My dear friend,
[...]
I realize this letter may seem endless, and it might take you time to read through
it all. Please feel free to stop, whenever you have had enough. We are facing a
period of extreme instability. We are told that we live in a state of permanent
crisis, a state of emergency and thus of exception. Since the early 1990s, the
Internet has widened our access to information and fostered the exchange of
opinions and the digital elaboration of forms of collective and shared knowledge,
building interconnected networks and archives, but its bits, blogs and summaries
have also introduced an experience of knowledge that is increasingly indirect and
a partial collapse of intellectual endeavor, as well as a crisis in ethics and
behavior, generosity and integrity.
[...]
The question today is how not to be contemporary, how not to make a
festival, how not to communicate, how not to produce any knowledge,
and yet somehow manage to articulate intelligence and love. For a curator
today, to do a project means to learn from artists and others how to navigate
these misunderstandings, how to create an exhibition with them as a decoy,
how to open up spaces of revolt with them, how to deny, withdraw or defer,
while celebrating with them.
excerpt: Letter to a Friend: 100 Thoughts/ 100 Notes, No. 3, dOCUMENTA(13),
By Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. Full text here.
play the version and reel it back:
