Schizoanalytic Floorplanning and Curatorial Refrains

Abstract

While art institutions are beginning to decolonise, curating is integrating uneasily with likewise decolonising university pedagogical structures and discourses. Simultaneously, the professional is surrounded by new amateur and consumerist “curation” and “curatorial subjectivities” emerging in neoliberal society. This project seeks to contribute critically to curatorial practice and studies by considering pathways made possible by the conjunction of different models of the curatorial. It rereads a portfolio of five of my texts published over the last ten years; speaking as a practitioner, the project applies a curatorial research method to reorganise and reread the portfolio of my own writing for gallery publications on artistic projects by Ciara Phillips, Les Levine, Yam Lau, Chris Kline, Ibghy and Lemmens, Nadia Lichtig, Josèfa Ntjam, Anne Riley and Jol Thoms. A critical and speculative framing text borrows theoretical tools from Félix Guattari’s militant “meta-modeling” to forage for components of mental and social ecologies of the curatorial and explore the potential of curating and thinking with the notion of the refrain. This new curatorial essay folds the portfolio across an interpretation of schizoanalytic cartography. Attending to broader ecologies that condition the breaks and sutures of curating, the curatorial and curation, the project speculates on a direction of curatorial practice-studies; so that it might venture off its foundations and develop a processual, listening, and trans-disciplinary ethos, I chart movements through a mental ecology toward a yet-speculative intervention in the social ecology of the curatorial.