In May, Chloe Carroll spoke to emerging curators Linnea Bake in Germany and Sitara Chowfla in India about their experiences of working through the first months of the pandemic. Almost four months later she talks to Ameli Klein in Graz, Austria, about the changing situation overseas.
As visitors take their first steps back into arts spaces, curators are still grappling with what it means to invite viewers over the threshold. Institutions must rethink what success looks like beyond maximum capacity, and the most vulnerable sector workers across the UK face mass redundancy, despite (largely overdue) government rescue packages for the arts. Over the last weeks, London’s Tate galleries have been surrounded by protesters calling for the protection of art and culture jobs. Amidst such strikes and calls for change, the art world’s ‘return to normal’ feels fraught with new anxieties, old tensions having risen to the surface. It’s clear that the show must go on, but how?
CC: You’re in the unusual position of having started work at an institution during the COVID crisis. The events of 2020 have highlighted the need for urgent and sincere shifts in institutional practice, particularly in terms of responsibility for the wellbeing of their audiences. How is the work of Kuenstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst und Medien evolving and responding to the conditions of the pandemic?
Exhibition View, Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst & Medien, Graz, 2019, Photo: Markus Krottendorfer
AK: Since I started this new position when the crisis had somehow already become the new normal, I can only share the changes that were made after the reopening of the house. The Kuenstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst and Medien’s sense of care towards the art world was evident in that they were willing to fulfil a position during the height of a pandemic. It is also remarkable that they made an effort to keep all of their staff throughout this moment of uncertainty.
It was undoubtedly an unusual interview experience to sit two meters across from each other and only see each other’s eyes over the top of a mask. But this also set the tone for me. It gave me a clear sense of the responsibility that the Kuenstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst and Medien has during this critical moment towards both the public as well as the art community.
Shortly after I joined the team, we opened two exhibitions: Image Wars—the Power of Images curated by Jana Franze and, Gerlind Zeilner: Cowgirls curated by Sandro Droschl. With a range of exhibitions and projects cancelled, many artists are experiencing health and financial insecurity, especially as it continues to be uncertain which projects will actually move forward. That is why at the house we wanted to ensure a sense of continuity in the programme, and decided to open the exhibitions while implementing extreme security measures. All visitors were required to wear masks, maintain social distancing, and we of course limited the number of visitors through entrance and exit controls so as to comply with the guidelines set by the national health department. Naturally, we also cancelled all planned speeches and opening events.
As it still remains unclear about how long the pandemic will last, I believe that we have to find new compromises and strategies that prioritize the safety and health of all participants, while ensuring the survival of our cultural scene. The need to re-think cultural production under the current circumstances could be a crucial opportunity to reflect, slow down, and reconsider artistic practice and its institutionality, precisely to account for a more just, equal, and caring art world. Marco Baravalle describes this very issue in On the Biennale’s Ruins? Inhabiting the Void, Covering the Distance: ‘(…) facing Covid19 pandemic could be the chance for a radical rethinking of the social role of the arts and art institutions instead of the mere desperate attempt to hold on.’
CC: Alongside and prior to your position at Kuenstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst und Medien, you’ve worked as a freelance curator and coordinator for many years. Could you talk a little about how your situation changed in the context of the pandemic? Long-term, what does this mean for the survival of freelance art workers?
AK: In all honesty, the situation not only changed my perception but burst the illusion of a balanced way to exist within the art world as a freelancer, without independent wealth. Conversations about money are an ongoing taboo within the art world. However, although the crisis did not create the problem, it did highlight its urgency. It enforced my firm belief that we need to openly talk about the economic reality of cultural institutions as well as that which pertains to freelancers and artists.
The logistical requirements for working as a freelancer are extreme. It involves, for example, extensive traveling which makes health insurance, visa or legal work permits, and international tax forms, a constant struggle to obtain and uphold. I have had extensive conversations with colleagues and friends surrounding these issues, yet just acknowledging the need for more support and transparency often feels like a provocation.
The seriousness of the situation began to sink in for me when I was going through customs in New York this past February. I was asked into a separate questioning room after my recent stay in Shanghai had been flagged. I’m usually a little on edge around airports, as I have faced barriers with US immigration before. Ironically, the fact that they only questioned me about my health rather than my paperwork somehow highlighted the seriousness of the situation.
I was in the city to meet with artist Adam Cvijanovic, finalizing arrangements for his residency at Castello di Potentino, and to select and pick up pieces of Lily Moebes stunning textile works from her “Gatekeeper” series for a planned exhibition in Venice. For obvious reasons, neither project was realized, as Venice and most of northern Italy had quickly gone into a state of complete lockdown.
The escalation of contagion within Italy is still beyond my comprehension; however, the social responsibility and sense of community with which Italy responded to the crisis is truly exemplary. It helped many other countries develop coping mechanisms and strategies to implement before reaching a similar situation.
Within my living reality, this crisis led me to see many things more clearly: the fragility of the art system within Venice that is so strongly reliant on seasonal workers; the dependence of the city on tourism; and the fact that many industries are in decline, all added to an already extremely precarious situation.
The mayor of Venice, Luigi Brugnaro, revealed his post-emergency strategy, ‘as before, more than before,’ which Baravalle translates to mean ‘more tourism, more hotels, more cruise ships, more cuts to public services, more events to make up for the time lost.’ Hopefully, my work allows me to explore the opposite: smaller projects, long term development, process-oriented work that shows responsibility and accountability towards every partner involved.
CC: On that topic, I’d be interested to hear about your recently launched platform Collective Rewilding, which positions itself as ‘cur(at)ing for a broken world.’ What were the impulses behind it, and what does it hope to achieve? How do you understand collectivity in the face of social rupture and ongoing political unrest? How do narratives of curing/healing relate meaningfully to processes of decolonization?
AK: The forming of the collective was a somewhat natural process, beginning when Sara Garzon and I met at Cornell University two years ago. Our discussions led to the research and exhibition project The Cartographic Impulse, originally intended to take place during this year’s Architecture Biennale and in partnership with Biennale Urbana.
The postponement of the edition left many local art workers in an urgent situation, which led us to further think of this paradox of care that surrounds the art world. We wanted to get into this conversation about how to institute a culture of care. Or rather, how to cur(at)e for a broken world, which, while urgent, still remains an open question.
Sabina Oroshi joined the collective later. We were intrigued by Sabina’s interest in reshaping and enriching curatorial practices, and recognised a shared interest that came from realising how fragile the art world is in the face of ongoing challenges such as climate change, forced migrations, the rise of hate, and most recently the pandemic. We were all in our independent theoretical work trying to find alternative approaches to a world of multiplying crises, and that ultimately brought us together.
In Collective Rewilding, we think that to institute a culture of care requires addressing these multi-systemic crises with an awareness of the different ways in which we all are experiencing them, and to insist on the urgent need to incorporate intersectional modes of solidarity. That is also why we believe that to demand environmental justice is also to demand social justice across the board – not just in terms of ecology but also race, gender and sexuality.
It is in the very nature of international biennials, fairs, and residencies to operate on a temporary schedule and under ever-changing leadership. Travel becomes a necessity to participate or visit, often preventing the system from establishing long-term mechanisms of care. With a new artistic director in place at every edition, for example, the Venice Biennale leaves behind the guards or install-workers who are usually local residents in critical situations. Without a year-round contract, most workers re-apply to jobs they have done for decades once a year, making it impossible to form unions and demand social security, health care, or a raise. However, I do not mean to point the finger at this particular biennial because its structure is incredibly complex, with every participating country under a different system and national organization. The scene is exceptionally heterogeneous, making a solution all the more complex.
We landed on the term ‘rewilding,’ as we approached an institutional critique with an environmental methodology. Although the term is still mostly exclusively used in ecological contexts, it has multiple connotations that allude to the long-term aim of restoring and maintaining wilderness while reducing the past, present, or future impact of humans on nature. The process implies returning ‘non-wild’ cultivated areas to a ‘wild’ natural state (in a sense reversing the Anthropocene). However, while we are conscious of the problematics surrounding a romanticized ideology of the ‘wild’ as it is often fetishized from a historical, euro-centric perspective, we are mostly interested in the possibilities of the term, as it signals human responsibility toward other human or non-human species to restore self-regulating and autonomous communities. In that sense, it is unimaginable to think about rewilding without considering the social, cultural, psychological, economic, and political dimensions of its process.
Repositioning humans as a part of nature and the wild – instead of a conqueror that dominates its surroundings – allows us to question art institutional practices. It helps deconstruct the very foundation of ‘culture’ as a superior human-made model, and to acknowledge the importance of holistic natural systems as an alternative form of structuring the institution.
Rewilding for us means understanding our responsibilities; our relationship with nature and other peoples as well as gaining insights into systems that can inform adaptive management and sustainability for artistic projects.
CC: Considering collectivity, what limitations and possibilities do you think the pandemic poses for curatorial work across borders; for finding new peers and learning from each other? We wouldn’t have met if it weren’t for a residency in Shanghai, but these travel-dependent modes of connection are arguably no longer sustainable.
AK: As I’m questioning the extreme frequency of travel that participating in the art world seemingly requires, I’m painfully aware of my complicity. I frequently fly, I often ship and receive artworks across the globe. In fact, when I saw the multitude of environmentalist posts at the beginning of the lockdown, celebrating the rejuvenation of nature, I immediately remembered the article John Harris wrote two years ago for the Guardian, titled ‘Our Phones and Gadgets are now endangering the planet’, that stated how ‘the energy used in our digital consumption is set to have a bigger impact on global warming than the entire aviation industry.’ I can only begin to imagine the impact that the past months of home office, virtual showrooms, and online exhibitions have had. Not that I want to excuse travel, but I do think we should also be keenly aware of the flaws in the narrative of a happy, guilt-free online art world that we are often presented with.
In Collective Rewilding we use the calculator from Energy Agency NRW to calculate, reduce and offset the climate-damaging emissions in our project planning process. We find this an important tool in order to identify the necessary requirements of sustainability and event planning.
In my daily reality, all of this just means that I’m acknowledging the problematics surrounding technology and different modes of transportation. In our case, working collectively has allowed us to substantially reduce travel time, as Sara is located in Mexico City, Sabina in Hamburg, and I’m in Graz. Because of mutual trust, great communication and understanding of the collective goal, there is no need for each of us to take flight for studio visits or meetings with institutions. Sara being located in Mexico City can reach artists and institutions in her surrounding, the same goes for me working between Graz and Venice, while Sabina is able to easily stay connected with the northern European partners. Between the three of us, the need to travel was almost eliminated, allowing us to work through the lockdown.
The reality, however, is that we only met because we lived abroad, traveled, and participated in international, temporary programs. We benefited from the very structure we now question. We are very aware of the multiple crises that we face and continuously reflect on the challenges of globalization. That is why we are trying to bridge these complexities with a call for new world-making paradigms.
World-making as a creative inquiry, however, prompts two different, albeit related, questions: which and whose world are we to imagine? These questions invite an assortment of answers so that we can foster collective imaginaries towards a pluriverse. That is, to work towards the speculation and construction of multiple worlds ‘stitched together’ by solidarity and as ever-shifting assemblages of ‘patched together’ intersubjectivities equally capable of relating to each other and the environment.
Since different forms of worlding demands that we position ourselves vis-à-vis each other and other-than-human beings, we want both our research-based projects to invite speculations on ways of world-making that, to cite Anna Tsing, can help us ‘construct assemblages by looking around, rather than ahead.’ Tsing’s use of the concept of assemblage, moreover, questions the hegemonic idea of progress as this is underscored by modernity and its relationship with environmental destruction and control, which is why it is so pertinent.
At Collective Rewilding, ultimately, we hope to explore how to work collaboratively in constructing views and practices towards a collage of ‘entangled ways of life.’
Based between Venice and Graz, Ameli is working as a writer, artist liaison and curator. She is currently working as the Curatorial Assistant at the Kuenstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst und Medien Graz besides her involvement with Collective Rewilding.
She previously held positions with Il Giardino di Daniel Spoerri, the Hood Museum of Art, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. Ameli has been invited as a Curator in Residence at the SCL, Shanghai Biennale, V-A-C Curatorial Lab Venice, and artpace San Antonio, Texas. She has worked at the Biennale di Venezia 2016/17/18, as a Project Assistant, Catalog Researcher and Pavilion Manager.
Chloe Carroll is a writer and curator based in London, where she currently works as the Stanley Picker Trainee at Matt’s Gallery. Her writing has appeared in ArtReview and art-agenda.
