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