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From Necessity to Radical Practice

When Veem House for Performance lost structural funding from the Performing Arts Fund in 2016, it responded not with institutional despair but by voluntarily becoming a ‘100 Day House’.[1] Operating only 100 days per year, Veem aligned its public presence with its available resources, turning restriction into strategy. It created space to reflect on the unsustainable expectations of constant output in the cultural sector.Similarly, the lumbung model, developed by ruangrupa for documenta fifteen, proposed an alternative way of organizing artistic work and resources: based on shared harvests, commons-thinking, and solidarity economies. Lumbung emphasized collective decision-making and distributed authorship, fundamentally challenging dominant curatorial and institutional norms.In a different register, and recent history, the Student Intifada for Palestine of 2024 and stretching across to 2025, a widespread movement of Palestine solidarity and institutional critique, demonstrated how communities can self-organize, reclaim institutional space, and shift the terms of engagement. The university occupations across the US and Europe were not simply about political protest; they became acts of co-governance, where students reimagined how institutions should function and whom they should serve. Among students, as well as cultural workers and arts educators. Basecamp overlaps its existence and draws energy from all these precedents. It is a sign of the times. 

The transformation is not a retreat from institutional life, but a bold effort to live out values long theorized: equity, anti-hierarchy, accountability to community, and collective authorship. BAK already brought up questions about the condition of cultural work and the possibilities of alternative institutional forms. With Basecamp these theories are brought into practice. 

This offers urgent questions: can a cultural institution really function democratically? If everyone gets paid equally – from director to cleaner – does that undermine traditional opinions on professionally in the eyes of funders. And will new finances recognize collective decision-making as a legitimate management model? These are not signs of failure, but tensions interent to the experiment. 

The Flower model

In January 2024, Basecamp entered Phase 1 of restructuring. This period, spanning six months, saw the organization operating at 25% of its former capacity, both in terms of budget and personnel. Despite this contraction, a committed team remained, working six- to seven-day weeks to keep the program running, both publicly and away from view. They did so while also dismantling traditional roles, ending formal contracts with third parties, equalizing pay, and conceptualizing a new format for the institution’s future. The team consisted of both regulars, bringing continuity, and new faces that were attracted by the rebuilding efforts and could see a change.[2]

The result is a ‘flower model’, a structure made up of seven interconnected petals, or domains, each with a coordinator, accomplices, and collective responsibilities.

This model is rooted in sociocracy, a system of governance that emphasizes consent-based decision-making, decentralized authority, and the equivalence of all members. Instead of majority votes or hierarchical leadership, decisions are made when no reasoned objections are raised. Each circle or domain operates semi-autonomously but remains interconnected, ensuring transparency, feedback, and shared accountability across the whole organization.

These petals are:

Finance & Governance (Lisanne, shifting from cultural authority to cultural humility, rethinking finance as creative practice (f*ck capitalism), waste policy – agroecological transition & sustainable institution, governance, admin, budget making, HR policy, funding application, lobby, policy, contracts)

Programming (Jeanne, building (new) tactical imaginaries, coordinating different content streams and base workers, rotating artistic lead: collectivizing Basecamp.)

Space-Making (Esther, with a focus on unbuilding & rebuilding cultural infrastructure, making collectively run spaces, building care, installation & de-installation, cleaning, keys, equipment care, rentals etc.)

Hospitality & Kitchen (Grace, with a focus on food sovereignty within urban practices, hospitality as solidarity / care, no waste & recycling, b.ASIC a.CTIVIST k.ITCHEN & B.A.R. maintenance)

Access-Making (Alex, focused on language justice, accessibility politics, disability rights practice, house rules, hosting queer & trans group readings)

Community Holding (Srishagon from Qolored Collective, liaising between other collectives using the space, such as New Womens Collective, HKU, Feminista en Holanda, Pyra, Spoorloos)

Information and Documentation Making (Ying, with a focus on translating BAK into Basecamp, social media, website, graphic design, internal communication)

Additionally, Natalia handles cleaning; Esmee coordinates the freeshop; and superhosts, trusted community members with keys, ensure continuity. Base workers and time-or-financial contributors form a base of community users that animate the space daily.

Infrastructural Critique

While unique in its formalization as a cultural institution, Basecamp is part of a broader wave of institutional critique moving from theory to structure, particularly within the realm of infrastructural critique, as articulated by Marina Vishmidt, long term involved in BAK.[3] This mode of critique interrogates the systems, relations, and material conditions that sustain cultural institutions, not merely exposing institutional contradictions but asking whether these infrastructures can be transformed, or whether they must ultimately be abolished. As Vishmidt argues, infrastructural critique unsettles the assumption that reform is always the goal; instead, it asks whether exact reproduction of institutional life under conditions of austerity and precarity might itself foreclose emancipatory potentials.

Infrastructural critique attends to the governance mechanisms, funding logics, labor relations, and spatial arrangements that shape what culture can be and who gets to participate. It blurs the lines between critique and construction, challenging the very grounds of institutional endurance and utility.The context of BAK’s recent financial challenges and radical restructuring cannot be fully understood without recalling the sweeping austerity measures that reshaped the Dutch cultural landscape beginning in 2011. That year, the Netherlands government announced severe budget cuts to arts and culture, slashing structural subsidies by approximately €200 million. These cuts disproportionately impacted smaller and mid-sized organizations, destabilizing traditional funding models and forcing many institutions into closure or precarious reorganization. From the perspective of infrastructural critique, such austerity reveals the fragility of institutions that rely on state patronage, exposing how dependency on these forms of funding reproduces the very hierarchies and exclusions that critique often targets.

From BAK to Basecamp

This transformation didn’t arrive as a single ‘aha-moment, but rather by zooming out an realizing that change had happened,’ says Esther, coordinator of Space Making. If the old BAK was a vessel built to house critical art and discourse, Basecamp is something closer to a compost heap and a scaffolding site in one, decomposing the old while experimenting with how new structures might take root. This is what infrastructural critique looks like when it moves beyond exposure to reconfiguration: not reformist renovation, but abolition as imaginative reconstruction.

Gone are the month long exhibitions, gone are the white cubes of the exhibition space. In stead: a communal kitchen, a freeshop and spaces that are being used instead of watched. Grace: ‘The kitchen was already a prototype before we used her in that manner. It is a place where everyone comes together, also those who have no affinity with food. You can cry, talk and plan without pressure in the kitchen. Especially in fragmented times this places forces us to take breaks and start over.’ 

Spatially, the change is just as material. The very layout of the building is reshaped by how people move through it: open kitchens – to cry in and talk, plan, strategize, without the pressure to perform -, collective hosting, Wednesday assemblies. Tables migrate through hands and minds working together, access points multiply, and rooms once reserved for spectacle become sites for gathering and improvisation. The aim isn’t efficiency, it’s tactility. Moving from sending and presenting to making and storytelling together. Messy, relational work that makes room for mistakes.

Crucially, this shift is not driven by a rejection of leadership but by a redefinition of it. Jeanne: ‘I started with a fellowship, an internal research project about what BAK needed. We asked: what relational infrastructure follows BAK’s Trainings from the past year? Most fellows that were involved in these Training, stay part of it. Our modus has become: with, within and against. In December they asked me to take on a more stronger role. I said: Yes, but only if we do not lose our funding. Then we lost our funding. As an artistic director I focus on the collectivization of BAK: a new structure, new management, finances. It’s hard work, but we keep going forward, with a smile.’

Composting the old, building the new

Basecamp is not just a new institution, but a tactical imaginary: a space where infrastructure is aligned with movement, where collective agency is not performed but practiced, and where the threshold to participation is deliberately low. If the previous BAK required understanding to enter, Basecamp requires presence, care, and taking responsibility. The result is a kind of liveliness that many in the team noted even before they could name it. It wasn’t that programs returned, it was that the space began to breathe differently. There was music, food, reading groups, and assemblies. The door was held open for a new kind of public. Things didn’t just happen at BAK; they began to happen through it. Ying: ‘I hope that Basecamp will become a real movement space ; an infrastructure that supports organizing with a collective approach, making it a place for close-knit relations with different movements.’

BAK’s transformation into Basecamp was born of necessity, but its continuation depends on imagination, solidarity, and institutional courage. This model challenges many institutional habits about the neoliberal governance model for public cultural institutions: that leadership must be singular, that professionalism must be hierarchical, and that funding can only flow through vertical command. While there are activist collectives with cultural work embedded in the field, and collectives, in general, do get funded, there is no precedent for a cultural public institution to function based on this nonhierarchical model. 

In this light, Basecamp is not a retreat but an advance toward the unknown, or rather the ‘not yet’. It is one possible answer to the question so many in the cultural field are asking: how do we stay with the trouble of institutions while building the ones we actually want to inhabit?