E.6.1 Moss Projects: Curatorial Incubation and Cross-Cultural, Cross-Disciplinary Methodologies

Toby Lawrence, University of British Columbia

Throughout Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses, Robin Wall Kimmerer (2004) reminds us that there is always another way, even on the paths—in the practices—with which we are the most familiar. Correspondingly, Kimmerer’s essays offer simultaneity of epistemic approaches: “In order to tell the mosses’ story I need both approaches, objective and subjective.” Scientific and Indigenous ways of knowing. She continues, “intentionally giv[ing] voice to both ways of knowing, letting matter and spirit walk companionably side by side. And sometimes even dance.” Guided by the teachings of moss stories, how, then, is curation understood and communicated beyond western art constructs? And how do these approaches “dance”?

In 2020, after a year of dreaming, Michelle Jacques and I officially embarked on the development of Moss Projects, an educational and philosophical space hosted by the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria aimed at peeling away the colonial layers of western art institutions to imagine something else. This collaborative initiative supports Indigenous-led inquiry and practice alongside peer-to-peer pedagogies that value diverse knowledge systems and modes of organization beyond dominant western parameters of curation, art, and art history, within the context of Turtle Island. We are asking: How are curators being trained? What innovative strategies support curators in becoming, and who already are, attuned to a wider breadth of community needs, perspectives, and traditions? How can art spaces adjust organizational philosophies and practices to accommodate underrepresented and underexplored models of curation and organization? What are the questions we don’t know yet to ask? This paper will weave together conversation and theorization around our collaborative development, as White settler and Black Canadian curators, of Moss Projects. Furthermore, it will expand on the seeding of the idea for this program and delve into the collaborative, reflexive, and praxis-based process of utilizing and offering our professional resources for Indigenous and allied incubation of curation and to establish mechanisms for sharing cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary methodologies.

E.6.2 Curatorial Infinities: Not Knowing for Institutional Creativity

Cissie Fu, Emily Carr University of Art + Design

The current pandemic and calls for racial justice have heightened scrutiny of institutions that make, keep, and share knowledge: financial and temporal pressures on basic research to race for a cure tense against political and social urgencies to redress colonial systems of power and privilege. Between the desire for a disease- and distance-free future and the disgust for a discriminatory and deleterious past, the fundamental functions of universities and museums to produce and preserve knowledge are suspended in a not-knowing now. Met with uncertainty, some educational and cultural institutions are rushing to coin curatorial futures and entertain electric futures, while some publishing houses and public organisations are rounding up luminaries to refuse the premise and reject the logic of futurism, but this contrary motion betrays the same core belief in knowledge as sure grounds for justification and legitimacy.

If our future is now and our now, ridden with change, is rendered strange, how can curation — as primarily a practice of care — create conditions for not knowing together? Instead of speculating about or projecting ourselves into a possible future, listening for polyphonic presence and attending to multiple interpretability in a single site can bring forward encounters that matter here and now to make room for how alive we can be in unpredictable plurality. To not know, and to insist on not knowing, thus opens us and our institutions to capacious and courageous ways to exhibit and organise.

E.6.3 curatorial methodology across different spatial temporalities

Bopha Chhay, Artspeak

‘Uncertainty’, and ‘unprecedented’ are two words that have been in wide circulation since the pandemic was declared in March 2020. Over the past several months, the pandemic has revealed deep structural inequalities, notably between those with necessary supports such as health care services and housing, and those without. Were things ever certain, and if so, for whom? In this paper, I’d like to consider what the role of artists, arts workers, and arts and cultural institutions is within their wider and respective communities, and how ways to re-envision curatorial methodology might require a shift of attention to ‘what is already there and present’. How can we connect with, acknowledge, and honor the work and organizing that has taken place within the communities that we are a part of?

I would like to discuss three recent projects I organized at Artspeak Gallery in Vancouver over the past three years: Artspeak Radio Digest, a series of radio broadcasts in partnership with Vancouver Co-op Radio; Maple Spiral: pedagogy of a tree in the city, a studio residency project led by Vancouver-based artist Laiwan; and Quivering, a project by the Taiwanese artist Hong-Kai Wang; all of which considered varied time scales (social, historical, ecological, economic, geological etc.). The methodologies and frameworks in these projects worked towards a deep understanding of place, and the collaborative nature of the work foregrounded the significance of the relationships formed, through initiatives that favored decentred authorship. The projects aimed to develop frameworks for lived and embodied forms of knowledge, building citations that honor this praxis. In their ability to remain open to revision, these frameworks actively make space and imagine different spatial temporalities for other modes of artistic practice. These collective experimental practices that embrace risk and acknowledge existing precarity, can work towards reimagining and implementing ways to secure a different kind of future.

E.6.4 Let’s Play and See What Happens

Manuel Piña, University of British Columbia

This project is an invitation to a practical interrogation of the fundamental shifts occurring in the way knowledge is created, perceived and disseminated. It is also an attempt to foresee new ambitions for artistic and curatorial endeavors: an imagination of what is possible. Current conditions (technological acceleration, crisis of scientific knowledge, information overload, corruption of language, emerging ways of being, to name a few) are rendering dominant linear knowledge-transmission (teacher >>> learners) model obsolete. This model is being quickly superseded by one of de-centralized knowledge-formation: a continuous social process of research and curation on the one hand, and of collaboration and dialogue on the other.

The vast and complex social and cultural implications are already visible: an increasingly important body of knowledge emerging outside of academia; the resurgence of traditional wisdoms, the dissolution of truth, and an evident, all-encompassing paradigm shift. The political implications are yet to be seen, but will be equally profound, as the education system – particularly academia – is key to the perpetuation of the dominant, colonial system of power. Academic writing will be hard pressed to respond to these changes, just as we will assist to the emergence of new forms, functions and understandings of artistic and curatorial practices. Curation, in particular, has to be radically interrogated as it is likely to morph into a fundamental skill for cultural survival of individuals and collectives.

My paper-less proposal is an invitation and friendly challenge to the Co-Chairs of this session, Elham and Marisa. Our contribution will be an ongoing process of collective research, discussions, and findings. This will include the imagination of new possibilities for curatorial practices and a search for the tools and platforms to exercise novel ideas through new modes of inscriptions. This will be an open process, in which we are inviting others to partake, to inhabit a space of productive uncertainty with outcomes we can't possibly anticipate.