The project economy as a ‘medium’ for the artists: turning meaningless procedures into meaningful practices

The project has become a primary working modality for artists, curators and researchers in the artworld. According to a 2024 study realized by the Observatoire romand de la culture (ORC), “project management occupies a significant portion of artists’ working hours in French-speaking Switzerland. […] This substantial workload is increased by the prevalence of project-based funding: 64.03% of the artists received a financial support through a specific project that requires rigorous planning.” A true project-economy has indeed arisen, which stands in parallel with the art market.

Most of the practitioners who operate within a project economy would agree with this: they are impelled to develop strategies to obtain funding, sometimes at the cost of their own convictions; they spend a great part of their time dealing with administrative tasks that include writing proposals, reports and budgets; their production is framed by deadlines and managerial procedures that do not fit creation or research; their artistic or academic work is subsumed to criteria and injunctions imposed from outside: they have to innovate, produce tangible outcomes, solve concrete problems; etc. This is why the project economy is usually seen as a means to instrumentalize the work of artists. Researcher, curator and lecturer Kuba Szreder has even argued that a new form of proletariat has arisen that he calls a “projectariat.”

While the argument of instrumentalization is legitimate, it is partially true, because the project economy leaves room for different forms of agencies. Moreover, to best operate at the heart of the social fabric, engaged artists have long appropriated the project, its procedures and methodologies, such as mapping the terrain, collaborating beyond disciplinary and sectoral boundaries, managing teams, solving problems, etc. As the documentary Contemporary Art at the Test of the Rural: Working Modalities of Project Artists sought to demonstrate, in other words, some artists have already made of the project a sort of medium in its own right, so turning meaningless procedures into meaningful practices. This precisely is the idea that the 2026 Master Symposium seeks to explore in Sierre, through workshops that address four categories of projects which are emblematic of the project economy: Kunst-am-Bau projects, artists-in-residence projects, research projects and social projects.

Students will have to choose one workshop, but a same approach will be implemented in all of them. These workshops will explore ways to turn the project into a medium through addressing the specific conditions of these four situations (Kunst-am-Bau projects, artists-in-residence projects, research projects and social projects): In which context are these projects implemented? How are these they structured? What is expected from artists? What type of skills do they require? How to manage such projects? What types of agencies do these projects call for? Etc. Ultimately, students and the guests in charge of the workshop will ask themselves how to position oneself in the project economy, and take the best of it?

To keep a trace of these reflexions and share them with all the participants, each group will have half an hour to prepare a synthesis that will be presented before the end of the symposium.

More information: master-platform.ch