Collective curating. On breaking some spells

This text is a revised version of the keynote speech given at the “Symposium: Collective Curating”, curated by Eva Neklyaeva and hosted by SAAL Biennaal in Tallinn on the 31st of August 2023

Let’s start with a paradox: I am standing here alone, in front of you all, expected to talk about collective curating. The questions, hopes and struggles that I will be sharing with you weren’t shaped in isolation though. They have been thought-with and lived through with many colleagues, artists, curators and audiences that I had the privilege to encounter in recent years. Stemming from situated, embodied knowledge and based on practice carried out with many, they are traces of collaborative endeavours. I am deeply grateful to everyone I have been lucky enough to meet along the way - especially to my comrades in curating who reflect current working conditions in performing arts and never cease to experiment with new ones.

And just before we take the next step, let me point at another paradox. In the past two years, I have been curating a transnational artistic research project Breaking the Spell, a series of gatherings in four European cities (Leipzig, Munich, Warsaw and Ghent), hosting feminist practices of thinking- and being-with in performing arts[1]. It was a temporary space of common learning or unlearning for artists, curators and thinkers who re-enchant the way we work in the performing arts and who refuse to follow the dominating, exhausting modes of producing. Stemming from a grim time of a pandemic isolation on one hand, and exhaustion by a radical political conservative turn in my home country on the other, it desperately looked for ways to build and maintain transnational alignments.

And in the middle of this beautiful, enriching, often truly joyful process there was an acute pain of solitude which accompanied me throughout the whole trajectory. It was sometimes overwhelming, sometimes barely graspable, but persistent - I could always count on its presence right next to me.

A notion of solitude might seem indeed pretty paradoxical in the context of a project based on gatherings, and even more in the context of a curatorial practice, that is always relational: emerging from the process of being-with artists; with human and non-human companions; with landscapes and contexts. But if we look closer at the modes of production in contemporary performing arts, it becomes clear that curatorial work often turns out to be deeply alienating.

In the case of Breaking the Spell, the alienation materialised on several levels. Firstly, it was overwhelmingly present in my position as a freelance curator, being fully responsible for the development of the project and yet not having full control over the means of production. Breaking the Spell was made possible thanks to the collaboration with four performing arts organisations in four European cities and to the external funding received from Kulturstiftung des Bundes. If one initiates and runs the collaborative project as a freelancer, they ultimately always are situated in between, depending on (various) structures, modes of working, dynamics and power relations of hosting institutions. Which might potentially become even more demanding when a project challenges these very modes of working by proposing a format that does not comply with the presentation or festival framework.

And even if one has the privilege to collaborate with thoroughly engaged and genuinely interested institutions, as I had, one will always remain dependent on their good will, while being simultaneously held accountable for “delivering” the project. This type of collaboration (as many more!), requires constant conversations, renegotiations, adaptations, while not offering the freelance curator a stability of institutional structure to rely on. In such constellation, there is barely a space for mistake or illness on the freelancer’s side.

Secondly, there is another type of alienation, embedded in a curatorial position: the alienation of a privileged position of power, which a curator, no matter how precarious their working conditions are, undoubtedly has - as they have the power of making decisions and allocating the budgets (for instance, deciding about who will be invited to take part in the project such as Breaking the Spell and who will not).

Finally, in the case of this particular project, there were two important personal circumstances that contributed evenly to the experience of alienation from the curatorial perspective: while the leading role for Breaking the Spell was conceived for two persons, it had to, due to some life changes, be at the end of the day carried out by one. And, on top of everything, the project took place at the moment when I got alienated from my own socio-political context by relocating to another country.

But the experience of alienation that bitterly accompanied me throughout this project has not been a unique, personal case, nor an exception. It has rather been just yet another manifestation of a political condition of curation that is strongly related to alienation of subjectivity in late capitalism: a highly competitive system that positions the artworkers in a constant state of alert: always ready to create, produce, negotiate, propose, compete, adapt, initiate, frame, articulate, host and provide.

In their book Toward a Transindividual-Self, Bojana Cvejić and Ana Vujanović observe that the process of constructing the subject in neoliberal capitalism is focused on self-production, on “self-creative autopoietic formation of the self” (Cvejić and Vujanović, 2022, p. 21). But, as they highlight aptly,

“an autopoietically oriented individual is supposed to be autonomous, while in fact performing in fast-changing social ground, marked by insecurity, precarisation, and a general atmosphere of fear. In these circumstances, where the individual is encouraged to be autonomous, self-sufficient, and responsible for themself while so many things are not in their hands, autopoiesis leads to a dysfunctionality of the individual, who should then be treated, repaired, and fixed.” (Cvejić and Vujanović, 2022, p. 163)

The position of a curator is a good example of the socially constructed subject based on autopoietic autonomous character, being deeply embedded not only in the late capitalist socio-political conditions of performing an individual, creative self, but also in one of the still prevailing myths that have shaped the European art world: a modernist figure of an autonomous, talented individual, an omnipotent expert; a kind of genius.

How did we end up here?

And that has been the case from the very beginning: the position of performing arts curator has emerged quite lately, in the 1980s, in the middle of substantial socio-economic changes that formed the currently dominating version of neoliberal capitalism. The beginning of curatorial work in performing arts accompanied the development of infrastructure that supported new, independent artistic practices and boosted the international exchange (festivals, e.g. Eurokaz in Zagreb; networks - e.g. IETM; production houses, such as Kaaitheater in Brussels, STUK in Antwerp, Kampnagel in Hamburg or BIT Theatergarasjen in Bergen and more). What followed was a transformation of modes of artistic production: introduction of a project-based rhythm of work, development of international collaboration on the level of coproductions and expansion of the festival circuit.

But, as Sigrid Gareis, a curator and co-director of the university course Curating in the Performing Arts highlights, in the 1980s and 1990s, when the new infrastructure appeared to support new artistic practices, these were still mostly concentrated around the figures of an individual, autonomous artists (Gareis, 2023). This hierarchy was mirrored in the new institutional structures: back then, most of the production houses and festivals were run by a charismatic, individual leader, who was performing their duties autonomously. Responsible for vision and program, they would often work as a ‘scout’, traveling around the world, observing artists working in their own contexts and “discovering” them for the European audiences. So the knowledge generated and accumulated within a curatorial practice (namely: access to artists and their practices, network, conversations, travels and opportunity to get to know new contexts) stayed usually within one person. In consequence, the pressure only grew: an individual was supposed to deliver expertise on the global art field. An impossible task.

That condition was interestingly addressed by Frie Leysen, an initiator and artistic director of Kunstenfestival in Brussels (today: Kunstenfestivaldesarts), who in 2002 explained in an interview, quoted by Sigrid Gareis in her article:

“I work alone because I don’t believe in consensus. If you have a group, then you have to find consensus, and I don’t think that in the consensual decision you find exciting work. Exciting work is in the extremes that you cut out if you have to agree with other people.” (Leysen, Mufson, 2002)

It does not mean however that there were no attempts to challenge the curatorial practice from a collective perspective. An interesting example comes from the visual arts field from around the same time. For Documenta XI, in 2002, Okwui Enwezor invited 6 curators to prepare documenta XI with him. This attempt did not bring a radical change in representation though (Enwezor was still named as the artistic director, and was still serving as “the curatorial face” of that edition, so different to Documenta XV), but, as Oliver Marchart analyses in his book Hegenomy Machines: documenta X to fifteen and the Politics of Biennalization, on the structural level it was an important attempt to dismantle the figure of an omnipotent curator. It was also a gesture acknowledging that one individual cannot possibly get an overview on what is going on in the art globally - the aim of Documenta XI was to break through a centralised, western perspective (which was a similar goal to Frie Leysen’s one, however carried out differently).

Enwezor’s endeavour was not the first one in the history of this monumental institution: in 1968, the artistic director of Documenta, Arnold Bode (who, as Oliver Marchart suggests, followed the spirit of revolts of 1968) invited a group of 26 persons to form a team that would decide, based on democratic principles, on who will be invited to Documenta IV[2]. This attempt to democratize and collectivize the curatorial position was however confronted with a backlash during the next edition, where the institution of Documenta decided to appoint Harald Szeemann as artistic director: curator-star, who reinforced the figure of a charismatic individual, setting up this tendency for the next decades. Having this episode (and the following backlash) in mind, Enwezor’s gesture turns out to be radical (especially for Documenta), as it highlighted the need for situated, contextualised knowledges that can come only from a diverse group of curators.

Around this time (end of 1990s and beggining of 2000s), the European performing arts field developed further the so-called independent (other than publicly funded, repertory theatre) production and distribution system, boosting even further the project-based rhythm of creation and festivalisation. The European market for the festivals quickly expanded, following the fall of the Berlin Wall and transformation processes in Eastern European countries (which equated to introducing a turbo version of neoliberal, hyperindividual capitalism)[3].

This has caused the myth of an independent curator to crumble, as it became evident that they, while theoretically enjoying freedom from institutional entanglements, actually fully depend on institutional schedules, thematic focuses and the institutional will to choose them as a collaborator. This phenomenon, together with increasing precarisation of artworkers, economic crisis (including the one from 2008), rise of radical backlash in politics and climate catastrophe led to the new, third wave of institutional critique and to a multitude of attempts to redefine the way we work[4]. An important element of that critique was to problematize an autonomous position of a singular curator from the political perspective, as it clearly reinforced the patriarchal, neoliberal model of a charismatic, perpetually developing and self-creating (Cvejić and Vujanović, 2022) individual, leaving all the ongoing, crucial reproductive labour invisible and not remunerated.

At the same time, the “charismatic curators” started to get burnouts. It became clear that what is being required from a position of a curator, especially when they are occupying a leadership position, is simply not possible to be carried out by an individual - unless that individual can afford to exhaust themselves radically.

One of the first curators in the performing arts field who decided to address this problem publicly and who pointed at systemic, social conditions of what had been so far perceived as a personal failure, was Barbara Raes, a former artistic director of two large performing arts institutions in Flanders: BUDA in Kortrijk and Viernulvier (then Vooruit) in Ghent. After withdrawing from her position, she wrote a seminal text on burnout wave rising within the field:

“Burnout occurs when the gap between your own deeply-held convictions and your daily patterns of survival becomes unbridgeable – where passion meets powerlessness. Every era has its own diseases and exhaustion has been a plague through the ages. Even though ‘burnout’ is not unique to our times, it's a disease that has many parallels with the practices and systems of a society in overdrive. (…) How do you do it in a field where you’re expected to implement optimal policies in just two or four years; where the government is set on ‘result-oriented’ practices; where artists may be 'hip' today but just as well 'hop' tomorrow? When art centers become companies, and art lovers their customers; where professionalization is more and more equated with the values of a market-derived management culture, and where work ethics are based on being over-passionate, over-flexible and under-paid? These are the perfect ingredients for stimulating a sector, but also the perfect recipe for a catastrophic burnout.” (Raes 2014)

Thus there is no surprise that the need for allingments became urgent and that collective curation emerged consequently as one of the answers - popping up more and more often both in case of production houses (Komuna Warszawa, Gessnerallee in Zürich, Tanzfabrik in Berlin, Kaaitheater in Brussels, new leaders of NT Gent from 2023) and festivals (SAAL Biennaal from 2023, Batard and Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels, Kyoto Experiment since 2022, Spielart in Munich, Santarcangelo when co-curated by Eva Neklyaeva and Lisa Giraldino, Bastard Festival in Trondheim in 2023).

But is the process of collectivising the curation indeed an answer to socio-political exhaustion of the curatorial endeavour? It certainly is not a wonder solution, that could work as a spell and change our field overnight. As we will see, a gesture of introducing more than one curator in a position designed for an individual will certainly cause some trouble, but will not bring substantial change unless it operates simultaneously on many layers, including structural, symbolic and narrative ones.

Nevertheless, with all its pitfalls and entanglements, collective curation might work well as a provocation and as a potential political project, offering a perspective to transform not only the way we work, but perhaps also the way we understand, create and maintain social relations. It might thus become a space for speculating on how a society could work otherwise - a condition enabling imagining and embodying social relations differently than in hyperindividual capitalism.

Why bother? Collective curation as a potential political project.

This is exactly the condition we have been researching within the Breaking the Spell - and exactly the spell that this project did not manage to break, at least not on the level of curatorial labour. And I do think that one of the reasons was the lack of structural change on the curatorial position, which was at the end of the day carried out by an individual. But what would have actually changed if there were many of us? What happens when the curation is being collectivised?

Let’s try to list some potentials that are opening when instead of an individual curatorial voice we get a chance to have a conversation with a multitude of them. What is listed below is a number of possible conditions for the political potential of a collective curation to emerge. However, it is never a promise or a guarantee - we will have a look later on what could perhaps support making it happen.

On a structural level:

1. Often, when the curatorial collective takes responsibility over a project or an organisation, the decision-making process will require more time and attention. In consequence, what usually happened behind closed doors or in an individual’s head, will need to be highlighted and openly discussed, at least with the closest team. Thus the mysterious phantom of individual taste as a basis of curatorial choices can finally be dismantled - and so can, potentially, the power of a gatekeeper. Ultimately, what is problematised is the power of shaping the artistic canon, revealing how does it actually happen that certain artistic practices are made visible and supported while others remain hidden and underfunded. Moreover, this is precisely the moment when knowledge that curators accumulate throughout their practice (namely: access to artists and their practices, network, conversations, travels and opportunity to get to know new contexts) can be thematised and, in consequence, can potentially become more tangible and accessible.

2. When the position of a curator is being multiplied, the institutional structures are inevitably challenged and shaken - even if only temporary. It might bring structural change, as it raises questions over the ways how things are done, and potentially transforms the institutional working models, communication strategies, production procedures, remuneration systems, etc. This can happen both when a collective curatorial process is being invited inside an institution (often at a leading position), and when a freelance curatorial collective starts a project-based collaboration.

3. When the exhausting alienation of curatorial practice is encountered by allyship. Being many means there is always someone to ask a question or to offer support when needed. Moreover, when being many, a potential for another political collective body opens up: a body that is not the sum of individuals, not the interindividual transaction only, but a transindividual one, emerging relationally. It is a body that would not have been shaped individually. I am referring here to the political concept of transindividuation, proposed by Bojana Cvejić and Ana Vujanović (Cvejić, Vujanović, 2022). The basic premise of their concept of transindividuation is that individuality is never fully acquired: it is rather an ongoing process of individuation, always taking place within interdependent social relations.

“Transindividuation means relations - not between already constituted individuals, but between the processes of individuation, the individual and the collective, the processes in which ‘I’ and ‘we’ are being co-formed in the midst of their preindividual conditions and potentials. It is therefore a relation of relations, whereby individuals are individuated through the reciprocal individuation of a collective.” (Cvejić, Vujanović, 2022, p. 228)

What is interesting in this perspective is that it offers a way out from the trap of capitalist realism, from the social framework we operate within on an everyday basis. The process of transindividuation starts with a question, a doubt, maybe a withdrawal from the way we do things. Cvejić and Vujanović refer to Gilbert Simondon, who stated:

“A veritable transindividual relation begins by solitude; it is constituted by the individual who questions themself, and not by the convergent sum of interindividual relations.” (Cvejić, Vujanović, 2022, pp. 201-202)

The concept of transindividuation as a performative process, as an ongoing condition and ongoing transformative journey is a proposal of political alternative, of another social imaginary. In the context of collective curation, this concept is helpful not only in anaylsing what collective curation already is, but mainly as a way to draw a possible horizon of what it could become as a political project.

On a more symbolic level (although both structural and symbolic inevitably overlap):

1. The political potential of collective curation opens up when it challenges the representation of the curator as author. In consequence, the figure of the individual genius can be potentially dismantled: the power is maybe not given up, but gets problematised and dispersed - at least to a certain extent.

2. When the precarious voice of a freelance curator is multiplied and thus amplified: the consequences of that change can be immediate and tangible, for instance the dynamics of negotiations change while an institution encounters a multitude of voices instead of a singular one.

3. When the focus shifts from a final product to a process: it helps to see curating as an ongoing practice instead of a fixed, new model that can be easily commodified and adapted everywhere.

Now, a political potential of collective curating materialises strongly, I believe, when both above-mentioned levels, structural and symbolic one, meet - and when the work to make them meet is being shared publicly, so it can become a common knowledge instead of yet another well promoted metaphor or a tool to boost competitiveness of an organisation.

But can collective curating actually become a form of democratising curatorial practice? Not necessarily. Often the distribution of power from an individual to a tandem or group means distributing authority, indeed, but among peers - this is the case when collective curation stays in hands of groups that consist of curators or who are composed of professionals already involved in the field. Therefore the potential to dismantle the power position emerges, I believe, when the task of curating is being offered to the ones who do not fit the job description: who seem not to be experienced enough, who might not have done it before, who did not graduate from a particular school etc.[5]

However, what the process of collectivising curation (and facilitating discourse around it) can certainly do is to help avoid binar divisions of good collectives and bad institutions; good freelancers and bad city theatres - or the other way around. This simplified view is harmful for the field, as it reinforces the clichés, and renders the alignments impossible before they even have a chance to emerge. It could be really helpful to understand what conditions particular institutional structures or decision-making processes - and, at the same time, to acknowledge that establishing a collective does not mean avoiding the problem of hierarchy or power by default.

Collective curating - pitfalls

Collective curation is sometimes romanticised as a conflictless, harmonious solution, a remedy for it all. Everyone who has ever experienced such a process knows how little that imaginary has to do with reality. Collective curation is far from being a wonder solution, a happy consensual journey, freed from discomfort, dissent or power struggles. The gesture of introducing a group in the position of curator does not solve its problems by default. The choices are still being made. They are still exclusive. The conflicts still arise, people still leave, get exhausted, have broken hearts.

Another important question is directly related to the effort that the collective curation entails. Negotiations, creating procedures and spreading the decision-making processs often requires a lot of additional time, effort and resources. Is collective curation then a matter of privilege - in a sense that only well-secured, and well-funded institutions can afford it?

Finally, there is a risk of commodification: a collective curation, as Dorothee Richter pointed out, could be seen as boosting one’s own competitivenesson the market by acquiring another, precious competence of collaboration (Richter 2023, p. 388). Hence, it is key to make sure the collective curation works not only on a symbolic or representative level, but also on a structural one.

Let’s imagine the collective curatorial model of SAAL Biennaal becomes successful and inspires a transformation of the local field. It would be a beautiful (and desperately needed!) example, but still a rather unique one. So the question is: how to translate the exception into a condition? How to make its political potential open and accessible to many?

Let me follow with a draft proposal for few a steps that could help facilitate the transformation (and stay with all its trouble):

• let’s become many: let’s look for allies who could walk this journey alongside us, offering support, but also making our effort accessible to the ones who did not happen to be part of it;
• repeat: let’s look for ways and support to make it happen again, so it indeed stops being an exception but starts to work as a norm. Additionally, a perspective of repeating this endeavour helps to focus on its procesual aspect, and to see it as an ongoing practice instead of a fixed, new model;
• regenerate: the transformation will not be facilitated by worn-out, exhausted workers;
• let’s make it public: as a curatorial process it is also a process of generating knowledge, let’s take care of distributing it, of sharing the process publicly, opening it up for a conversation, a critical view, a challenge by an artist or another curator.

At the end, I would like to come back for a moment to the desire for a collective curation to bring answers to all these pertaining questions that are depriving us of sleep. This expectation is unrealistic, but not surprising. Exhausted and often lost, we are longing for some answers. And whereas a collective curation certainly is not a wonder solution, it is a performative gesture that might offer some transformative potential. Its performativity might shake, at least temporarily, the working structures we operate within, offering an invitation to look at them from yet another angle and opening a space to imagine them anew. And this gesture, with its performative and political potential, could actually work as another spell. Since we have not succeeded yet to break some spells of alienation and exhaustion, perhaps what we can still do is attempt to cast a new one. It will not solve all problems, but might help to change the way we see things, and the way we do things. An exercise of prefigurative curation. If you were invited to find a right spell today, in this room, whom else would you need to think of it with?

Bibliography:

Cvejić, Bojana and Vujanović, Ana, Toward a Transindividual-Self: A study in social dramaturgy, Oslo – Brussels – Zagreb: Oslo National Academy of the Arts – SARMA – Multimedijalni institut, 2022

Gareis, Sigrid, What Is a Curator in the Performing Arts?, in: On Curating: Curating Dance - Decolonize Dance, Issue 55/2023

Leysen, Frie, Mufson, Daniel, Searching for the Next Generation: Frie Leysen & the KunstenFESTIVAL. An Interview with Frie Leysen by Daniel Mufson, 2002, https://danielmufson.com/interviews/searching-for-the-next-generation-frie-leysen-the-kunstenfestival/ (accessed: 14.12.2023)

Marchart, Oliver, Hegenomy Machines: documenta X to fifteen and the Politics of Biennalization, On Curating, n.b.k., 2002

Raes, Barbara, Radiantly burning out and stacking stones, Fo.AM 2014, https://fo.am/blog/2014/09/25/radiantly-burning/ (accessed 14.12.2023)

Richter, Dorothee, Curating: Politics of Display, Politics of Site, Politics of Transfer and Translation, Politics of Knowledge Production. A Fragmented and Situated Theory of Curating, On Curating 2023

[1] Breaking the Spell was a pilot step of the artistic research project that reflected practices of thinking-with and being-with in performing arts and researched spells as political and artistic practices. For a year and a half between 2022 and 2023, we gathered in four European cities, being hosted by Residenz Schauspiel in Leipzig, Munich Kammerspiele, InSzPer Performing Arts Institute in Warsaw and Viernulvier in Ghent. See: https://www.viernulvier.gent/en/pQPAESb/part-of--breaking-the-spell- (accessed: 14.12.2023)

[2] https://www.documenta.de/en/retrospective/4_documenta

[3] In some of the Eastern European countries, celebrating a promise of a new, better life if only we were good enough, if we behaved as good pupils and followed the West, an euphoria has quickly given way to frustration and utter exhaustion of turbo neoliberalism we experienced there.

[4] E.g.: The Fantastic Institution and The Return of Fantastic Institution conferences initiated by Agnes Quackels at Buda in Kortrijk in 2017 and 2018; European network RESHAPE (2018-2021), Feminist Futures project by apap network (2020-2024).

[5] A good example of an attempt to practice dismantling the figure of a curator as an omnipotent Expert was The Shake Down: a collaborative project initiated by the New Theatre Institute of Latvia in Riga and Rosendal Teater in Trondheim. It invited a cohort of 10 young people from Latvia and Norway to co-curate two international performing arts festivals: Homo Novus in Riga (September 2022) and Bastard in Trondheim (April 2023). The teenage curators participated in a 15 month exchange and mentoring program that supported them in exploring festival making and curatorial practice. See: https://the-shake-down.com/en/ (accessed 14.12.2023).

On the photo: participants of the panel discussion on collective curating at SAAL Biennaal 2023. From the left: Eva Neklyaeva, Maarja Kalmre, Yoko Kawasaki, Marta Keil, Maria Arusoo, Sabine Cmelniski