“Slow Spicy Curatorial Practices” assembled a team from Zurich and Hong Kong to formulate, share questions, urgencies and working curatorial practices, in the hopes to cooperate with other existing or up coming formats and spaces. Referencing the etymological sense of “curate” (lat. curare – to take care of), the team attempts to extend the action of ‘taking care’ to that of hospitality, of sharing, and of care to enable a space of collaboration.
The team compares the act of making art with making food – both of which requires the combination and processing of ingredients, handcraft and traditions to experiment and create something new; both fo which an existing culture is required to built upon.
To find mutual culture, care for it and share & grow it, we will break down big topics into simple ingredients and work with them, like in sourdough (flour and water). In the past, sharing your sourdough literally means “sharing a culture”, from person to person, node to network; from individual to collaborative connectivities. By taking the metaphor of a sourdough, the team takes a new light in curating – one that lets ideas grow collectively, across disciplines and distances. Collaboration itself is based on shared interests. Now we ask how to produce such interests and what kind of topics can we find to work with?
Based on the fermentation of sourdough, the group shared and discovered mutual cultural practices and values, invited participants, links and actions to care and curate the future (in art projects or elsewhere). Curating then becomes a shape if we are producing forms of exhibitions – we have to agree on formats such as displays, performances, excursions. We are very much at the beginning of what in the end could be a play, a form of collaboration and exchange rising topics we hadn’t been talking or thinking before. Curating is about doing and reflecting what has to be done.
6.-11. June, 2015 Hong Kong, Connecting Spaces
For the duration of 5 days, we initiate different collaborative settings. Different formats of caring and sharing will be tired out which involved in questions of in- tangible value, mobility and caring. By focusing on two of the oldest economical settlements in Hong Kong – North Point and Sam Shui Po. The connectivities of neighborhoods (街坊) in these two old harbors would be researched. We cordially invite you to this process with us, to investigate co-curating in practice. Please join us on the 10th of June, 2015 at ConnectingSpace Hong Kong G/f, 18 – 20 Fort Street, Wah Kin Mansion, North Point, Hong Kong.
February, 2016 Zurich
We would also like to call your attention to the Winter Kitchen on Curatorial Practice in Zurich in February 2016, which would be the continuation of research based collaboration to June 2015.
Contact us: Katja Gläss / Pei-Wen Liu
Team
- Wiktoria Furrer (research associate, Institute for Critical Theory, ZHdK and curator of workshops and collaborative processes)
- Chow Yik 周翌 (Freelance research associate, artist and independent curator)
- Katja Gläss (artistic and research associate, Master of Arts in Transdisciplinarity, Department of Cultural Analysis and freelance photographer)
- Hannah Horst (graphic designer and research associate, Master of Arts in Art Education, programme Curating & Museum Education, Department of Cultural Analysis, ZHdK)
- Kaspar König (artist, musician, composer and research associate Transdisciplinarity as a research focus, Department of Cultural Analysis, ZHdK)
- Pei-Wen Liu 劉佩雯 (Sound Artist, independent researcher and cultural facilitator)
- Lucie Tuma (research associate Dramaturgy, Bachelor of Arts in Theater, Department of Performing Arts and Film, ZHdK)
- Stefan Wagner (curator and freelance research associate IFCAR, ZHdK; Networked in Zürich)
- Angela Wittwer (research associate Z+ Platform for Transdisciplinarity, ZHdK)
- Yip Kai Chun 葉啟俊 (Hong Kong based Artist and Curator)