Unannounced Voices of Change

Alternative forms of curatorial and institutional work suitable to our novel conditions, when the relationship between physical and online work must be revised.
Never before has the entire world been caught up nearly simultaneously in such a similar experience as in this era of the pandemic, which has only accelerated the spiraling crises of our time. The experiences that artists and curators now address, and even the very sense of experience itself, are more situated than local, extending beyond demarcated localities and individual communities, and resonating in precise yet expanded contexts of culture, space, and time. This book proposes alternative forms of curatorial and institutional work suitable to our novel conditions, when the relationship between physical and online work must be revised in the name of a new sense of the situated, and as various economies of solidarity are already developing. The predominant forms of curatorial production (exhibitions, conferences, publications, etc.) have long considered and even depended on geographical difference, on different localities and the fragility of social groups, yet they always translate these conditions into their own dominant language. What gets lost in translation is the body of the one being translated--the situation of each voice, each body. It is possible to retrieve these vulnerable bodies of people, artworks, and exhibitions, but only if curatorial work and institutions begin to develop this crucial sense of the situated that by necessity, by a new urgency of distance and closeness, must transform the idea of the local in the age of pandemic relations.