XP Newsletter: Self-Instituting

> We have an actual intern! Meet Bettina below.
> Dec 6 - Office-style end of year drink for freelancers.
> Dec 11 – Mending Circle with Wietske
> Dec 12 - Bettina's goodbye drink
> Jan 16 - Are.na Annual launch
More info below under NEWS.

Maybe it's a response to maturing, maybe it was always there, this fear of Organisation. "Thanks for coordinating," someone responds to an email draft I sent in the XP group chat. Discomfort follows. It's nice when work is acknowledged but also throws me back to when my side job was coordinating the MA Critical Inquiry Lab, and it felt like Organising ate up way too much brain and heart space to do self-initiated work.

As a frequent "responsible one (...) who puts on the lifeguard vest"⁷ of organisation, I want to believe that there is no conflict here, that organisation is just what makes Art possible, that it maybe even can be a form of art. And then a newsletter poses as a journal article. But I also fear this might be a myth that keeps me and others from making actual work.

It has been quite a pattern lately, so in this newsletter I'll weave a (long) thread through some experiences and events, looking for ways that Organising and Art can relate happily. Who knows, maybe I'll convince myself and comfort my inner organiser (and yours). Afterwards you can also read snippets of the lessons we wish we had learned in school and had to self-organise after. But first, let's look the danger in the eyes.

1) XP member in monthly meeting, 2024
2) XP member during lunch, 2025
3) XP member when rearranging the space, 2022-2025
4) XP member during radio chat on income-pooling, 2025
5) Intern Bettina's response to our maturing efforts, 2025
6) XP member during radio chat on organising, 2025
7) From Pools of Conviviality in Are.na Annual, forthcoming

You might know us as artists or designers, but as a group we're mostly known as professional moderators. At least based on the jobs we get offered as XP. This spring, a question if we would like to moderate a panel on the role of institutes, at a new design biennale opening event of 180 euro a ticket.

We were invited by art collective TAMI (The Actual Main Institute) who are exploring what it would mean to have institutes cater to artist needs rather than the other way around. You know, that shapeshifting for funding applications and open calls to appease or fool the Gatekeeper to let you into the Institutional world of Art and Design.

When Jack was working on the task of making slides for the panel, diagramming the influence blowing from policy to institutions to curators to artists, for some reason it looked a bit flatulent. Maybe it was the ticket price, maybe our boyishness, but we decided to lean into it:

As the moderator I was tasked to deliver the theory, to introduce the conversation. It seemed like about half of the audience was in on the joke. Perhaps those who raised their hand for: who identifies as a freelance cultural worker? And for: who got a free ticket?

In the 20min power-panel, with Maren Bang from TAMI, Amanda Pinatih from Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and Delany Boutkan from Nieuwe Instituut, we shared anecdotes of shapeshifting artists, but also speculated on ways to reverse the flow of power by having institutes cater to artists.

How to enter from the exit? reads the title of an exhibition on institutions by befriended artists⁸, perhaps staying with the metabolic, you know, a bottom-up model. In one work, Noam Youngrak Son tries to become the smallest institution possible. If a cultural institution is what turns work into value, what about a vending machine selling their memes as postcards? Then they told me they realised that basically is what freelancing is: being your own institution.

I'm afraid it's more the latter. Maybe it's the 'lancer' part that casts us already in a field of competition, and its accompanying structure of survival feelings. Being our own boss, we're tasked with Organising our art/hard work into market value, recognised by the orgs, grants, companies we rely on.

I want to believe there is an alternative to the individualist 'becoming the product' response to top-down organisation of art. During the panel we were trying to picture this power inversion happening within current institutes. It wasn't easy to imagine catering-to-artist being funded. But later I realised, isn't that exactly what artist-run spaces are doing? What we are trying with Extra Practice? Lately we refer to ourselves less as moderators than as "prototyping support structures for cultural freelancers."

When was it that you felt free to make art? When you were a kid? When you were studying? When you were on that residency? Few places more organised than the institution of a school, residency, or nuclear family. The organisation of an artificial womb, walls that temporarily keep out the World and Work and the demand for organising your mode of survival yourself.

I then get the sense that anti-organisation sentiment is misguided. Directed at the symptom, the bureaucratic messengers and gatekeepers, rather than what the organisation organises towards. 'Let's not think about boring business stuff' is only possible when you don't have to. 'Death to institutions' only when you have an alternative support structure. Ignoring organisation then just imports the current structures unquestioned, as Jo Freeman reminds us in The Tyranny of Structurelessness.

If we look at Organisation more as sedimented collective agreements, it shows its promise – collectivity, aka if we all agree it means we can realise more together – and its trap – power centralisation, aka did everyone really agree? Maybe the Art of Organisation is less about the separation into organs with tasks, and more about how those organs relate, attune, and become an organism together.

How to Organise? read the title of an event Varia invited us to, as if they knew what we were muddling through. We gathered with about 10 collectives, with Ben, Kirsten and me representing XP. Everyone shared tools, like the ever-feeding feminist soup (Feministas Rotterdam), a 5-15% collectivity fee added to invoices (Hackers & Designers, Varia), and sharing work principles in an online editable doc (HumDrumPress). Our tool was the spreadsheet to draft income-pooling that Jack and Emma shared in an earlier newsletter, as a way of collectivising financial experimentation (which turned out to first require breaking the taboo of financial transparency, and then made us share personal survival tactics).

I left feeling excited about admin and all. It suddenly felt empowering, as the invisible spatial design of the organism we're in. Instead of importing the conditions of the market and letting them determine our roles, could self-organising be a way of counter-structuring, to care for the conditions of our work? Could we self-institute ourselves into a womb for art, and could this whole practice then become Art?

Headphones hang from mics on stands around a table filled with cables, a mixer, and a laptop. By now I'm quite familiar with how this radio setup makes space for a particular kind of conversation. It's informal, because not fully scripted, while you also want to make sense together. First for the people around you and then the people who might be tuning in. An improvisational collective jam. All from this messy table.

It was my first time in Topolò this summer. Robida's Summer School was about radio, but I feel they also were a kind of radio. An infrastructure for emergence, a soil for art-making. Each participant was also host, by leading a session and cooking, but this was only possible with the care infrastructure that the Robida members Organised. This started from the conceptual framing and funding behind the open call, but continued with arranging places to sleep, the kitchen, the radio, the website, all the support every participant got to work out how their idea might actually take place in and around the village.

The curator who is a caretaker creates a space for making art, without knowing what art will be made. (...) a caretaking of a space for art-making as the making of social forms, of modes of making together that form value itself, that invent value as an experiment made in care, under the watch of the caretaker, the accomplice. Under this watch, art-making can suspend whatever value tries to plot, and invent a practice of valuing for itself, with others, a conspiracy of value for itself, in space of caretaking, in complicit love, write Valentina Desideri and Stefano Harney.⁹

Instead of top-down or freelance Organising of Art for Value, the caretaker would organise to "suspend whatever value tries to plot." This is the kind of organising I want at XP. Not rules to tie play to usefulness, but creating the conditions that allow for play, for desire, for pursuing meaning. To be our own summer school. Maybe this is what I need to learn, organising more conditions for process and less result.

It was the reason why, earlier this year, we decided to focus our collective 'XP maturing' efforts on things that would directly help our individual practices. If some are stressed for money or work it limits our space for collective play, so how could we help each other? One main lesson from these sessions: that Organising our labour conditions aka project management is not something we had learned. Uncertainty on deliverables and plannings makes it way too easy for existential doubts to creep in. When is my work good enough? Do really I deserve this invoice? I was quite amazed how with one good email to a client, Kirsten turned from a week of stress to a week of play.

When there are more people than mics, the radio changes the conversation in another way. It slows it down, equalises vocal volume, minimises interruption, and centers attention on the one holding the mic. During one of the Poolside chats the mic passed through the audience and we were all listening to Dalal from Zawyeh space in Jordan, who pointed out how in the Global South, organisation is often a necessity for art-making. To make your own place, audience, community.

Maybe self-organising in the Global North points to a growing necessity. Not just to replace eroding infrastructures, but to prepare for what the forces behind such 'austerity measures' may unleash. This is what I see when I look at self-run spaces for collectivity close to us like varia, .zip, but also places like Kiosk, Worm, Roodkapje. Organisings for Art. Perhaps unsurprisingly, at some point during How to Organise? we discussed the idea of organising amongst these to share the Art of Organising.

Here, look at this draft contract for income-pooling.
On your left, the Big "should I take on the work?" Flowchart!
On your right, a projection of a dive into our fears and dreams.
Or listen, you'll hear a radio conversation of people talking about all of this.
Have you noticed the depth gauge of your commitment, a fish net, a pool noodle, don't you see you're in a Pool?

Instead of our individual work we put our collective work of building support structures on display. But did that really turn Organising into Art? Perhaps when framing art as a practice of following desire in material, self-organising would fit, but it's hard to feel it.

To some visitors at least, it did not seem a satisfying answer to where is the art. Yet I was also surprised by visitors who entered while we were halfway a radio conversation about a draft contract, and decided to stay, listen and contribute. Or the graduates of Design Academy Eindhoven in our post-grad workshop, who listened attentively when we talked through the whole flowchart until we arrived at the end and got an applause.

Click the HTML icon "< >", write "< sup >" for superscript but with style "line-height: 0; font-size: 0.5;" or it will disrupt the paragraph, then enter the number of the footnote. Maybe scroll up to see at what number you're at. Then "< /sup >". It works most of the time. I started posing as journal and now I should finish it.

In a text for the Are.na Annual (forthcoming) we speculate on how far collectivity could and should go, and the Organisation vs Art tension routinely resurfaces. It keeps diving one level deeper into sharing, until we would share our mission with other collectives, following up on the political duty to try and change the swimming conditions for all. Great, but. Endless group conversations with other collectives and no time to art? Isn't it enough "just to live it"?¹¹ Do we need to buy political influence with our soul?

At the recent grad show of Design Academy Eindhoven, some graduates organised as the Committee Against Genocide, to shift attention from design to Palestine. They had sewn a big flag, organised daily walk-outs, wrote speeches and open letters, collectively researched spots at Dutch Design Week that support Palestine or are complicit in the genocide, designed, printed and distributed a counter-map, used their screens to show Palestinian films, hosted a panel with two of the film makers, joined forces with local activist organisations and folded paper birds for every Palestinian kid who died.

At the XP Away day last winter I tried to picture a loop of the cauldron feeding our individual practices feeding back into the collective fire. Maybe the things we do creatively can be part of Organising. Publishing, teaching, hosting events, building websites. Writing even. Just like we do at XP already, but then with others. Not necessarily Organising as Art, more Art as Organising.

Fig 11. When Sylvia Wynter talks about auto-institution, she talks
about how this earliest known Artwork in the Blombos Cave in
current South Africa, played a key role in Organising a sense
of kinship beyond genetic family bonds.¹²

I have to think of Kirsten's organising obsession aka practice, and how preparing to start itself became part of the artwork. Could this workaround spiral out from the scale of the individual to XP, to a collective of collectives, to revolution?

I think Organising and Art feel the same when rehearsing the conditions we want to see. To imagine the scene or scenario we want to be a part of and start making it, so it can grow. Maybe that's why I miss the Opening Party from last year with its four rehearsals. Arty-party.

I remember finding the melody of Bella Ciao annoying when I first heard it. How to make a snob an activist? Maybe it was the reharmonised version from the organ at the Anti-Fascist Church during Engage that unlocked it for me, or more me for it, to be touched. Because a week later it touched me again, now from the throats of the DAE graduates at their daily walk-out. And a week later again, when the transnational student coalition band Ghanni was joined by the whole audience choiring in at the Jan van Eyck, and I learned to see how political organisation rides the rippling echoes of a song.

So many things to learn and unlearn. In May we got an email from artistic research student Bettina for an internship. So then we had our first interview call. Vibe check was easy (as many in Rotterdam can confirm by now 🤙) but what could an intern work on?

One of our XP maturing ideals was sharing our lessons with those new to the cultural freelancing ocean, and I guess an internship would count as well, but we decided to go meta. So Bettina has been working on a Post-Grad Kit. Who else would know better what a pre-grad would need to know?

I would have liked some lessons on how to set boundaries for myself, and how to communicate them clearly. Not only telling clients and collaborators what I will and will not do and when, but also feeling when I am taking on too much and knowing when to stop working, and muting work-related messages in my ‘free’ time. Some lessons on how to take free time.*

I touched the bottom a few times and regularly still swallow water, but I’m diligently practising my management strokes with a bit of help from the inflatable structures I built in Notion/Obsidian (which I have to admit sometimes can get too overblown) and from the lifeguards around the studio who will yell at me to ask for more money.

I wish I hadn't learnt to rely on others to define the value of things. Something that I find myself struggling with is deciding whether something is good or not, and only through someone else confirming (or denying) that quality can I find (or lose) value in it.

[W]hen things are going well, I feel like I can be put into some form of creative cruise control (...) basically my intuition can pull me forward in a project and the tools I need at that moment are there at my disposal. But then to reach that moment I feel like I need to have tools that don't focus on activities of swimming/freelance life but are instead tools that bring out more reflective states on what I need to swim/work to start with. Like the tool for knowing what time of day I write better, or the tool for knowing that unless I feel some agency within a process, then I'm going to feel unmotivated to do it. Maybe these are more like indicators, but a spirit level is also a tool.

Wish I learned that art production is often just like any other work. I think because it's "art" and takes on this mystical feeling, there's pressure to make things that feel like magic. But I don't think that kind of art is "day job ready" under current conditions.

For a long time, I put pressure on myself to make everything meet a standard I was happy with before putting it out into the world. I feel that less now, or at least I think it's only sometimes true. Especially with paid projects, "good enough" is totally okay.

I do not think [education] should be detached from how society functions however, rather it should see all things as points of study. So in this way when things like finances and capitalism are not studied they rid us of the opportunity to see them as changeable.

Everything happened in this bubble and you didn't need to create an audience, this was already organised in the shape of the department head and tutors who evaluate you. This was a space where I could allow myself to be a learner without the outside world knowing it. But this created a big hurdle afterwards because of course I still was a learner. I think I hadn't posted anything on Instagram for 4 years.

In an educational environment the work is always going to be a proxy of your development. Which I think fits a little too comfortably with a protestant work ethic where your worth is defined by your work. So why the hell put something on a platform for your followers to determine your worth in likes? This was, I mean is, still something I need to unlearn.

Even though I'm always amazed how it feels lighter to publish things under this collective identity, I did take months to get to finish this newsletter (sorry!). Maybe it also creates more of a frame of meaning, it will at least be meaningful to my peers. A bit like a radio conversation, as long as it reaches the other faces at the mics, it might also reach those of whom they become a proxy.

I look at the pool. I see some lancia spezzata (old soldier, broken lance) still swimming and remembering the times they had difficulty knowing who owned, who owns, and who will own and therefore represent, their livery badge, whose patterns seem to spread on the work they deliver externally.

I understand now why freelancers bear their own spare. It is not to fight, it is to honor and prove their own coat of arms. It is in this precision that lies the ephemeral condition of reflecting, that artistic freelancers have to manage to learn alone. Reflectivity, your own surface; I feel like all of you had wished to learn how to leave the water when it was, and when it’s, enough. Having the capacity of knowing oneself « enough reasons » (whether they are justifiable to others and to you, or not). But to do so, you have to know who your work is (as it holds your own livery), to detach from it and ask yourself is this worth, and not linking it to your own personal worth. Drowning, Dr. Owning, you are doctors of your own condition of ownership, and learning who you own reveals what you sell, what you make a product of, what consistency related to yourself you offer to your work.

Because you all have wished to understand who is your shadow reflecting on the surface and on the white tiles of the pool, your work and its morphologies, whether it is commissioned or personal, you all seem to have eluded the process of having to construct dependence on others, and you seem to accept the fact that it is something that you learn naturally to keep afloat. But the key to knowing who the shadow is, lies there, and is what school should be aiming to teach us, understanding who is the reflection of others and tangle yourself in it equally, understanding everyone's relation to their work. Not freelancers understood as emancipated from feudal work structures or freedman, freeholder, because we are always under the yoke of some sort of market structures, but understood as its semantic core in the old english freo, and proto germanic frijon, that meant: not in bondage, free to love, friends. We should be learning since the beginning of school how to swim different swims together and rotate the roles of safeguards being overprotective, kids splashing like idiots, oldster taking all the time left in the world, young parrot and parakeet talking on the side, and hypersportive provers, rather than prioritise the power dynamics that underlie competition and value.

> Dec 6 19.30-00.00: Annual Freelance Office Holiday Party 🎄👔🥂📈🪩
A dream finally coming true, office-style end of year drinks for freelancers. Unfortunately it's already full by now, but you can email to mail@extrapractice.space if you want to be on the waiting list.

Extra Practice Newsletter Sep Oct Nov 2025 issue

Self-Instituting

Gijs de Boer

I. Pushing it, or The Organisation of Art

II. Self-instituting, or The Art of Organisation

III. Support structures, or Organisation for Art

IV. Rehearsing, or Organisation as Art

V. Learning, or Organisation after Art school

News