The Curator as a Listener, by María Carri

Audio 7 [ANDREA ARIAS] AUDIO-2022-11-21-13-47-14 2

Cada obra es única e irrepetible. El dibujo del tejido es fruto de la inspiración de su tejedora. (Each piece is unique and can’t be repeated. The design of the woven piece is the fruit of its weaver’s inspiration.)

Audio 8 [ANDREA ARIAS] AUDIO-2022-11-21-13-47-14 4

Cuando compras algo hecho a mano estás comprando mucho más que a un objeto. Estás comprando horas de experimentos y fracasos. Estás comprando días, semanas y meses de trabajo. No compras una cosa, estás comprando un pedacito del corazón de otra persona. (When you buy something handmade, you are buying much more than just an object. You`re buying hours of trial and error. You’re buying days, weeks, and months of work. You’re not buying a “thing,” you’re buying a little piece of someone’s heart.)

Andrea Arias, Chowhay Alto de la Sierra community.

Andrea Arias is a member of the Wichí community Chowhay Alto de la Sierra, located in the Municipio Santa Victoria Este, in northern Argentina. Even though she is a Wichí speaker, she said these words in Spanish, and they reached me in the form of an audio file that I listened to through my computer in upstate New York. It was 2022 and I had not yet met Andrea in person, but I would soon. Until then, I would listen to her voice many times.

Andrea was also a member of Thañí, an organization of several hundred Indigenous Wichí women weavers with whom I was then working to edit a printed publication and curate an exhibition of their textiles as part of ¹Silät, my final MA Graduate Thesis Project at the Center for Curatorial Studies, in Bard College. The project unfolded across dual temporalities: the publication and the exhibition were presented in the Hessel Museum in New York during the northern Autumn of 2023 and subsequently in the Wichí community Choway Alto de la Sierra, the day of the southern Solstice of the same year. For the publication, curator and artist Andrei Fernández and artist Guido Yanitto interviewed many of the weavers of Thañí, with whom they have been working closely for many years. Mediated by no other technology than a cell phone, they recorded their voices in their homes in the Wichí territories of Chowhay Alto de la Sierra, La Puntana, and La Curvita. They mostly spoke in Wichí, some of them in Spanish. As I listened to their recordings, I could hear subtle shifts in their tones as they transitioned between languages: some would talk about the color violet that comes from the black carob, others about the mythical origin of women or the early moments of their organization. But all of them spoke about this other technology, one that has been integral to their lives and shaped their subjectivities as women of the Wichí people: they spoke about weaving.

Cuando compras algo hecho a mano, estás comprando mucho más que a un objeto, Andrea says. Estás comprando horas de experimentos y fracasos. Estás comprando días, semanas y meses de trabajo. No compras una cosa, estás comprando un pedacito del corazón de otra persona. One reproduction after the other, the stories in their voices configured an image and, in turn, their textiles would become a voice.

Textiles and texts have a reading quality, they prompt us to decodification. Particularly in Silät-book, the text acts as a sound-recording device: the core chapter of the publication is an edited version of the recorded voices of the women, transformed into an audio file, transcripted and translated, edited and translated again ². Likewise, weaving as a technology of preservation has long been accredited, as well as its political implications ³. Although I was working with Wichí as language and Wichí as textile from a radical exterior, this reading quality became resonant to me, hinting at a shared cosmology. The way in which the women of Thañí manually spin and combine the chaguar fibers ⁴ to create a geometric grammar echoes with the rhythmic cadence of the Wichí language, which constructs stories in a spiral manner, with repetitive themes that move forward and backward. The organic geometry in each weaving and the stories in their voices exist in a threshold of temporality, one that permanently memorizes a past that is at the same time the impulse towards the future. “Our work takes the ancestral forward,” ⁵ will say Claudia Alarcón, one of the leaders of the group. From this lingering sense of textuality, emerged the necessity to create new conditions of illegibility: of perception, of listening, of forms of attunement to that which escapes established taxonomies, mostly unuseful and eminently colonial. To say the works of Thañí are portals, passages towards Wichí ontology, its historical struggles and its resistances⁶, to the vindication of the “voice of praxis” and the right to forms of “co-authorship”—as artist and Director of Museo Nacional de Etnografía y Folklore Elvira Espejo teaches⁷—is also to suggest they are also complex formal artifacts for which we are equipped with the wrong set of categories. Attempts to pigeonhole these creations within traditional dichotomies of art versus craft, or past versus future, only serve to highlight the inadequacy of such frameworks, whose predominance had marked discourses around Indigenous artistic practices and have insistently failed to refrain the desire to exercise a so-called empirical authority by applying categories of the known to that of the unknown.

This was the start of my proposition. Surrounded by an increasing amount of audio materials that would become Silät, coming to me through waves of electricity, multiple recording and amplifying artifacts, a form of calibrated listening revealed to me as the starting point for rethinking a possible curatorial practice. By the time I met these voices in person, I had learned plenty. As the project unfolded, dwelling on reproduction technologies would turn into a much bigger ontological question: how can we listen to these stories?

In this article—the first of a four-part series titled “The Curator as a Listener”—I take a cue from this question to propose the need to rethink curatorial practice and to conceptualize it as a working methodology that is flexible enough to capture the vibrations of its time and original enough to encourage crosswise movements which can produce new unexpected resonances. Moving beyond curator as exhibition-maker or curator as mediator, I would like to put forward the idea of the curator as a listener.

Because listening is inherently relational, it inevitably is tied to hierarchies and power relations, so addressing forms of curatorial listening necessarily requires a critical reflection on the normalized learned forms of listening within broader and more hegemonic structural forms of subjectivation. This in turn has prompted me, as curator of Silät, to revise my own positionality as a listener, especially as one who has internalized colonial forms of listening and knowledge-building. The positionality of critical listening redirects our focus so that we might become better attuned to parameters that are often normalized—including race, class, or gender— and to how these parameters filter and influence the way in which we are able to listen. In the following chapters of this series, I will turn to elements of ethnographic listening and the work of music composer Pauline Oliveros and Wwélmexw ethnomusicologist Dylan Robinson to problematize this positionality and move closer to what a possible curatorial listening is made of.

Curating has a long history—from curators as the caretakers and custodians of objects and collections, to the emergence of curators as independent exhibition makers in the late 1960s, to the globalization of curatorial practice that accompanied the growth of international formats, such as the proliferation of biennials that characterized the artistic landscape of the 1990s⁸. In this process, curators shifted from the role of organizers with a greater or lesser degree of institutional associations, to that of mediators, thus extending their procedural skills and organizational abilities into a discursive practice of knowledge production. By the 1970s, this emphasis on mediation increased the visibility of curators towards their heightened position in the 1990s of what curator and writer Paul O’Neill has defined as “supervisibility.” ⁹

The changing role of the curator over time yielded the scope in the definition of this practice, which was adopting activities traditionally associated with other disciplines, resulting in what became known as the educational turn¹⁰ or the collaborative turn¹¹ in the early 2000s. In the wake of the pivotal exhibitions Documenta X (1997), Documenta XI (2002), and the proliferation of discursive practices, it became clear that pedagogical models—comprising discussions, talks, symposia, education programs, debates, and various discursive activities—traditionally relegated to a supportive role in the exhibition of contemporary art, had transitioned into central elements of curatorial production¹². In her opening remarks in 2009 as Director of the program at the Center of Curatorial Studies at Bard College, Maria Lind synthesized this moment: “It is clear that curating is much more than exhibition-making. Exhibitions are just one dish on the curatorial menu. Curating involves commissioning new work and working beyond the walls of an institution. It also includes activities that would traditionally be labeled as programming and education.” ¹³

As curatorial work has become more dialogical, collaborative, and process-oriented, exhibitions have become more porous and ramified, and the exhibition format has turned into a distinctive making-public moment within a more extended project. One such example of this is the notion of “situated curatorial practice,” coined by curator Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez. Drawing from her experience at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, an experimental platform in the low-income suburbs north of Paris, she articulated a particular form of curatorial practice that emerges from locally-rooted community to develop open-ended projects that integrate people’s subjectivity into the equation¹⁴. Building upon Donna Haraway’s feminist philosophy and her notion of “situated knowledge,” Petrešin-Bachelez pioneers this theoretical framework to curatorial practice, one that seems unwilling to commit to a fixed meaning. While Petrešin-Bachelez does not overtly reference the act of listening, her situated curatorial practice distinctly identifies a moment of receptivity. This openness serves as a pivotal juncture that molds the potential form of any given project. In the history of curatorial practice, listening is a singular act: could it become a way of knowing? Can a curator be a listener?

In proposing listening as a curatorial modality for working with others, I set aside the visual predominance that has historically marked the field. The concept of curatorial listening I would like to put forward involves the curator’s capacity to capture the vibrations of her or his time—like an antenna—and thus locates curatorial practice in a potential space of transformation, such as politics or radical education. When Lind builds on Chantal Mouffe’s radical political theory to say that curatorial practice is “an aspect of life that cannot be separated from divergence and dissent, a set of practices that disturbs existing power relations,” she makes explicit a fundamental note of curatorial practice that I would like to

reclaim: that is, its capacity to intervene society “to operate like an active catalyst, generating twists, turns, and tensions—owing much to site-specific and context-sensitive practices and even more to various traditions of institutional critique.”¹⁵ For this, curatorial listening becomes relevant when trying to attune ourselves to those nodal points of conflict, the ones that signal the always unfair distribution of power, while also seeking to enable non-extractive forms of perception—as Dylan Robinson says—where we listen with all our senses—as Pauline Oliveros says—and the sounds keep reverberating, unfixed and invisible, much longer after being listened to.

This text has been made possible thanks to conversations with Candice Hopkins, Nida Ghouse, Andrei Fernández, Mônica Hoff, Mariana Leme, Raquel Storf, and many others, whose voices still reverberate in my thinking.

¹Silät was an exhibition at the Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, from April 1 – May 28, in 2023. The project also comprised a trilingual publication: María Carri (editor), Silät. Atsinhay ta chumhas ta ihi Thañí laka Silät (El Mensaje de las Mujeres Trabajadoras de Thañí) [The Message of Thañí’s Working Women], made in collaboration with Thañí weavers, Andrei Fernández, and wichí translator Demóstenes Toribio García, designed by Stoodio Santiago da Silva and published by the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, New York, 2023. Both the exhibition and the publication were also presented in the Wichí community Chowhay Alto la Sierra Community, an event organized with Andrei Fernández, in Santa Victoria Este, Salta, on June 20th of 2023.

² See Delfina Díaz et. al., “What Thañí means.” In María Carri (editor), Silät. Atsinhay ta chumhas ta ihi Thañí laka Silät (El Mensaje de las Mujeres Trabajadoras de Thañí) [The Message of Thañí’s Working Women], Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, New York, 2023, 125-135. [Hereafter cited as Carri (ed.), 2023.]

³ Curator Ruba Katrib refers to Melissa Cody’s Navajo textiles as “Technologies of Tradition.” in Isabella Rjeille (editor), Melissa Cody:Webbed Skies, São Paulo, MASP, 2023, 26. For a comprehensive work on the social and political practices associated with handmaking see: Julia Bryan-Wilson, Fray: Art and Textile Politics, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2017.

⁴  The chaguar or caraguatá is a plant of the bromelia family native of the semi-arids part of the Gran Chaco, a geographical region in South America that includes part of the eastern plains of Bolivia, the western region of Paraguay and the central part of northern Argentina. Wichí women have historically used its vegetable fibers to prepare the thread they use to weave.

⁵ “La Puntana,” in Carri (ed.), 2023, 121.

⁶ The women of Thañí invited Elerio María, teacher and leader of the Choway Alto de la Sierra community, to speak about the historical claim of Wichí people for the communal recognition of their land. His testomony is part of the publication Silät. See: Carri (ed.), 2023, 151-154.

⁷ Espejo Ayca, Elvira . “SON[I]A #371 ELVIRA ESPEJO AYCA.” Radio Web MACBA. MACBA, April 27, 2023. https://rwm.macba.cat/es/podcasts/sonia-371-elvira-espejo-ayca-2/.

⁸ O’Neill, Paul, The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s), MIT Press, London, 2012. (Hereafter cited as O’Neill, 2012.)

⁹  O’Neill, 2012, 32.

¹⁰ In 2008, in the roundtable discussion You Talkin’ to me? Why art is turning to education,# Paul O’Neill and Mick Wilson gave the label “educational turn” to the arrival of educational forms into artistic and curatorial practice. This discussion later became part of the foundation for their well-known “Curating and the Educational Turn,” published in 2010 (hereafter cited as O’Neill and Wilson, 2010) . Also in 2008, the term appeared in Irit Rogoff’s article “Turning.” Rogoff, Irit “Turning,” In e-flux Journal 0/2008, eflux.com, e-flux. http://www.e-flux.com/journal/turning/

¹¹ María Lind,“The Collaborative Turn” in Johanna Billing, Maria Lind, and Lars Nilsson, eds.,Taking the Matter into Common Hands: On Contemporary Art and Collaborative Practices. London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007 (Hereafter cited as Lind, 2007).

¹² O’Neill and Wilson, 2010, 12.

¹³ “Language and Thinking, Bard College,” Maria Lind Manifiesta Papers, Accretion 2010: Series IIB, Box 12, Folder 482, Center for Curatorial Studies Library and Archives, Bard College (hereafter cited as Maria Lind Manifiesta Papers, Box 12).

¹⁴ Petrešin-Bachelez, Nataša, “Around Curatorial Practice: What do we do when we curate?,” lecture published by A Space, Asia Art Archive, July 2013. Last accessed 11/27/22.

https://vimeo.com/106957309?embedded=true&source=video_title&owner=13109299

¹⁵ María Lind, “On the Curatorial”, in Artforum, Oct 2009, Vol 48, N2, 103.

Bryan-Wilson, Julia, Fray: Art and Textile Politics, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2017.

Carri, María (editor), Silät. Atsinhay ta chumhas ta ihi Thañí laka Silät (El Mensaje de las Mujeres Trabajadoras de Thañí) [The Message of Thañí’s Working Women],New York  Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, 2023.

Espejo Ayca, Elvira . “SON[I]A #371 ELVIRA ESPEJO AYCA.” Radio Web MACBA. MACBA, April 27, 2023. https://rwm.macba.cat/es/podcasts/sonia-371-elvira-espejo-ayca-2/.

Lind, María, “On the Curatorial,” in Artforum, Oct 2009, Vol 48, N2, 103.

Lind, María, “The Collaborative Turn” in Johanna Billing, Maria Lind, and Lars Nilsson, eds., Taking the Matter into Common Hands: On Contemporary Art and Collaborative Practices. London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007.

Maria Lind Manifiesta Papers, Accretion 2010: Series IIB, Box 12, Folder 482, Center for Curatorial Studies Library and Archives, Bard College.

O’Neill, Paul, The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s), MIT Press, London, 2012.

Petrešin-Bachelez, Nataša, “Around Curatorial Practice: What do we do when we curate?,” lecture published by A Space, Asia Art Archive, July 2013.

Rogoff, Irit “Turning,” In e-flux Journal 0/2008, eflux.com, e-flux. http://www.e-flux.com/journal/turning/

Rjeille, Isabella (editor), Melissa Cody: Webbed Skies, São Paulo, MASP, 2023.