Note: The Linking Paper connects the specific project to my broader research. It was intended primarily for the doctoral pre-examination process. Much of the content can be found in the dissertation. Read the document if it's helpful. Otherwise, feel free to go back to the Being & Feeling (Alone, Together) exposition landing page.

This Linking Paper is also available as a PDF.

This linking paper offers perspectives on choreographic thinking within my curatorial practice through the lens of Being & Feeling (Alone, Together).

Being & Feeling (Alone, Together) was a curatorial project organized for the Lamont Gallery at Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, NH, USA and MUU Gallery in Helsinki, Finland in 2020. While some of the components for Being and Feeling (Alone, Together) (including the title), were developed before the pandemic, the project unfolded alongside myriad cultural, spatiotemporal, and political situations that the pandemic produced.

The exhibition component of the project at the Lamont Gallery was scheduled for May-June 2020. Some aspects of the project were reimagined. Other components, such as the subsequent program at the MUU Gallery, were postponed repeatedly and finally cancelled.

Still, the project moved in unexpected ways. In response to the pandemic, I used movement—including the movement of thought—to generate and analyze aesthetic experience in a dispersed and remote curatorial terrain. Venue closures, delays, and cancellations required me to assemble a constellation of curatorial effects not confined to or dependent on physical sites and independent of preconceived forms or formats.

Claiming the constellation as the modus operandi of curating may seem like a sly move, an attempt to annex more than one’s fair share of territory. This is not what I intend. Rather, this move reflects my curatorial practice more accurately: each gesture accumulates into a network of relations—some I instigate, and some instigated by others.

The pandemic has been an instigator in this case, perhaps even an unlikely collaborator.

Choreographic Devices

In Being & Feeling (Alone, Together) I focused on choreographic devices—compositional mechanisms or organizing forces—that motivated and characterized strategies for pandemic curating.  What devices initiated an action? What led to other reactions? How did the parameters engendered by the pandemic not foreclose the project completely, and instead allow it to move forward, differently? Some of these devices included:

Restriction, Stillness, and Letting (Things) Go

The pandemic restricted our access to the gallery, to the works, to events and programs, and to each other. At the start of the pandemic in March and April 2020, I felt paralyzed. I wanted to hold on to what was: the exhibition, the programs, and the plans. There was no opportunity to cultivate the "excess" that develops from interactions between artworks and audiences once a show opens, a key part of my choreographic curatorial practice.

How could we move forward? Could these restrictions create new approaches to the curatorial? In order to move, I had to let things go.

Being, Feeling, Alone, Together

I used the project title—and our situation—as choreographic devices. We had to contend with so many emotions during this time: desire, loss, confusion, and longing. An early etymological meaning of emotion is “a (social) moving, stirring, agitation.”[1] During the pandemic, we moved alone, and together, in manifold ways, and in various emotional states. Those actions made other curatorial movements possible.

There was an urgency to create and connect despite the physical distance, uncertainty, and inertia the pandemic produced. We countered assumptions that the exhibition was cancelled (Why are we paying artists?), and that our activities did not contribute to the mission of the parent institution (How can you think about art at a time like this?). We kept trying. We kept futuring. A collective act of resistance.

By moving forward with a newly imagined program, we practiced what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney call “exuberantly metacritical hope.”[2] This activity is “practiced on and over the edge of politics, beneath its ground, in animative and improvisatory decomposition of its inert body. It emerges as an ensemblic stand, a kinetic set of positions, but also takes the form of embodied notation, study, score. Its encoded noise is hidden in plain sight from the ones who refuse to see and hear.”[3]

Conversations

Much of the movement in Being & Feeling happened through conversation. I hosted research conversations with collaborators in choreography, architecture, and dramaturgy, as well as with participating artists and audiences. I had dialogues with words, artist statements, theoretical texts on curation and choreography, and poetry. I also had conversations without words, those that Katherine Profeta might describe as “linguistic gestures in the direction of what cannot exactly be spoken.”[4]

These exchanges motivated and shaped curatorial choices. What emerged for the project was supported by a partnership: “meaning is never carried discretely in one word or motion but in another sort of dance, the one to be found in their interaction.”[5]

Space(s) and Site(s)

Perhaps because of the lack of access to the gallery space, I re-emphasized spaces and sites, including the (inaccessible) physical gallery and how it could be reconsidered. Contemplating the physical, architectural, and material spaces of the gallery increased my awareness of other spaces, including Zoom spaces, asynchronous places, and social and emotional sites.

The Visible, The Invisible, and Gaps

While this exposition includes what was visible or knowable to an outside audience, it prioritizes the invisible, incomplete, or behind the scenes. These "never happened" moments are as much the artistic research outcome as anything that was perceived externally. They were much needed gaps or breaks. What was missing—a live audience for a performance or a non-functioning Zoom link—propelled speculative artistic research. Gabriele Brandstetter suggests breaks are displacements within the curatorial. They allow the tree (or map) of knowledge to become nonhierarchical, wherein “the movement of knowledge is triggered.”[6] The gaps made new movements possible.

Constellation

During this experience, some questions familiar to artistic researchers arose: if my process includes activities that are both the practice and the artistic research outcome, but that leave little visible trace of their influence—how do I know that I know? How do I demonstrate this knowledge?

Through the scaffold of the exposition, I mapped visible and invisible knowledge.[7] My aim was not to locate any final positions with certainty, but to locate myself in relation to elements that were themselves always in motion. Within contemporary curatorial theory, a constellation[8] is the dynamic and combined activities of the curatorial—the public-facing exhibitions, pedagogical programs, and materials—as well as the behind-the-scenes, incipient, and even imagined activity.

The word constellation, “a collection of stars,”[9] is related to desire. The word desire, from desiderare, is to “await what the stars will bring.”[10] Both words, constellation and desire, anticipate the word conversation, with its prefix of co- or con-, meaning together or with.

This perspective, motivated by a desire to be together, became especially important for moving forward with the project in spite of the pandemic. A constellation evokes the continuously changing relationship between fixed and unfixed positions. You stand in one place. The world moves around you. You move to get a better view. You are in motion, too.

Alongside: Privileging the Research, Not the Object
(of Research)

There is an archive section (accessible from the landing page) with materials available to external audiences, such as exhibition announcements, photographs, and publicity, but I have underemphasized it. Artistic research is not restricted or even obliged to produce objects of knowledge. The new knowledge that emerges can be configured as processes, tendencies, and activities that are not fixed or clearly demarcated.

I assemble my ideas about choreographic thinking by making a reading experience that is in itself choreographic. This is not to disorient the reader, but to reflect the spirit and methodology of my artistic research process. I hope the titles, introductory texts, and layouts in each section provide sufficient guidance.

My artistic research and the traditional curatorial setting—the gallery—are deeply entwined. The isolation of the pandemic required that I reconsider my assumptions about gallery, exhibition, and audience, among other concepts, and that I learned to perceive how my practice advances even without its customary supports. The exposition is not simply recording a reaction to the pandemic. It details how the pandemic produced an "alongside" or alternative site for research where I could theorize choreographic curatorial practice in relation to, and apart from, a given context.

The process hastened my arrival to a place I was already heading.

Works Cited:

Brandstetter, Gabriele, “Written on Water: Choreographies of the Curatorial.” Cultures of the Curatorial. Edited by Beatrice von Bismarck, Jörn Schafaff, and Thomas Weski. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012

Harney, Stefano and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. New York: Minor Compositions, 2013.

Online Etymology Dictionary. https://www.etymonline.com/.

Profeta, Katherine. Dramaturgy in Motion: At Work on Dance and Movement Performance. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015.

Tufte, Edward R. Beautiful Evidence. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press LLC, 2006.

von Bismarck, Beatrice, Jörn Schafaff, and Thomas Weski, Cultures of the Curatorial. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012.