Artist-Run Palace
photo of artist-run palace, Komplot, Brussels 2023
The Artist-Run Palace is a performative and speculative group exercise in which participants collectively design an imaginary artist-run space, starting from shared values, questions, and tensions. By translating ideas into rooms, routes, structures, and spatial relations, the exercise explores how collectivity takes shape—not only through language or intention, but through social and spatial architectures.
Inspired by the concept of the memory palace, this work does not aim to preserve the past. Instead, it invites participants to build a palace for the future: an imagined environment in which artistic, social, and economic values are temporarily given form. Through play, materials, and collective imagination, participants create spatial models that function as thinking tools for alternative ways of organising, collaborating, and being together.
The Artist-Run Palace moves between conversation and action, seriousness and play. It is not a workshop with a predefined outcome, but a collective exercise that opens space for uncertainty, speculation, and the unexpected. Rather than producing a blueprint for an ideal organisation, the work generates a shared experience in which it becomes possible to sense what it takes to build something together—and what is at stake when we do.
