This course invites curators, artists, activists, educators, cultural workers, and those who are interested in critically engaging in thinking about post-representational, affective, and experiential transdisciplinary curatorial forms: a curation that allows for a shift from an on-looking audience towards activated and self-empowered protagonists; a holistic and relational – versus informational and representational – curation, for an emancipatory activation of the curatorial public.

The course will introduce and discuss some exemplary fieldwork and philosophical approaches – for example, Brazilian scholar and curator Suely Rolnik or those who have been inspired by philosopher Baruch Spinoza – advances that might encourage the development of and experimentation with embodied critical thinking for the making of alternative ethical-aesthetic-political curatorial formats. The theoretical engagements will be mobilised with some simple physical exercises to affectively activate the course protagonists. 

The materiality of our human existence – as a spatial agent itself – and as a multidimensional being with its sentient qualities, is an essential starting point for experiencing a critical practice. How might we create alternative curatorial ways to stimulate not only human inter-subjective but also inter-relational agency and critical consciousness towards our environment, and towards what might be considered as the “Other”? How might we take better account of, and create ‘response-ability’ in the ways that we learn, practise, and live together?

 

Berit Fischer (PhD) is a curator, researcher, artist, writer, and an editor with focus on experiential and socio-ecological knowledge formation, critical spatial and transformative emancipatory practices, that are often inspired by feminist- and radical pedagogies. In 2016 she founded the Radical Empathy Lab, an on-going nomadic socio-ecological and research laboratory for experiential knowledge formation.

She is the founder and curator of the (Re-)Gaining Ecological Futures festival that critically engages with the human-centred ontology and the dualism between nature and culture at the Floating University and is a founding member of the Urbane Praxis e.V.. She holds a practice-based Ph.D. from the University of Southampton, Winchester School of Art and has been working and publishing internationally for over two decades. Previously based in New York and London, she now works from Berlin, Germany.

http://www.beritfischer.org