Building upon scholarly research in the fields of art, cultural studies and transformative politics, this article examines how museums, as cultural infrastructures, function as sites for grounding radical imagination and political prefiguration within housing struggles in Rome. To further critical debates on the relations of art and activism in art institutionalism, this article analyses two case studies: the art museum MAAM (Museo dell’Altro e Dell’Altrove Museum of the Other and Elsewhere) and MAd’O (Museo dell’Atto di Ospitalità Museum of the Act of Hospitality). In both cases, occupants and artists collaborate on the premise that artistic projects can serve as political tactics that favour various facets of the right-to-housing movement. Drawing on Cornelius Castoriadis’s concept of radical imagination and Davina Cooper’s theory of conceptual prefiguration, the article analyses how these experimental institutions mobilise care, hospitality and cohabitation as normative practices. It argues that reconfiguring the museum as an inhabited and relational infrastructure, MAAM and MAd’O prefigure alternative forms of cohabitation under conditions of housing precarity.
Aria Spinelli (Sat,) studied this question.