Online conversation between Bassam El Baroni, Patrizia Costantin and Parastoo Jafari about the connections between curating and ‘archipelagic thinking’. This is an invited event, organised by recent graduates of MA Curating Art & Public programmes (LSBU & Whitechapel Gallery) in the context of their exhibition “Archipelago: Visions in Orbit“, currently at Whitechapel Gallery (15 August 2024 – 5 January 2025). Further details to be released soon.
The archipelago is diffracted, fractal, necessary in its totality, fragile or contingent in its unity, passing through and remaining, it is a state of the world. — Édouard Glissant
Bassam El Baroni is a curator, writer, and associate professor in curating and mediating art at the School of Arts, Design, and Architecture, Aalto University, Finland. El Baroni’s work explores artistic and curatorial practices in relation to technology, the political economy, financialization, infrastructural futures and histories, and new forms of activism. Recent publications include: Between the Material and the Possible: Infrastructural Re-examination and Speculation in Art (editor, Sternberg, 2022) and Manual for a Future Desert (co-editor with Ida Soulard and Abinadi Meza, Mousse Publishing, 2021). Curatorial projects include: Infrahauntologies, Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art, Oldenburg, Germany; La Box ENSA, Bourges, France (2021 – 2022); What Hope Looks like after Hope (On Constructive Alienation) at HOME WORKS 7, Beirut, 2015; Agitationism, the 36th Eva International–Ireland’s Biennial, Limerick, 2014; Manifesta 8, Murcia, Spain, 2010 – 2011 (co-curator). In 2024, he co-developed and ran the free online school programme, The Creepin’ Illiberalist Curriculum, with artist João Enxuto, as part of Weird Economies (W.E.), an online experimental platform exploring alternative economic imaginaries.
Patrizia Costantin is a lecturer and researcher whose work investigates the curatorial as a site for political worldbuilding. She is particularly interested in exploring the role of curating as a relational practice for negotiating with reality, contemporaneity, and the technological realm. Costantin holds a PhD in Curatorial Practice (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK, 2019). Her thesis, machines will watch us die: a curatorial study on the contemporaneity of digital decay explores digital decay after the material turn in media studies through a postmedium curatorial approach. She is currently Programme Director of the MA in Art and Media, and Lecturer in Curating at the School of Arts, Design and Architecture at Aalto University, Finland.
Parastoo Jafari is an art historian and independent curator with an interest for questions of reality, memory and time in contemporary arts. Her research and curatorial projects mainly address theory and multidisciplinary methods as trajectories to analyze the artistic concepts. She gives special attention to the creative and research-based methods and explores sources of the artistic production under process and after. She received her doctoral degree in Art History from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich with a focus on material and intellectual contexts of artistic modernism and institutionalization of modern art with particular attention to Iran.
Image credit: Jade de Montserrat, Real Still 2017–2021, Watercolour, gouache, pencil crayon, pencil, charcoal, masking fluid, oil pastel on paper, courtesy of the artist and Bosse & Baum