Uncurated Curated Spaces

I’ve been working to explore and experiment with curation and our roles as curators over the past few months. One of the most exciting things has been working with other people experimenting with what curation can be and thinking about every aspect of it. It’s not just the spaces we put things in or how we arrange them/present them (and everything surrounding that) but also what those things are and how we relate to them, connect to them and experience them. Having been exploring first spaces and places (trying out sharing ideas, stories and connections in public spaces that people wouldn’t necessarily expect art to be, and through non physical spaces like conference phone calls, video calls and voice recordings through messages), I then moved into looking at how we relate the things we bring into spaces - our senses and connections to objects/smells/visuals/sounds/tastes and how to really examine that within the process of curation.

In a recent workshop I did an activity where we isolated the senses playing with different ideas/visuals/objects/sounds etc to explore our responses to them. We looked at what was pleasurable/disturbing/neutral etc. and why. It was powerful seeing people’s different feelings and responses to things.