On Co-Curation

It takes a village… Somewhere among the ruins of the not-too-distant recesses of our collective memory lie the vestiges of the proverbial village. In our conception, co-curation is an attempt to reassemble the village, to reconstitute our version of the village for our time, in order to bring to fruition the efforts of colleagues from far-flung corners of the globe in a moment of collective breath. To co-curate a concept of beauty, however grotesque, at the tail end of a festival.

In this conjuring, co-curation constitutes an attempt to circumnavigate the contours of imposed traditions that bestow power upon one single curator as a matter of course. In previous editions, within the framework of the SPIELART festival, we explored various forms of co-curation: Julian Warner’s community project GLOBAL ANGST, which involved a conference followed by a parade through the city, or Betty Yi-Chun Chens WHEN MEMORIES MEET, which comprised works from East, Southeast, and South Asia. Our current project BIRDS ON PERIPHERIES goes one step further: for the first time, we are attempting to harness the knowledge and instincts of an entire group of co-curators.

This project is an invitation to bring together minds from diverse schools of thought and practice, for them to enter the circle and to reimagine it together, to give it a new name. Co-curation is co-creation. It is co-elaboration and collaboration by other means. It is the splitting, unpacking, and distilling of a shared, common (or uncommon) practice towards the imagining of what is not yet seen but is already in the process of being visualised. Co-curation is about carving out pockets of space and time to imagine, experiment, and perhaps most importantly, to listen. It is barely conceivable to curate without listening. Co-curation is not much different, as it demands of those within the circle that they each speak in equal measure, and listen in equal measure. The effort of co-curating BIRDS ON PERIPHERIES, which invites eight external co-curators to invent and imagine a common and collective curatorial proposition, asks its audience to listen generously.

This segment of the festival is possibly the most experimental. It is the one we leave deliberately open to experimentation with future-facing ideas and, as such, the elasticity of the space created there allows for possibilities to expand or contract the walls of curatorial imagination.

It is against this backdrop that we fantasised about opening up the curatorial space just that little bit wider, to broaden the communal circle, so to speak, in order to expand the often limited bandwidth of coded curatorial practices as a means of facilitating an experiment in collective imagining. In order to achieve this vision, we invited a mix of curators, producers, and artists as co-curators of the BIRDS ON PERIPHERIES programme: Gabriel Yépez Rivera, Virginie Dupray, Aurélien Zouki, Éric Deniaud, June Tan, Satoko Tsurudome, and Sankar Venkateswaran.

With one eye on the ever constricting geopolitical and economic situation and the resultant reduction in collective common sense, it seems now more urgent than ever that we insist on the inclusion of multiple voices – if only to ensure that we remember that the histories that we are attempting to inscribe against the darkening sky emanate from multiple manifestations and articulations of real worlds. Plural worlds. At a time when the proverbial village has been razed to the ground and replicated by AI, sans all its foundational human intuitions, co-curation constitutes the reassembling of the various parts of a choir that all sing one song, together, in unison, in multiple voices.