Speculative Pen: Fabulating Institutional Futures

An Experimental Format for Institutional Self-Questioning

Speculative Pen is an artistic symposium that departs from the conventional conference format, positioning itself instead as a collective learning space and curatorial intervention. Running from 9 to 11 July 2026, the event connects institutional self-examination with speculative exercises aimed at imagining the future of art organisations. Rather than a site of one-directional knowledge transmission, it is designed as a space where institutional structures are reflected upon and creatively extended.

The title invokes the ballpoint pen as a tool of administrative practice, reinterpreted here as an instrument of speculation. The central inquiry is twofold: to what extent can speculative thinking reshape institutional frameworks and expand the scope of possible action, and how might utopian propositions be translated into grounded, situated speculations that build on existing practice?

A Collaborative Research Project

The symposium is an open research initiative undertaken by three institutions: CCA Temporary Gallery in Cologne, Kunstverein Bielefeld and Kunstverein Siegen. It forms part of Übermorgen—Neue Modelle für Kulturinstitutionen, a programme run by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation) that brings together fifty cultural organisations across Germany to develop new models for their futures as meaningful spaces for social life, particularly amid the significant crises of the present moment.

Over eighteen months, the three venues have been jointly developing their working methods, testing new models of collaboration and participation, and pursuing a shared question: how can art institutions remain networked, equitable and fit for the future? What unites their curatorial approach is an understanding of exhibition-making as something that extends into the urban and social fabric of their respective cities, and of discourse and education not as peripheral activities but as integral to curatorial practice itself.

The Permacultural Institution

A key conceptual thread running through the research is the idea of the permacultural institution, developed by Aneta Rostkowska in her essay "Towards a Permacultural Institution" (published in Islands of Kinship, Mousse Publishing, 2024). Drawing on permaculture principles—long-term thinking, interdependence and care for living systems—the model envisions art institutions as accessible, hybrid spaces combining the functions of community centres and exhibition venues, prioritising the well-being of both staff and the wider public.

The framework advocates decentralising curatorial authority, embedding social engagement into an institution's core structure and cultivating sustainable practices that resist the overproductive, fast-paced logic of the contemporary art world. Crucially, it insists that ecological and social sustainability must be addressed together—neither can be meaningfully pursued in isolation.

This concept has been developed through both theory and practice, first through the summer seminar Towards Perma-Cultural Institutions: Exercises in Collective Thinking (Stiftung Künstlerdorf Schöppingen, 2022), and subsequently through the workshop series Towards Permacultural Institutions: Curating Transformation (CCA Temporary Gallery, 2023), which applied permacultural ethics—earth care, people care and fair share—to questions of institutional change.

Reframing Precarity as Solidarity

Kunstvereine occupy a distinctive position in the cultural landscape: chronically underfunded yet stubbornly persistent, they have long functioned as nimble, community-rooted spaces capable of experimentation precisely because they operate outside the logic of large-scale institutional self-preservation. Speculative Pen asks how that structural precarity might be reframed as a condition for solidarity, and how genuinely collaborative practices can be built within and across these structures.

Programme and Participants

Through collective writing sessions, creative self-expression guided by artistic impulses, fictional excursions, workshops, discussions and lectures, participants will address questions of participation and publicness, different organisational forms and possibilities for democratising institutional practice. The symposium also attends to social sustainability and process-oriented, collaborative educational work, considering inclusive access alongside decolonial and transcultural perspectives.

The programme includes Paulina Seyfried's workshop Language Creates Reality on the third day, alongside contributions from an international group of artists, curators, researchers and institutional practitioners, among them Cane Adina Erzi, Alistair Hudson (online), Andreas Maus, Nina Möntmann, Tamarind Rossetti and Stephen Wright, Meghna Singh, Kathy-Ann Tan, Fatoş Üstek (online) and Franciska Zólyom. Food is provided by AMA TWI.

The symposium is convened by Jennifer Cierlitza (Kunstverein Siegen), Lisa Klosterkötter and Aneta Rostkowska (CCA Temporary Gallery), and Victoria Tarak (Kunstverein Bielefeld). It will be live streamed, and registration is open by writing to info@temporarygallery.org before 1 July. Accessibility information is available on the Temporary Gallery website.

Funded by Übermorgen—New Models for Cultural Institutions, an initiative of the German Federal Cultural Foundation, delivered in collaboration with Bureau Ritter as executive partner.