ABOUT JIAS
We live inside systems that reward winning, punish or avoid failure, and measure everything that can be counted — and quietly sideline everything that can't. The neoliberal drive to be the best, to accumulate, to optimise: the appetitive logic of modern life. It has colonised not just our workplaces but our imaginations.
Play disrupts it. Not by arguing against it, but by offering something more compelling: the experience of turning toward one another again. JIAS is practice ground for this.
Playing unwinnable games together — games where winning is impossible by design — short-circuits the competitive reflex and opens something else: curiosity, trust, the shared pleasure of being in a thing together without needing it to resolve into a winner and a loser. This is not naive. It is, as Winnicott said, the place where we live — a potential space where nonsense helps us ‘make sense’ of the world, and, I would add: by inviting us back to our bodily senses.
The Joyful Institute for Adequate Studies was built with a desire to explore this practice more in commuity. Founded by Scottish-South African performance artist and practice researcher Anthea Moys, JIAS is a place for collective learning through play, for the kind of study that happens when you stop trying to win, and for queer, embodied, imperfect, indirect ways of knowing that institutions tend to sideline. It takes many shapes: podcasts, writing, workshops, games, residencies, and the ongoing gathering of tricksters, artists, practitioners and weirdos who are figuring this out together.
Supported by Creative Scotland's Go See Share fund, JIAS as part of its Research and Development phase, has been speaking with artists, practitioners, tricksters, and academics who are figuring this out — in real time, imperfectly, together:
What does it mean to become institutionalised — and how do we share the undoing? How do practitioners, tricksters, artists work with the institution as material? What happens to the artist inside an institution? What is lost? What is gained?
Your second-best, unfinished self is welcome here...
Want to know more? Start with the Introducing the Joyful Institute for Adequate Studies podcast — a full introduction to JIAS, where it came from, and what these four words actually mean.
ABOUT THE NAME
Institute: stand up, claim the right to exist.
Adequate: level with us, equal to the moment, nothing more owed.
Joyful: rejoicing — and the word shares its root with play.
Studies: not the quiet room, but the bodily shove toward something you're eager for.
ABOUT THE FOUNDER
The Joyful Institute for Adequate Studies was founded by Scottish-South African performance artist Anthea Moys, currently based in Edinburgh. JIAS was conceived as a space for collective exploration, and grew from two places:
A long artistic practice of making unwinnable games, riding stationary bicycles in cycle races, and asking what happens when we remove the winning
And, in response to her IASH (Institute for Advanced (NOT Adequate!) Studies in the Humanities) fellowship, a practice-research workshop called the Carrier Bag of Tricks, where playing unwinnable games together inside institutions turned out to produce something that behaved like trust. And joy. The juicy, adequate, shared kind.
Find Anthea at antheamoys.com and @antheamoys