MASTERFUL MICRO-REFLECTIONS Extracts from the first day of talks from Micro-Curating
| Carlos Rendón
Enrique Rivera: Curator as Spy Director of the Santiago Biennial of Media Arts (Chile). Researcher, audiovisual artists and curator. “The curator is a kind of spy that needs certain strategies and tactics in order to gain an artist’s trust. Often the curator must remain invisible, disappear. Therefore, getting to that place of familiarity, in a broad sense of the word, is a complicated matter. It’s as if you were going to a psychoanalyst, telling him everything, then the psychoanalyst somehow reveals your inner world.” “Talking about marginal curatorship in a museum institution smacks of structural paternalism. Generally speaking, I wouldn’t work with an artist just because they are someone who is socioeconomically disadvantaged. It’s like choosing a woman to take part in an exhibition just because she’s a woman, just ‘to keep it balanced.’ If the exhibition were to call this into question it would be interesting, but it opens up the debate over whether including those who are historically underrepresented in an institutional setting in an almost paternalistic way can in fact be as harmful as their exclusion.” “We try to think of the humans who walk through museums as animals. Primates, intuitive mammals, and their relation to the works, which is often rational, or intellectual in nature. We were interested in encouraging that intuition, but without being naive. We were dealing with complex issues like immigration and inequality, but without trying to over-intellectualize. Integrating the logic of intuition in curatorship.” Javier de la Fuente: A Curator Isn’t a God Co-director of the Expanded Aesthetics Festival (Colombia). Sound artist, researcher and academic. “A curator is not a god, nor someone that knows everything about everything. A curator is liable to make a few mistakes from time to time, and the mistakes too, are part of the journey. Errors are a way of reaching places that we have never been before. In no uncertain terms, what we are dealing with is not something measurable, but debatable.” “The box, be it black or white, is now obsolete. Work is starting to appear away from museums or other preordained spaces, away from those buildings whose architecture requires you to go up some set of stairs in order to look at a sculpture. This means that people can now appreciate and be part of a work of art, even if it would never occur to them to go to a museum.” 136
