Alexander and Vandenbroucke reframe monitoring and evaluation from an apparatus of external judgment into a situated practice of institutional knowledge-making. Their iconic concept is the “M&E gaze”: a totalising perspective that privileges endpoints, predefined standards and apparently neutral observation while obscuring the partiality and power of the funder’s own position. Drawing on Haraway, they argue that funding institutions must recognise that sensing, interpretation and evaluation are conditioned by geography, hierarchy and institutional interest. Methodologically, the article turns evaluation back upon the evaluator through collaborative research, long-form interviews, participant observation, artistic research and reduced reporting burdens. The crucial operation is reflexive inversion: instead of requiring artists to distort their work into fundable metrics, the institution examines how its own categories shape what becomes visible. The wider bridge is to STS, feminist epistemology and institutional critique, where objectivity is reconstructed as accountable partiality and evaluation becomes a reciprocal process of learning rather than control.
URBANISM MEETS ART