CORRESPONDENCE

4

4

/

Power relations in cultural institutions and what cannot be found in their archives?

Carolina Rito, Laurence Rassel, Felicity Allen, Françoise Vergès

4

4

/

Sharing agency. What's wrong with participation?

Dmitry Vilensky, Pablo Helguera, Suzana Milevska, Bernadette Lynch

ABOUT CORRESPONDENCE

Symposium* discussions have been transformed into an exchange of emails between russian and foreign researchers, curators, educators and artists. In their personal correspondence, the participants reflect on questions proposed by curators of the symposium* and talk about issues that they find important at this critical time.

in russian only

curatorial forum

/

rus

rus

Power relations in cultural institutions ...

The participants of the correspondence were invited to reflect on the problems of participatory projects. These projects are conceived by artists, curators and educators with good intentions to include participants from a non-artistic environment in the cultural process.

Sharing agency ...

Carolina Rito, Laurence Rassel, Felicity Allen and Françoise Vergès have been invited to start a written correspondence on the crucial topic of power relations in cultural institutions and their consequences on processes of institutional archiving.

ГМИИ им. А.С. Пушкина и ГЦСИ в Санкт-Петербурге при поддержке «Фонда поддержки инноваций и молодежных инициатив Санкт-Петербурга» в рамках 2-го Кураторского форума © Санкт-Петербург 2020

The participants of the correspondence were invited to reflect on the problems of participatory projects. These projects are conceived by artists, curators and educators with good intentions to include participants from a non-artistic environment in the cultural process. But what do these projects actually mean for the participants as well as for the initiators of the projects themselves? What forms of commitment and responsibility do they take towards the collaborators? In their correspondence, Dmitry Vilensky, Pablo Helguera, Susana Milevska and Bernadette Lynch approached these issues from different positions, but being (like all of us) in a similar situation of global political crisis, distancing, «radical domesticity» and the impossibility of participation.

Sharing agency. What's wrong with participation?

Carolina Rito, Laurence Rassel, Felicity Allen and Françoise Vergès have been invited to start a written correspondence on the crucial topic of power relations in cultural institutions and their consequences on processes of institutional archiving. In their letters, the authors reflect upon the potentiality of enacted-research, the necessity of acting from within the institution, and how to include cure and care in the functioning of institutions. Proposing a False Poem, Felicity Allen asks whether gossip could be a feminist strategy, while Francoise Vergès underlines the racial dimension of cultural workers' vulnerability.
The correspondence questions the way institutions are built, by whom and for whom and how their archives are produced, and proposes a feminist pedagogy, a pedagogy from below, as an approach to rethink what is considered as «natural truths».

Power relations in cultural institutions and what cannot be found in their archives?