introduction

In her speculative text “Report of the Department for Lesbian Revolutionary Art,” historian Holly Firmin writes:

Curation was, before the revolution, more often than not the extraction of surplus value from women artists by men-curators, from trans artists by cis-curators, from gay artists by hetero-curators, from black artists by white-curators, from disabled artists by able-curators. It was curators who acted as the gatekeepers to the means of production: the means to assign value to art, and the resources with which to create it. The existing border between the curator and the curated has been ripped apart as artist-led, collective practice dominates, whilst the individualised, market-based model of artistic production has all but dissolved.¹ 

Firmin’s “Report” imagines a new art world, one that has eradicated the social hierarchies and monetary inequality of our contemporary moment in favor of collective practices and unfettered global creativity. The “Report” is born out of the frustrating reality of our contemporary crisis: that which the Collective Rewilding team—a curatorial laboratory run by Sara Garzón, Ameli M. Klein, and Sabina Oroshi—identifies as one of a broken world, a world plagued by precarity due to the unfettered effects of global capitalism.² Critic Zarina Muhammad exposes how this broken world affects the cultural industry: unpaid internships, grant competitions that pit artists against each other, boards of trustees who place neoliberal interests over those of their constituents.³

How must cultural workers answer Firmin’s call for the eradication of curation? How can we fix this broken world? Curator Maura Reilly proposes curatorship-as-praxis: working horizontally to find connections across disciplines, temporalities, and geographies, with activism at the forefront.⁴ Along the same lines, art historian Claire Bishop visualizes curation as a constellation, expanding Walter Benjamin’s “archive of the commons” into a “project of bringing events together in new ways, disrupting established taxonomies, disciplines, mediums, and proprieties…in order to break the spell of calcified traditions, mobilizing the past by bringing it blazing into the present” which “pulls into the foreground that which has been sidelined, repressed, and discarded in the eyes of the dominant classes.”⁵ In her analysis of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Museo Nacional de Reina Sofía in Madrid and MSUM in Ljubljana, Bishop applies Reilly’s curatorial activism to the museum collection itself. 

Similarly, queer theorist Gayatri Gopinath demands that we embark on curation with “a sense of obligation to document, analyze, archive, and value the small, the inconsequential, and the ephemeral” and so bring together “disparate racial formations, geographies, temporalities, and colonial and postcolonial histories of displacement and dwelling.”⁶

 If curating is about bringing pieces together, can curating not function then as an act of care, as an act of reparation? In a sense, Bishop, Reilly, and Gopinath echo Firmin’s speculative call for the eradication of cultural institutions in the wake of Muhammad’s criticism of the contemporary moment. We must reimagine how museums function, what collections we are acquiring, and how we are presenting them if we aim to fix this broken world. 

This project aims to document the various ways in which cultural workers across the Western Hemisphere reimagine curation and the presentation of culture in the wake of widespread institutional critique. There are contemporary instances of radical curatorial activism, constellatory thinking, and ethical care work that already build the reality that Firmin imagines. However, this work is being done outside of the museum itself. In line with Gopinath’s attention to the often-ephemeral nature of subaltern sites of history, this project considers radical publishing practices as the foil to the contemporary museological system. It asks:

In what ways are radical publishing practices serving to curate and present culture? How can they serve as models or alternatives for contemporary museums to engage in decolonial and decannonizing work?

In order to answer these questions, this project charts a constellation of collaborative cultural production and dissemination. If a museum must serve as the “archive of the commons,” why not get rid of museum walls altogether? Why not go into—and break—the archive itself?