I am reaching you across time, from the middle of a pandemic, COVID-19. I am a border-crossing, radical, anti-racist white performance art curator, and I am a woman, observing her own time: a challenging present. Individual and social safety has been shredded, and the significance of this global human crisis runs deeper than what we are able to know. The police run the street. They invite citizens to stay home. We travel only for essential reasons. Borders are closed. We wear masks. The virus is highly contagious. Hospitals collapsed. And I sit on a chair on the balcony, looking at the lighthouse, thinking about my own responsibility in this state of exception. I am part of a capitalistic catastrophe. Forms of oppression, discrimination and colonialism are threatening the survival of humanity. Since I cannot move, I write.
What does it mean, in this most critical time, to curate performance art and to perform the curatorial, within and beyond a system of institutionalized exploitation and spiritual abyss? Is the art system — a constellation of hierarchical forces, elitist activities, and rusty binary models — willing to see, reorient and nurture art as a soul project? How, during this pandemic that so violently exposed human urgencies and contradictions, can curators reconnect with the roots of humanity? Do you see yourself in racial, gendered, able and classist terms? Please, be honest.
Operating in the complex fabric of the contemporary and embracing performativity as the language to address the complexity of human consciousness, I collected evidence of the Western-centered privilege that regulates the art system. I undertook a serious and committed enquiry into the curatorial politics, within and beyond its white walls. And I am writing you this letter to readdress the normative definition of curating. Knowledge grounds in multiple realities existing in human difference and cultural diversity, not only in the realm of intellectual and abstract ideas. However, such a heterogeneous archive has been forced into a single narrative, built on theoretical and intellectual reasoning by male, white, privileged authors who have been granted the historical power to sing the praises of the civilized world order.
Hence, I join my voice with those who dare address the formation of artistic identity, the ethics of the curatorial praxis, and the social dimension art activates. I join my voice with those who insist that the curatorial must be differently envisioned, meaning with reference to modes of becoming in ethics and responsibility, to honour these plural and complex realities — the bodies that make them be, the spaces humans inhabit, the time given to human experience, the memory that remains once its course has gone. Art has regrettably conformed to arbitrary categories, labels and stereotypes that are still unquestioned in their assumed universal validity. What if your judgments and equations have been socially informed and culturally reified? What if you inherited an unconscious psychological structure without even being aware of it? An artificial, cultural myth. Yet, the myth became very real. It affected your genes, your chromosomes and veins. It affected your vision. It informed your gaze and penetrated through your skin. It unconsciously chained and directed you soul soil. Not just yours, that of all individuals. Human existence has been radically uprooted, because of these paramount dead angles and historical misunderstandings that fogged over the human possibility to acknowledge how much history, society, culture, language, stories, lullabies, education, every day experiences continuously form that unconscious structure of pre-determined judgmental feelings and ideas that inform and affect thoughts, actions and behaviours.
Yes, I am here stating that racism is omnipresent and is perpetuated through language and culture. We do not even realize it. We, white people, are not able to read it, because it operates in a sly form. The unconscious is the place where these overwhelming and bombarding corpora of visual and racial stimuli constantly shape our psychological and cultural constructions, imposing moral categories to which everyone must comply. Whiteness, as a mythical construction by racial terms of pureness and canonical beauty, has been arbitrarily bound to the idea of moral neutrality and cultural universality. So my question is, what are your criteria in selecting and exhibiting? Do you account equal rights to all cultures and bodies? Which voices do you ensure to art history? Who are you exhibiting, collecting, presenting, representing, selling, talking and writing about, nurturing, taking care of? Are you aware that your choices transmit specific messages and human values to your audience? And please tell me, how do you interpret the art institution racial and gendered demographics?
As Frantz Fanon highlights in Black Masks, White Skin, the social and economic reality epidermalized forms of projected inferiority, imprisoning black and brown people and all other minorities in their visible appearance, thus imposing an existential deviation on the life of all human beings. I believe that this is a crucial understanding, being this rooted in history and philosophy, having it infected art criticism and both the artistic and curatorial vocabulary. But doesn’t it also mean that, in the same way, we can still change the course of history, if we change the discriminatory mindset that informs the curatorial language?
We have to be willing to lose the grip on power, to let it go completely. We all have to descend from the ivory tower. So far, many of you refuse. Although the post-colonial expanded the definition of what constitutes identity in contemporary art and culture — researching and discussing within and beyond its own boundaries; functioning as a bridge between disciplines, people, and cultures; creating new and unexpected constellations of exhibited individuals, artworks and cultures of distant times and spaces; creating spaces for conversations on identity issues — many of you still refuse to give up benefits and advantages given by institutionalized power.
Wouldn’t it be rather liberating and constructive to critically confront these deep psychological and representational contradictions at the root of discrimination and exclusion within the art system? This is an ethical call, matter of responsibility towards the bodies and temporary communities we, artists and curators, gather. What does ethical care have to do with the in-between spaces that the curator redeems from invisibility, through gates and bridges open to cross?
While sit on a chair on my balcony, looking at the lighthouse, thinking about my own responsibility in this state of exception, the whole world is crying out. Can you feel it?
Francesca Carol Rolla – Formentera 2021
Image: Arcipelago-C.S.-ph.LorenzaCini