L'Internationale

Distributed across Europe — no single headquarters · Principal funder: Creative Europe programme of the European Union

Overview

L'Internationale is a European confederation of museums, contemporary art institutions, research centers, universities, and arts organizations, founded in 2009 to offer an alternative model to the globalizing art institutions that, in its founders' assessment, were replicating the structures of multinational corporations and their centralized distribution of knowledge and cultural authority. It takes its name from the nineteenth-century workers' anthem written by Eugène Pottier in 1871 following the Paris Commune — the hymn whose refrain, "The Internationale shall be the human race," expresses the aspiration for horizontal, non-hierarchical solidarity across difference that the confederation explicitly models its institutional character upon. The confederation operates through multi-year cooperative programs funded primarily by the Creative Europe program of the European Union, supplemented by match funding from member institutions. It publishes through L'Internationale Online — a free, open-access digital platform launched in 2013 that hosts commissioned texts, research, artistic projects, online exhibitions, and a downloadable library of publications in critical theory, postcolonial studies, geopolitics, and museum studies, all available at no cost. In its current configuration under the "Museum of the Commons" program (2023–2027), L'Internationale comprises fourteen full partner institutions and two associate partners spanning twelve European countries.

The confederation is explicitly not a network of equals convening periodically around a shared brand. Its governance model is designed as a working horizontal: member institutions share curatorial research, exchange staff, co-commission artistic and scholarly work, and make collective policy statements on political and cultural questions ranging from climate to Palestine to the future of the European project. It rejects, in formal language on its About page, fascism, extractivism, and neocolonialism, and describes its vision as "a world of many worlds, where European cultural and geopolitical positions are decentred." The tone and ambition are unusual in an institutional context: this is a confederation of publicly funded museums that has made explicit political commitments in its founding documents and program statements, treating decolonization, climate justice, and democratic commons not as themes for exhibitions but as structural conditions of its own operation.

Founding and the Alternative Internationalism Argument

L'Internationale was founded in 2009 by six major European modern and contemporary art museums — Moderna galerija (MG+MSUM, Ljubljana), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS, Madrid), Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen (M HKA, Antwerp), SALT (Istanbul and Ankara), and Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven) — in direct response to a specific diagnosis of what was wrong with the international contemporary art world. In the years running up to 2009, a small number of large institutions in major metropolitan centers — Tate Modern in London, MoMA in New York, the Guggenheim with its network of franchised satellite museums — had come to function, in the view of the founding members, as the effective curriculum-setters for contemporary art globally, determining which artists, histories, and geographies counted as central and which were peripheral. The founding coalition of L'Internationale was deliberately assembled from the periphery of this system: Ljubljana, Barcelona, Antwerp, Eindhoven, and Istanbul are not Paris, London, or New York. The choice was a formal argument — that the most interesting perspectives on art, history, and the contemporary moment came not from the centers of capital accumulation but from the edges, the contested borders, the cities with unresolved twentieth-century histories and complex present-day politics.

The confederation's legal and operational home is the L'Internationale Association, a formal legal entity that manages the cooperation agreements, EU funding relationships, and governance structures. The programming is conducted transnationally: exhibitions, seminars, residencies, schools, and research projects are developed collectively across member institutions rather than organized by a single lead institution and hosted by the others. This model requires a different kind of institutional trust and a more sustained commitment to shared intellectual labor than most museum partnerships; it has been the consistent challenge and the consistent achievement of the confederation's four programs across fifteen years.

L'Internationale Online

L'Internationale Online was launched in 2013 as the confederation's research and publishing platform — a digital journal and open-access library hosted at internationaleonline.org. It publishes commissioned essays, artist contributions, curatorial research, online exhibitions, and documentary material connected to the confederation's program work, alongside independent scholarly contributions in areas including decolonization, museum theory, political philosophy, and contemporary art history. All content is free to read and all publications are free to download, in keeping with the confederation's commitment to the commons as both a practice and a principle. The platform also hosts the Glossary of Common Knowledge — a collaborative, multilingual conceptual dictionary developed by members of the confederation to articulate the working vocabulary of their shared political and intellectual project — and publishes statements and opinion pieces on current cultural and political debates.

The online library has grown to encompass several dozen volumes spanning critical theory, postcolonial studies, museum studies, and geopolitics. Recent titles include Climate: Our Right to Breathe, a collected volume responding to planetary ecological crisis; Performing Collections; and volumes arising from the confederation's earlier programs on the legacy of 1848 and 1989 in European art history. Physical copies of all publications are held at member institution libraries; digital copies are available for free download without registration or paywall. A new version of the online platform was launched alongside the Museum of the Commons program in 2023, with the prior decade of content archived at archive-2014-2024.internationaleonline.org.

Programs

• 2009–2012

  Founding period. Six founding institutions establish the confederation and its governance model; initial collaborative research and joint curatorial work begins across member collections.

• 2013–2017

  The Uses of Art — The Legacy of 1848 and 1989. First major EU Creative Europe–funded program; L'Internationale Online launched 2013. Proposes new readings of European art history anchored in the revolutionary moments of 1848 and the transitions of 1989; research, exhibitions, and the Glossary of Common Knowledge developed across member institutions.

• 2018–2022

  Our Many Europes. Second major EU Creative Europe–funded program; confederation expands from six to ten partner institutions. More than 40 public activities across member institutions — conferences, exhibitions, workshops — focused on the plurality of European cultural and political identities since 1989.

• 2023–2027

  Museum of the Commons. Current program, granted €2 million by EU Creative Europe (match funded by member institutions). Confederation in its largest configuration to date: fourteen full partner institutions and two associate partners. Three thematic threads: Climate (planetary ecological crisis, institutional sustainability), Situated Organizations (democratizing museums as actors in social ecosystems), and Past in the Present (the role of local and shared histories in constituting present communities). New governance structure introduced based on working assemblies.

Member Institutions (Museum of the Commons, 2023–2027)

Reina Sofía

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

Madrid, Spain

MACBA

Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona

Barcelona, Spain

M HKA

Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen

Antwerp, Belgium

MSN

Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej w Warszawie

Warsaw, Poland

SALT

SALT

Istanbul & Ankara, Türkiye

Van Abbemuseum

Van Abbemuseum

Eindhoven, the Netherlands

MSU

Muzej Suvremene Umjetnosti

Zagreb, Croatia

HKW

Haus der Kulturen der Welt

Berlin, Germany

HDK-Valand

HDK-Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg

Gothenburg, Sweden

NCAD

National College of Art and Design

Dublin, Ireland

ZRC SAZU

Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts

Ljubljana, Slovenia

IRI

Institute for Radical Imagination

Italy

Tranzit.ro

Tranzit.ro

Romania

VCRC

Visual Culture Research Center

Ukraine

Associate partners: IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin) · WIELS (Brussels, Belgium)

Access and Usage

L'Internationale Online is freely accessible without paywall or registration at internationaleonline.org. All published essays, artistic contributions, and research texts are available to read online; all library publications are available for free download in PDF format. The archive of content from 2014 to 2024 is preserved at archive-2014-2024.internationaleonline.org. Researchers, artists, and institutions interested in contributing to the platform or in partnership with the confederation can make initial contact through info@internationaleonline.org. Information about the Museum of the Commons program, its themes, and its participating institutions is available through the About section of the website. L'Internationale maintains active social media presences on Instagram, Facebook, and X under the handle @internationaleonline.