INSquaRE Collective
Co-created by
INSQuaRE is a collective founded by Pankaj Tiwari and Dimitri van den Wittenboer. In our collaborative artistic practice, we explore the potentiality of space. We approach space through its performative dimension questioning how it is produced and lived by human interactions with each other and our environment. Our artistic aim is to challenge the established socio-political structures by discussing, imagining and performing alternative prototypes.
We believe that art as a tool or as an applied medium is not revolutionary, but art as a living practice it is. So, at the moment, we are an epicenter of try-out energies. We try all the so-called “ideal societies” and their practices. Especially the ones that have been claimed to exist only in theories.
From 2022 InSquare will be registered as an Amsterdam based Foundation that focuses on interdisciplinary collaborations and develops a cultural program in the city.
Every month we go for a short residency to different places to share our ideas and practices with different communities.
Our aim is to create structures that are based on commoning by rethinking the way we live together in our society. Our objective is to generate and redistribute physical space, financial resources and knowledge. Our goal is to create parallel infrastructures, laws and institutions and make them participatory and inclusive. We believe that to practically counter precarity, exploitation, expropriation, and racism the cultural sector needs to start working together.
We ask the questions
How can we as cultural workers become independent of the market and the state funding?
How can we creative sustainable prototypes?
How can we operate according to our own values and make our own discourses?
We aim to explore this question on four different levels: space, knowledge, finance and artistic interventions by creating prototypes and trying them out.
Residency network (Space)
Insquare operates in a community of spaces that are available for life and work to our members. This is an attempt to explore the potential of space on its physical but also social and political level. It is also a prototype for overcoming the precarity of space and the issue of not having space.
At this moment three spaces are part of the InSquare network: Nothinginwalkingdistance (Eifel, Germany), The Fotons, (Balrampur, India) and Roomwithoutadoor (Amsterdam, Netherlands)
The Tent: A school of performative practices (Knowledge)
In the framework of knowledge, Insquare sees a need to create our own school for artists coming from far. InSquare felt a need to create the right condition for those artists part of the educational/school programme. Insquare runs a school with an experimental educational program The Tent: a School of performative practices, a 12 months program that collaborates with 8 institutions and offers space for 4 participants.
Artistic Interventions
In our collaborative artistic practice, we explore the potentiality of space. We approach space through its performative dimension questioning how it is produced and lived by human interactions with each other and our environment. Our artistic aim is to challenge the established socio-political structures by discussing, imagining and performing alternative prototypes. We believe that art as a tool or as an applied medium is not revolutionary, but art as a living practice it is. So, at the moment, we are an epicentre of try-out energies. We try all the so-called “ideal societies” and their practices. Especially the ones that have been claimed to exist only in theories.
Financial Redistribution (Finance)
The Insquare team is generating financial resources from the cultural funding structures and redistributes it to the members and the creative community. It also creates structures for the larger artists community. The access to the resources is based on negotiation and bottom-up governance. We also explore the question of how we as cultural workers could live independent from the market and the governmental funding.