To launch the two week Curatorial Programme Summer School of de Appel, which deals with land, ownership and collectivisation, Aria Spinelli will engage in a discussion with Marco Baravalle on the neoliberal genealogy of contemporary curating and the resulting regimes of mobility. The figure of the independent curator was canonised in the 1990s and is understandable only in the context of accelerating globalisation. This shift in curating brings with it a new vision and spatial conception of the world as an "archipelago of connected islands." This focus aims to reflect on that vision as a contested space between radical critique and neoliberal normalisation, whereby art and curatorial practice can also be interpreted within the framework of emancipatory politics. 

The art mode of production compels curators and art workers to adopt a nomadic lifestyle. The romanticisation of this model and the professional identity that it engenders frequently serve to obscure its most problematic aspects, in particular the role of privilege based on class, gender and race, the ecological impact and the resulting spatial regimes of our cities, where art, linked to private global financial capital, participates in the process of the general disappearance of public space. Is it possible to conceive of a different regime of mobility (radical permanence) that, while not reducing itself to stillness or a “localist” option, creates alternatives to nomadic neoliberalism? How can practices of art and curating use radical imagination and create these alternatives?

Join us for the conversation between Marco Baravalle and Aria Spinelli in de Appel on Tuesday 16 July at 7pm.