12.02.2018 - 14.05.2018
Crisis and anxiety characterize our relationship with the reality we share: inhabiting it causes a ‘nervous breakdown’ that is the result of a succession of events that alter our daily routine and lead to increased stress. Corruption, global warming, feminicide, drug trafficking, precariousness, insecurity, racism, abuse, exploitation, repression… although we have managed to turn a critical eye upon the realities that surround us, the information that represents them as a whole is confusing, fragmented, and sometimes unintelligible.
Perhaps it is for this reason that the figure of the curator in three decades has evolved from simple organizers to almost gurus, capable of providing narrative, perspective, and order to artistic and visual production—art being now one of the few spaces available for dissemination of anti-hegemonic, anti-patriarchal, decolonial, and anticapitalist thoughts. If we consider the visual and sensory regime that constitutes art as a sibylline refuge, necessary in the face of the systematic violence of the provocative language imposed by the extreme ideologies of our time, the curator can be understood as the oracle who will make art “speak” as a whole, the aporia that would cure us of the schizophrenic malaise of living in this world, allowing a true encounter with diversity to enable other collective ways of approaching our environment.
Alas! In a continent ravaged by colonization, imperialism, machismo, and neoliberalism, the voice of the curator often murmurs on the edge of dominant rhetoric. Reigning from the fragile castles that are their museums and institutions of art, from the precariousness of the independent spaces and behind the ridiculous walls, nourished by knowledge such as aesthetics, humanities, or philosophy, the curators are stateless sovereigns, prophets without gods who we follow with a faith deceived by few successful profiles shining from Paris or New York, but whose real achievements consist in the humble work realised day after day in the less shiny commons of our Global South.
In this issue of Terremoto, we will critically review in the most pragmatic and lucid way possible, what we call the ‘curatorial’ in various parts of the American continent and how it articulates the cultural network and approaches reality to order it. We will examine the models of expression and organization that we have adopted to reevaluate the structures we reproduce and understand the impact, limits, and possibilities of our activities, possibly beyond the limited world of art.
11
2018
Ad Minoliti, "Queer Deco series" 2018. Print on canvas, 140 x 100 cm. Image courtesy of Agustina Ferreyra Galeria
11 2018
12.02.2018
Issue 11: Curators on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
Víctor Palacios Armendáriz, Willy Kautz, Daniel Garza Usabiaga, Lorena Peña Brito
Lorena Peña Brito talks with Daniel Garza Usabiaga, Willy Kautz, and Víctor Palacios about the particularities of curatorial practice in Mexico and Latin America.
11 2018
19.02.2018
Issue 11: Curators on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
Ana Paula Lopes
Based on the curatorial practice of Frederico Morais and Walter Zanini, Ana Paula Lopes reflects on curation as an event in response to the times of dictatorship in the ’60s and ’70s in Latin America.
11 2018
26.02.2018
Issue 11: Curators on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
Carolina Ponce de León, Natalia Valencia
In an intergenerational dialogue, curators Natalia Valencia and Carolina Ponce de León discuss about the transformation of the artistic field in Colombia and Latin America.
11 2018
05.03.2018
Issue 11: Curators on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
Diego del Valle Ríos
Diego del Valle Ríos, editor of Terremoto, reflects on the curation of Carlos Ashida in the exhibition ‘Las buenas intenciones’ (The Good Intentions) as an example of the possibility of slowing the pace of contemporary society.
11 2018
12.03.2018
Issue 11: Curators on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
Carla Stellweg, Dorothée Dupuis
For 50 years, in Mexico and then New York City where she moved in the eighties, Latin Americanist curator, former museum and non-profit director, editor and writer Carla Stellweg has advocated for a hemispheric artistic dialogue which, according to her, was never a given in the Americas. Terremoto’s director Dorothée Dupuis went to meet her at her loft in New York City’s Lower East Side.
11 2018
02.04.2018
Issue 11: Curators on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
Maya Juracán
Maya Juracán writes about the curatorial methodology that will define the 21st edition of the Paiz Biennial in Guatemala.
11 2018
02.04.2018
Issue 11: Curators on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
Stephanie Elyse Sherman
Five years after its foundation, James McAnally and Stephanie Sherman reflect on Common Field, a US American network of artist-run spaces.
11 2018
09.04.2018
Issue 11: Curators on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
Nicole Smythe-Johnson
La curadora Nicole Smythe-Johnson reflexiona sobre el Caribe y Puerto Rico a partir de la respuesta del espacio artístico Beta-Local ante la catástrofe ocasionada por los huracanes Irma y María.
11 2018
23.04.2018
Issue 11: Curators on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
Adriano Pedrosa, Juliana Dos Santos
Artist and researcher Juliana Dos Santos reviews the visibility of Afro-descendant art in Brazil and then talks with Adriano Pedrosa, curator-in-chief of the São Paulo Museum of Art, about the integration of the Afro-Atlantic diaspora into the program of the most important museum in the country.
11 2018
23.04.2018
Issue 11: Curators on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
Nicolás Cuello
Nicolás Cuello reviews curatorial projects in Argentina that have made visible resistance and struggle against the heteropatriarchy since the nineties.
11 2018
30.04.2018
Issue 11: Curators on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
Patricia Restrepo
We invited 10 curators to select an exhibition that they consider important in the history of contemporary art in “Latin America”.
11 2018
07.05.2018
Issue 11: Curators on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
Patricia Restrepo
We invited 10 curators to select an exhibition that they consider important in the history of contemporary art in “Latin America”.