Constellation 3:
RE-BUILDING, RE-STRUCTURING, RE-VALUING
I don’t remember anyone explicitly teaching me this. No one ever said that being constantly available made me more valuable. Yet somewhere between education, work, and institutional expectations, as well as cultural ambition, I absorbed the lesson anyway. The more I produced, the more legitimate I felt. The more exhausted I became, the more seriously I believed I was being taken.
The cultural sector teaches this slowly at first: through praise attached to overwork, through admiration for endurance, through the expectation that artists, curators, writers, and cultural workers remain permanently available to their practice, their institution, their collaborators, and their audience. Under these conditions, value becomes inseparable from visibility, and visibility becomes inseparable from output. The body learns quickly that stillness is difficult to justify.
Chantal Mouffe reminds us that cultural production never exists outside politics. [1] Institutions do not simply reflect society; they participate in organising what becomes visible, valuable, and legitimate. That feels increasingly difficult to ignore within cultural work, where labour is often presented as passion while remaining deeply entangled with capitalist extraction. Exhaustion begins to resemble commitment, burnout becomes professionalism, and precarity disguises itself as opportunity.
Frequently, I think about how cultural institutions speak about supporting artists while continuing to rely upon invisible labour to sustain themselves: emotional labour, access labour, care labour, and community labour. These forms of work rarely appear in strategic plans or annual reports, yet they make cultural practice possible.
Mierle Laderman Ukeles challenged the distinction between maintenance and creativity decades ago, insisting that maintenance is not separate from artistic practice, but one of its essential conditions. [2] I find myself coming back to this because maintenance is precisely what cultural institutions struggle to recognise. We celebrate innovation because it appears visible. Maintenance disappears because its success looks like nothing is happening at all.
Capitalism struggles to value what cannot be easily quantified: rest, slowness, care, recovery, dependency, and collectivity. Yet these are precisely the conditions that sustain cultural life. Richard Sennett’s work on cooperation is useful here because it reframes social life as a practice rather than an outcome. Cooperation depends upon ongoing acts of negotiation, listening, adaptation, and repair. [3] These are learned skills that require time, patience, and continual attention. Contemporary institutions, however, increasingly reward efficiency over relation and productivity over maintenance.
David Graeber similarly argues that contemporary economies often reward work detached from its social usefulness while undervaluing the labour that makes collective life possible.[4] Care, maintenance, education, and support are treated as economically peripheral despite being indispensable. This inversion feels painfully familiar within cultural work, where visibility frequently carries greater institutional value than sustainability.
I recognise this logic in the kinds of work that disappear most easily: checking in on someone after an event, extending a deadline, translating information, redistributing time, or making space for rest. These practices rarely appear in institutional measures of success, yet they are often what make participation possible in the first place. They are difficult to quantify, easy to overlook, and indispensable for the continuation of collective life.
Increasingly, I think accessibility is not simply about adjustments. It is a way of reading institutions themselves. Every building, deadline, application process, meeting schedule, and communication style reveals who an institution imagined would already be there.
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson argues that disability emerges through cultural expectations about what bodies should do, how they should move, and what capacities they should possess. Institutions quietly construct an ideal body. [5] One that is available, mobile, productive, fast, responsive, and emotionally self-constrained. Accessibility enters the institutional conversation too late, after major decisions have already been made, budgets allocated, and timelines fixed. After exclusions have been created. Disabled bodies and minds absorb the labour of adaptations while structures remain largely unchanged.
Disability justice writer Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha reminds us that access is not an individual requirement, but a collective practice. [6]The question is not how institutions respond once exclusion occurs, but what assumptions about bodies, communications, energy, and time were embedded within the structure from the beginning. The structure speaks before anyone else, through its architecture, deadlines, and criteria. Through assumptions about who can remain available.
I used to think that exclusion happened in isolated incidents. Over time, this changed. Exclusion persists through accumulated repetitions. Institutional norms reproduce themselves because they appear neutral.
Sara Ahmed describes institutions as places where repetition becomes structures. [7] Policies accumulate, procedures become habitual, and certain ways of working begin to feel natural simply because they have been repeated for so long. Exclusion rarely appears through spectacular acts of discrimination. More often, it is reproduced through ordinary administrative decisions, habitual procedures, and institutional routines that have become so familiar they disappear from view.
As Chantal Mouffe argues, hegemony operates through the production of common sense: the assumptions, values, and institutional norms that come to feel natural precisely because they are repeatedly reproduced. [8] Cultural institutions, therefore, do not simply reflect society; they actively participate in shaping legitimacy, value, and belonging.
This is why representation alone cannot resolve inequality. Institutions can display critical work while maintaining inaccessible conditions, preserving centralised authority and exploitative labour. Visibility without redistribution becomes another form of extraction. Re-structuring, therefore, asks more difficult questions.
What conditions reproduce inequality even when representation improves?
Which bodies are institutions designed around?
Whose exhaustion is normalised?
Whose slowness becomes a professional risk?
Mouffe argues that counter-hegemonic practice requires transforming the institutions that sustain dominant orders rather than merely critiquing them. This requires structural change rather than tokenistic or symbolic inclusion. Budgets, timelines, authority, and decision-making. The institution itself must change shape. [9] This is where resistance intensifies, because re-structuring destabilises professionalism itself. Authority, expertise, and legitimacy no longer remain as secure as they once appeared.
Françoise Vergès Imagines the possibility of a "museum without objects”, one that refuses to repair historical violence simply through accumulation. [10] I find this image compelling because cultural institutions frequently respond to crisis by producing more: more programming, more exhibitions, more representation. Yet accumulation cannot repair structures organised through exclusion. Vergès reminds us that many histories survive not through objects but through words, gestures, songs, relations, and practices of care. These forms rarely enter institutional archives, yet they sustain cultural life.
These practices can take the form of friends proofreading your application, someone quietly redistributing travel costs, people refusing institutional urgency, or extending patience during moments of exhaustion. These gestures sustain cultural worlds, even when unrecognised institutionally.
Sennett distinguishes between restoration, remediation, and reconfiguration. Restoration seeks to return something to an earlier condition. Remediation improves what already exists while preserving its overall form. Reconfiguration, however, changes the structure itself. [11]
Re-building requires reconfiguration because some structures were never stable to begin with, and burnout reveals this clearly. The cultural worker becomes infrastructure, absorbing instability so institutions can continue functioning. Yet no amount of resilience transforms extraction into care. Re-building begins when continuation becomes impossible. Not through certainty, but through rupture.
Mutual aid practices become significant here because they reorganize support as collective survival, rather than institutional charity. They emerge when communities recognise that institutions fail unevenly and that alternative structures often exist before official change arrives.
Sennett argues that cooperation depends upon dialogic practices: sustaining relation without requiring consensus. [12] This is increasingly important because contemporary institutions often prioritise speed, efficiency, and resolution over sustained negotiation.
Re-building requires different temporalities, and acknowledging what should not be re-built. Not all institutional forms deserve continuation. Some structures are fundamentally organised around exhaustion and exclusion.
As Filippo Menozzi argues, decolonisation cannot remain symbolic; it must address the material foundations through which inequality is reproduced. [13] Re-building therefore, extends beyond representation and towards the conditions that make participation possible at all.
Re-valuing, re-structuring, and re-building converge on a different question entirely. Not how much can be produced, but what forms of life become possible. What conditions allow people to not simply participate, but to remain, to rest; to leave and return; to become dependent without apology, to be valued beyond productivity? I no longer think re-building means returning. There is no return. Only the slow reconfiguration of the conditions under which collective life might become more sustainable, more accessible, more relational, and more survivable than the systems we inherited.
NOTES:
[1]
Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically (London: Verso, 2013)[2] Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! Proposal for an Exhibition "CARE" (1969), in Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art, ed. by Patricia C. Phillips (Munich: Prestel, 2016)
[3] Richard Sennett, Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation (London: Allen Lane, 2012)
[4] David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (London: Allen Lane, 2018)
[5] Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997)
[6] Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018).
[7] Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).
[8] Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically (London: Verso, 2013)
[9] Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London: Routledge, 2005)
[10] Françoise Vergès, A Programme of Absolute Disorder: Decolonizing the Museum, trans. by Melissa Thackway (London: Pluto Press, 2024).
[11] Richard Sennett, Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation (London: Allen Lane, 2012)
[12] Richard Sennett, Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation (London: Allen Lane, 2012)
[13] Filippo Menozzi, 'The Postcolonial Museum and Nonsynchronous Heritage', Interventions, 27.1 (2025)