that that relationship that you're talking about is how does the collection reflect or talk to Democrats? Scanning the room again. We're doing this project and some of the people are now today actually because it's part of the International Festival here with Tanya Begaira who runs a school for integration but it's basically people from other cultures teaching theoretically the local people about their cultures so it's like reverse assimilation and in a way that's sort of about how you use the resource like this to actually say that this is a city with close to 200 languages spoken and you came on a daily basis and made a look around the galleries you wouldn't necessarily know that but buried in these collections and buried in the resources there are those stories as a speech act shows but it's how we tell those stories and we need to have that collective conversation which is inclusive in order to bring that through the truth, the reality of the complexity of how culture works And I think it goes back to how we use our resources is one of the things that we should be dashed on so it's like not to give up on those large scale institutions and say let's do pop-up museums it's both and, it's also that we need to respond to your kinds of initiatives and to use the resources that we have historically until we don't have them anymore to actually use them in constructive ways that can support the kind of dialogue between us so I think that's why we still do what we do in a sense because we feel responsibility to use the virtual resources in the best way that we can Annie? Thank you and it's really interesting to be here from the perspective of the institutions and I guess in the spirit of their deviant the civilians I just wanted to ask because we've spent a really wonderful, rich day talking about the NCHAS practice and his alternative sort of institution and he's very much sidelined and forgotten to, you know different occasions that he's popped up in the endeavor to bring him back into the narrative and with all due respect I also kind of feel slightly uncomfortable we're ending the day with such a strong institutional presence of two very respected male white leaders and I wonder how we can disrupt that as well, this kind of cleanery that's always there but also I think my colleague here at her point is really getting back to how do we couple the museum as a forum with the institution as a sort of passenger power or an instrument of power and I wonder how we can open that up more, whether it's through conversations like this and other reforms I just wanted to go because when you're talking I would affect more perhaps Oh sorry, yes and also having more people of color and maybe other women who are leading that sort of the parallel perhaps here Thank you, I'm sorry I just wanted to add to your comment I think the notion of the museum is what seems persistently useful because when we went to the public museum, the LIC museum and we're talking about museums and we're looking to building which is a particular and wondering exactly I suppose the same sort of questions that you were just asking what's useful about this discussion and is it that the notion of the museum is still useful I've just been thinking about an institution where it depends itself in opposition to the idea of the museum and whether or not that's helpful or not so I suppose could you answer that question about is that notion of the museum something that's useful for the area of access is it something that's helpful to use? I want to think about how we can expand the notion of the museum apart from just institutions with the buildings and the collections which themselves have to be very institutional because you have to protect collections and therefore you need resources therefore you need political power to have all those things come together but how can you also fracture that somehow to have other modes of museums of the future which I think you were talking about how museums without forms and how other forms of museums can happen to the digital perhaps I'm brainstorming here but it's been a long day and a very rigid day so wonderful night last night as well so I guess what I'm trying to say is how else can we open up these conversations where they are so much about policy really set a tone perhaps and other voices other persons from other communities with other interests to also join in that question of what is the museum perhaps if I could just come back on that one and I think it does bring us back to LYC a little bit as well it's a very clear example of something that worked just by doing stuff it really discovered what it was through doing and making and for me that is actually where the bread and butter of this is so yes of course we sit in these fora which obey the traditions of everything we're criticising right, so we've got the projector we have the layout of the chairs the podium, you know this has all the trappings but I think actually what I would say we're trying to do as institutions is to actually break those habits about changing behaviours so whilst you know, the architecture of the building kind of stays the same you can bend with it and play with it but that's the framework but there are lots of ways in which we can just by doing different kinds of things start to develop different behaviours and patterns and I think that's where we get to the point that you're talking about that's really exciting and it's quite hard to talk about that because that is just talk and actually I think if you see the texture of for example some of the things Charles has described the interpersonal moments like the conversation between the two Afghans in the museum, that's actually where what we're talking is taking place because Charles isn't there necessarily in that conversation those people are allowing themselves to take over the space in a different kind of way I agree with you and I struggle enormously and I'm struggling with my own privilege constantly in that relation I'm not sure what to do with it because my privilege is not necessarily only personal it's a privilege which is sustained by a structure and if I were to resign tomorrow it's not necessarily true that that structure would be overturned I agree and I wouldn't want to resign if you're doing that but perhaps are you just in a question to ask and I think I should say can I dream of someone else with me I think there are attempts to do that but I think the structural change which in the sense is the decolonial is the end of patriarchy capitalism and colonialism this is what the decoloniality implies that's the challenge the holy trinity of these three which coexist and which can't be separated the three are dependent on each other and in those terms that's the structure that we need to change now what I can contribute to that as somebody who's benefitting from all three all the time is hard to imagine except for me the question of the de-modern which feels like something which me as a privileged subject of the world owns that narrative that's my narrative it's also in I embody it I embody the modern man and so to try to de-modernize that narrative and myself to some degree does mean allowing other voices absolutely it does mean thinking about diversity in terms of the staff which we think about very hard it does mean giving people who you know it does mean changing your aesthetic radar radically from modern a modern aesthetic radar to other kinds of of understandings of what art could possibly be including some of the work that we've seen there that's not necessarily made art today and I think that's what the LYC Museum was doing as I was still saying just by practice and not necessarily by any other kind of rhetoric that I'm giving you now as a white person in power I understand that really we should think of ourselves as a music yourself yeah but I mean what would be nice is we could change the structure sufficiently that when I design it doesn't just repeat itself that would be great and this analogy of bending is quite nice that I think our friends have imposed so you keep bending and keep bending at certain points it snaps back but if you keep you know it's like steaming wood at some point it starts to kiss it starts to grow and I have to sort of bring at least a formal bit of this conversation to a close because we've gone well over even our 515 limit but as an example of bending and it may be a very small bit but I do want to sort of acknowledge I think the openness and generosity of Manchester Art Gallery to host about the exhibition and this event which in a way is also inviting exactly this kind of difficult conversation that we don't have enough of which is around who speaks, for whom, how in what form and how do we open up those conversations and I think sort of you and the artists that you curated within the gallery space itself with some bends here and not enough bends there I think it's very much part of that conversation and I sort of want to leave it there with the metaphor that I'll sort of take from Tai Chi so in Tai Chi which is both the form of moving meditation but also in martial art to practice the martial art you do something called pushing hands where the purpose is to find the center of the person that you're playing with and when you found it you pushed them even a little nudge and they'll go flying so I think we have to push hands with the museum with middle-aged white men with middle-aged brown men with whoever you wish to play with but I think the key thing that we can take away from Lee's three-way ping-pong table is that it's really important to play thank you all for playing with us today and maybe continue in that spirit