Terremoto 11 - Curators On the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

Terremoto 11 - Curators On the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
Author: Dorothée Dupuis (ed.)
Publisher: Terremoto, Motto Books
Language: Spanish / English
Pages: 104
Size: 22.5 x 33.5 cm
Weight: 428 g
Binding: Softcover
ISBN: 9782940524730
Availability: In stock
Price: €10.00
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Product Description

Crisis and anxiety characterize our relationship with the reality we share: inhabiting it causes a ‘nervous breakdown’ that is the result of a succession of events that alter our daily routine and lead to increased stress. Corruption, global warming, feminicide, drug trafficking, precariousness, insecurity, racism, abuse, exploitation, repression… although we have managed to turn a critical eye upon the realities that surround us, the information that represents them as a whole is confusing, fragmented, and sometimes unintelligible.

Perhaps it is for this reason that the figure of the curator in three decades has evolved from simple organizers to almost gurus, capable of providing narrative, perspective, and order to artistic and visual production—art being now one of the few spaces available for dissemination of anti-hegemonic, anti-patriarchal, decolonial, and anticapitalist thoughts. If we consider the visual and sensory regime that constitutes art as a sibylline refuge, necessary in the face of the systematic violence of the provocative language imposed by the extreme ideologies of our time, the curator can be understood as the oracle who will make art “speak” as a whole, the aporia that would cure us of the schizophrenic malaise of living in this world, allowing a true encounter with diversity to enable other collective ways of approaching our environment.

Alas! In a continent ravaged by colonization, imperialism, machismo, and neoliberalism, the voice of the curator often murmurs on the edge of dominant rhetoric. Reigning from the fragile castles that are their museums and institutions of art, from the precariousness of the independent spaces and behind the ridiculous walls, nourished by knowledge such as aesthetics, humanities, or philosophy, the curators are stateless sovereigns, prophets without gods who we follow with a faith deceived by few successful profiles shining from Paris or New York, but whose real achievements consist in the humble work realised day after day in the less shiny commons of our Global South.

In this issue of Terremoto, we will critically review in the most pragmatic and lucid way possible, what we call the ‘curatorial’ in various parts of the American continent and how it articulates the cultural network and approaches reality to order it. We will examine the models of expression and organization that we have adopted to reevaluate the structures we reproduce and understand the impact, limits, and possibilities of our activities, possibly beyond the limited world of art.