The Genealogy of an Idea
More than five years ago, Mischa Kuball approached me with a deceptively simple idea: to symbolically “transfer” a U-shaped section of the walls from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, where I was working as chief curator at the time, and place it in a public space for citizens’ free expression for several weeks, before returning it to the museum. This concept, triggered by the museum’s reopening in 2017 after a decade-long closure for reconstruction, captured the spirit of renewal for this iconic building which was opened in 1965 as an exemplar of socialist modernist architecture in Ušće Park along the Sava River. The museum embodied layers of historical significance and its reopening prompted urgent questions embodied in Kuball’s concept, i.e. how do local communities perceive museums, and how can museums actively engage with them?

This idea resonated deeply with my own curatorial practice, developed during the museum’s prolonged closure, which emphasized the permeability of cultural institutions to participatory art that involves diverse social groups. Drawing on my long collaboration with Kuball, I recognized the project’s potential to address these issues, despite the formidable challenges that include institutional resistance to the political oligarchy that viewed the museum as a tool for (self)promotion rather than public dialogue. Our efforts to secure support repeatedly failed. Even after leaving the institution in 2022, the concept lingered in my thoughts. Kuball later revisited the idea and wrote a statement inspired by John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer (1925) whose quote became a light motive for the project: “Why the hell does everybody want to succeed? I'd like to meet somebody who wanted to fail. That's the only sublime thing.” Through this museum_transfer framework, Kuball challenged the transitory nature of cultural spaces, focusing on the imprints of public interaction and raising provocative questions about whether the community is becoming obsolete in polarised and fragmented societies, and what the role of artists and participatory artistic interventions could be in repairing the broken social bonds.  

Our persistence paid off when the project gained momentum through key partnerships, notably with Simone Voigt of the Goethe Institute in Sarajevo and Senka Ibrišimbegović of the Ars Aevi Museum of Contemporary Art in Sarajevo. There, the concept was revived amid the challenges of constructing a new museum building designed by Renzo Piano to house a vast international collection. As support expanded across institutions, Sarajevo's artistic scene breathed new life into the initiative, adapting it to the local context.

In Sarajevo, where no museum building yet existed, three white walls were installed on the future site, inviting public interaction with instructions in the local language and English. The installation serves as a platform for free expression, encouraging interventions like markers or spray paint to create a collective artwork symbolizing typically restricted museum spaces. After three weeks of citizens’ engagement with the walls, a panel discussion was held in a public space in front of them. Representatives of the local art scene were invited to discuss the idea of a future Museums Quarter, including its pros and cons and the potential impact it should have on the local communities and the cultural scene of Sarajevo. This conceptual framework was later applied and adjusted to other partnering museums or galleries. Where possible, the walls were returned to the institution to “witness” a public debate with local experts on context-specific topics, specifically suggested for each venue, while addressing socio-political legacies in the post-socialist contexts of the region of South-East Europe.

Each art institution in the countries involved in the project, such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, Romania, North Macedonia, Moldova, Slovenia, Croatia, and Serbia, faces specific challenges, ranging from basic infrastructural and financial issues to difficulties in engaging local communities. However, a more pressing question often discussed with protagonists of the local scene was how each museum or gallery can redefine its identity and role in society while fighting for its integrity to reinterpret the concept of contemporaneity in today’s social context. The ongoing political pressure of “commercialization” of the institutions, which forces them to reproduce a neoliberal model of creating a culture of spectacle, cannot be ignored. In this context, the project if walls could tell directly addressed these vulnerabilities in each country and society, sparking debates about the role of cultural institutions and their communication with the public, including those who are not museum-goers. Furthermore, this promotes an artistic approach to critically reflect on social processes and their influence on the cultural sphere, particularly museums and the communities they are embedded into. The personal journey and experiences gained in all seven countries and institutions from the region where the project was realized led me to explore the theoretical underpinnings that Kuball’s idea embodies in the context of participatory artistic practices.

Theoretical Debates over Participatory Artistic Practices
The theoretical debates over participatory artistic practices, particularly in public space, have been ongoing for several decades, and one of the crucial aspects is to examine how Mischa Kuball, with the project if walls could tell, contributes to and reengages with this discourse while assuming a very specific position. The current debates on the role of interactive and participatory public art focus on their political and social aesthetics. Two different models, among many, could be discerned in this context, i.e.; interventional space, which explores the potential of participatory public art to reshape everyday life environments; and commoning space, where participatory art can create spaces that establish common social relations among specific social groups and build shared relations and collective inscriptions.[1]

Concerning these theoretical models, I will suggest yet another position of the artist as a catalyst and mediator that sets up a “stage” for open-ended participation, a tabula rasa without any filtering, guiding principles or limits imposed upon the potential users/public of the blank white walls to be set in public space for their expression. Even though the walls symbolically represent the institutional framework of the museum from which they were taken and will be returned, the citizens can perceive them as an empty signifier not necessarily connected to the discourse of institutional critique. Herewith, the question is raised whether this kind of interactive artistic practice in public space is merely a temporary “speakers’ corner” or reflects the vox populi in the uncontrolled and decolonized public space.

Drawing on Claire Bishop's definition of participation as making people the medium and material of an artwork, Kuball’s project opts for an open-ended, reversed approach as the walls invite unfiltered expression to disrupt passive spectatorship and turn it into an act of co-creation.[2] Bishop's arguments, informed by the theory of radical democracy, advocate for resistant and antagonistic art practices that challenge co-dependency and conviviality,[3] and warn us that participation can sometimes prioritize process over aesthetic and critical engagement, leading to a dilution of artistic intent.[4] Conversely, Shannon Jackson offers a critique of the oppositions and tensions traditionally associated with participatory art.[5] Jackson supports a more “eclectic” and nuanced approach to social engagement and the aesthetic integrity of participatory art. Unlike Bishop, Jackson does not prioritize creative agency, a focus that could undermine the complexity of the social and institutional contexts in which participatory art is embedded. From this perspective, Kuball’s project creates an open platform for interaction, where the walls serve as a blank space for imprints of diverse voices without any assumptions about the “aesthetic” and “conflictual” aspect that they may or may not induce.

The artistic position Kuball proposes is to “stage” the context where users become producers of the content of an artwork, thus aligning itself with recent theories that underscore how participatory artistic practices foster community engagement and collaborative practices empowering participants, transforming them from passive consumers into active co-authors of collective experiences.[6] The traces left on the walls have proven to tackle both global and local socio-political urgencies and crises and represent diverse ideological perspectives and societal sore points with subcultural and subversive messages in the form of graffiti, stencils or even abstract mural images as free artistic expression of the users. From this angle, the project resonates with the concept of usership developed by theorist Steven Wright who perceived it as a new category of political subjectivity that arose alongside the 2.0 culture that is based on user-generated content. The concept of usership, as Wright argues, fundamentally challenges the dominant cultural models of spectatorship in many ways, but also the neoliberal economic model of ownership that is particularly reflected in the institutional settings.[7]

The trap that participatory art can often fall into is that while presenting the collective actions as empowering for the community members, especially the ones belonging to the marginalized groups, it can sometimes obscure the social inequalities and the system that reproduces them. As Gregory Sholette has argued, participatory art operates in a paradoxical space where the assumption of creating a “democratic space” can produce a counter effect of reinforcing existing power dynamics and exploitative practices so present in the art world.[8] The danger of participatory art practices is that they may not be able to transgress the established institutional frameworks, which serve to aestheticize social engagement rather than produce meaningful social change. One concrete example from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje is very illustrative of this debate. While attending the guided tour through the Museum, a group of schoolchildren, mostly Roma from one of the poorest city neighborhoods, happened to be on the site of the museum’s porch where the project was inaugurated. They immediately joined in and filled them with their drawings and messages, amongst which, the one of “Black Barbie” serves as a poignant example of the potency of giving voice to marginalized social groups. However, the panel discussion held at the museum brought a heated debate and challenged the logistical constrains that forced us to place the walls adjacent to the museum’s building, on its turf, and not in the inner city where they would be more accessible to the larger communities. If not for the haphazard set of circumstances that brought the Roma children to the museum, the question of what would have been the chance for their voices to be heard and expressed on the walls remains. To recontextualize the quote from Dos Passos, I would argue that the failure is sometimes an inherent and constitutive element of this type of participative projects without predetermined “script” and invited users.    

One of the most challenging aspects of Kuball’s project was the aim of fostering dialogue in public spaces and creating networks of solidarity in fragmented societies. The potential of the artistic proposal for participation could thus have a direct impact on the dynamics of community engagement and collaboration. Within this context, the concept of care becomes crucial.

Care aesthetics offers a useful bridge from critiques of participation to longer‑durational, relational practices. James Thompson develops care aesthetics to show how caring practices have an aesthetic dimension, attention, sensibility, rhythm, and materiality, and how artistic processes can cultivate capacities of care.[9] Similarly, Thomas Munley positions care at the core of participatory art, arguing that collaborative cultural practice can cultivate solidarity, mutual responsibility, and durable communal bonds.[10]

Furthermore, it is important to revisit the theory of commoning, where participatory art aims to create spaces that can establish shared social relations among specific social groups in various localities.[11] In doing so, it is necessary to define the theoretical sources of this thesis, which stem from the “social practice of living together.”[12] The use of the verb commoning (the practice of making things common, becoming common) instead of the noun commons (common good) highlights the processual nature of striving toward the realization of the “common” as a set of social relations that are not fixed, but in a continuous state of change. Commoning could also be conceptualized as a spatial practice that contests privatization and produces alternative modes of urban cohabitation. Everyday acts of sharing and mutual care can reconfigure public space where urban potentiality emerges through performative practices that reclaim and reconfigure the city and may act as emancipatory forces when entrenched patterns of control are disrupted.[13]

Finally, Danny McNally argues that participatory artistic practices, which focus on engaging specific social groups or communities, typically place-based, prioritize collective actions and the establishment of shared social relations.[14] Stemming from his analysis of participatory art’s ethics and aesthetics, the project if walls could tell, aligning with the idea of collectivity, could be placed outside capitalist logic, where the walls act as a catalyst for ethical, processual commoning. Ultimately, this positions Kuball’s project as a dynamic space for autonomous cultural life, questioning whether the practices of commoning, collaboration and co-creation offer a meaningful platform for social interaction and equitable engagement of all social groups, or merely another test for the art community to stay in its “bubble” and challenge the institutional constraints within it?  

From Community to Commoning
Throughout the duration of the project if walls could tell, I have realized that it is crucial to engage with the philosophical insights of Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot when discussing the role of participatory art in redefining community. Both philosophers reject essentialist foundations of community based on race, culture, or identity, asserting instead that community emerges through our shared exposure to finitude and mortality, a concept resonating with George Bataille’s thoughts.[15] They argue that being-together is given in existence, yet it is inherently fragile and interruptive; thus, community cannot simply be produced as a fixed work or object.[16] This perspective sheds light on Kuball's project, where the blank white walls in public spaces facilitate relational interactions, transforming ordinary citizens into co-creators and revealing the “inoperative” community through their unscripted expressions.

While both philosophers emphasize the fragility and openness of communal relations, they approach these dynamics from distinct perspectives. For Nancy, community is ontologically before any social, political, or institutional formation. Being-in-common is not produced through shared labor, identity, or functional cooperation but exists as the relational exposure of singularities to one another. This exposure, or inoperative dimension, is central: community cannot be totalized, captured, or secured.[17] At its core is not productivity or functionality, but the relational spacing that allows singular beings to coexist without absorption into a collective identity. Nancy’s philosophical concept brings together singularity and plurality as intertwined elements of being. While making a distinction between singularity (unique existence) and individuality (a closed, self-contained entity), he argues that being is always relational, being-with (être-avec), and that existing means being with others, where plurality is the originary condition. Community exists in the between (l'entre), not as a substance or higher collective subject. Being-in-common is thus not an additional feature of being; it is its fundamental structure. Nancy’s theory grounds the ethical considerations of being in our exposure to others, where responsibility stems not from an abstract moral law, but from our shared finitude and vulnerability.[18]

Blanchot, by contrast, situates community within the ethical and ungraspable. For him, community is unavowable; it exists not through shared identity, mastery, or productive collaboration but through relational exposure that cannot be fully possessed or operationalized.[19] Community is “negative”,[20] structured around absence, interruption, and the ethical imperative to recognize the singularity of the other. It resides in the act of sharing that which can never be fully shared: of mutual self-exposure in common solitude, and in the paradoxical relation of absence of a binding substance and openness that remains unavowable.

This dialogue between Nancy and Blanchot also frames commoning as an enactment of inoperative and unavowable relationality. Commoning practices thus do not aim to totalize or instrumentalise social bonds but to preserve spaces of vulnerability, attentiveness, and co-existence.[21]

Building on Nancy and Blanchot’s perspectives on the fragility of relational spaces, Kuball enacts this by allowing public inscriptions on the walls, creating a space of co-existence that resists institutional control. In Kuball’s project, the walls function as a commoning practice, enabling participants to negotiate shared authorship and responsibility, mirroring Nancy's emphasis on exposure and Blanchot’s ethical openness.[22] As citizens engage with these blank walls, they transform public spaces into sites of emerging community, thereby challenging museums and cultural institutions to facilitate such relational dynamics beyond traditional frameworks. Thus, if walls could tell stands as a testament to the potential of participatory art to redefine communal relationships, foster dialogue, and promote collaborative engagement in the contemporary social landscape.

Institutional Framing of a Participatory Project
In an era of social fragmentation, contested histories, and authoritarian pressures in post-socialist societies, Mischa Kuball's if walls could tell project demonstrates the transformative potential of participatory art to reclaim and redefine public spaces as well as the role of art institutions in their continuous process of negotiation with local communities. Spanning cities like Sarajevo, Bucharest, Skopje, Chișinău, Ljubljana, Kraljevica, and Čačak, the initiative transformed blank white walls into dynamic platforms for expression, fostering dialogues that challenge institutional norms and amplify the voices of different social groups. Despite the continuous transformation of museums and cultural institutions into dynamic institutions that shape local communities and urban environments, intervening in everyday life, civic imaginaries, and public space,[23] one of the key issues they are still facing in the 21st century is how to develop new models of working with the public. The concept of Museum 3.0 is an example of the utterly different model of conceptualizing the way an institution functions in direct correlation with local communities.[24] This model is based on projects where the public becomes the actor that produces the content and institutional programs. The Museum 3.0 concept represents the new role of museums and other art institutions in society, based on the analysis of the concept of utility. It is driven by usership and not by the expert culture that engages with the public. Usership is perceived as a new category of political subjectivity that is based on user-generated content. Herewith, citizens as political subjects should be able to appropriate available political and economic instruments that turn them into active users and not passive consumers. In this context, Mischa Kuball’s project opens up the space for all potential users of art programs to be turned into direct and immediate producers of the content. Moreover, they become co-creators of an artwork that in several cases was donated and incorporated into the collections of partnering museums, opening up a new set of questions regarding ownership of a collaborative art work that was given to the public museums to preserve, or otherwise repurposed or recycled to remain ephemeral statements. Herewith, in one of the panel discussions, a viable radical question was raised about the authorship and the credits to the artwork and why the name of the artist stands on the caption of the walls? While remaining the carrier of symbolic “ownership” of the idea and concept, the artist was always in the background, not even taking part in the discursive discussions unless directly asked or addressed by the panellist or publics. Yet, the credits in the museums will always go to the artist first and only then to anonymous community members of the city in question, in spite of the strongly emphasised position of an artist as a catalyst who is not “speaking in first person” but allowing others to speak out for themselves. The “aura” of artistic persona is thus unavoidable in this conceptual setting.  

During the last decades, museums and cultural institutions were working increasingly with participatory and collaborative artistic practices to engage publics.[25] They are thus aligning themselves with tendencies in art that prioritize co-creation, as seen in Kuball’s project, where citizens actively inscribe the walls, generating new forms of publicness. However, participation is not inherently emancipatory: it must be situated within the infrastructures, funding regimes, and governance arrangements that enable or constrain meaningful agency, or perpetuate imbalances,[26] a tension evident in Kuball’s navigation of political pressures across post-socialist contexts. To grasp the emancipatory potential and limits of museum practice, it is therefore necessary to integrate the theoretical reflections on participatory art, commoning theory and care aesthetics, attending simultaneously to processes of co-creation, and collective agency and to the structural conditions that shape their possibilities.

In summary, the project if walls could tell, analyzed from different theoretical lenses regarding participatory practices and commoning, presents a specific artistic position that tends to transform passive spectators into active co-authors and question the role of museums and cultural institutions in civic life. Yet, its true measure lies in whether it has succeeded in reclaiming public realms from state and market forces or merely offered fleeting resistance. Ultimately, if walls could tell reminds us that participatory art is not just a medium for expression but a mediator for ongoing negotiation, urging institutions to embrace vulnerability and collective agency and while doing so, make stronger (regional) alliances. As societies continue to fragment, such projects may not resolve divisions but inspire the fragile, emergent and equitable communities built on the principles of solidarity and commoning practices.

Zoran Erić is an independent curator and Research Fellow at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade. He holds a PhD from the Faculty of Media, Bauhaus University in Weimar. His research fields include art theory, museology, human geography, urban sociology, and political ecology. He curated and co-curated numerous projects in Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Croatia, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Moldova, the Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, the USA, etc. He contributed to different international art magazines and academic journals including Artefact (guest editor of the 4th issue Glocalogue); Umelec; Manifesta Journal; Praesens; Third Text; A Prior; OnCurating (guest co-editor of “Precarious Labor in the Field of Art”); Hermeneia, Journal of Hermeneutics, Art Theory and Criticism Journal of Museum Education; Museum Management and Curatorship Journal, etc. He published papers in edited volumes with the following publishers: Routledge, Springer, JRP Ringier, NAi Publishers, Phillip Editions, Sternberg Press, Hatje Cantz, DISTANZ Verlag, Revolver Verlag, etc. He was a member of the IKT Board (2005-2008) and the President of the Serbian Section of AICA (2008-2010). He serves on the scientific board of MNAC, Bucharest, and the advisory board of IVAM Valencia, and is a member of CIMAM.