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Unbuilding and Rebuilding Cultural Infrastructures in Times of Crises

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Welcome to a presentation and discussion about the role of cultural institutions in times when political, social, economic, and climate crises overlap. Artist and domain holder, Core Building at BAK Basecamp for Tactical Imaginaries, Jeanne van Heeswiljk unfolds the work developing to unbuild and rebuild cultural infrastructure collectively. Introduction and conversation with Magnus Ericson and Giorgiana Zachia.

To respond to these multi crises requires direct action and intervention. Basecamp radically embodies cultural infrastructure in order to leverage the imagining possible for it. Imagining is central to life in which we convene for resilience, survival, renewal and repair. Basecamp enacts how an art institution can function as a space for shared resources, collective learning, and active forms of making, doing, and reflection – offering itself as site and structure towards intimacy, critique, exploration, possibility, and action.

People sitting in a circle in an exhibition space

Photo: Wang Xue Sophia

BAK Basecamp, 1933 Revisted, Antifascist Assembly in sculpture ‘What are Your Flowers’ by Iliada Charlambous

Jeanne van Heeswijk is and artist and domain holder, Core Building at BAK Basecampt in Utrecht. Her work emerges from specific local contexts and unfolds over extended periods of time, allowing relationships, shared knowledge and agency to develop. Grounded in methods from community organising, pedagogy, storytelling, and spatial practice, her projects facilitate what she describes as “training for the not-yet”—a process of preparing ourselves, together, for a more just future that has not yet been realized but needs to be collectively imagined and enacted. Jeanne van Heeswijk has been invited to develop the Contemporary Art Days Summit 2026, where artists, curators, institutions, artist-run initiatives, and other organisations from across the field come together to collectively reflect on the infrastructures that support contemporary art.

Magnus Ericson is Head of Applied Arts, IASPIS, Giorgiana Zachia is Project Manager Strengthening Art Organizations at Public Art Agency Sweden.

Unbuilding and Rebuilding Cultural Infrastructures in Times of Crises is a collaboration between IASPIS and the Public Art Agency Sweden. The event is organised as part of Practice Matters, a project exploring design, craft, architecture, and spatial practice and its ability to act in relation to present urgent issues of crisis and conflicts.