On Curatorial Hypothesis

Andrea Wiarda in conversation with Annie Fletcher October 2005.

Annie Fletcher is a so-called ‘independent curator’ working in the field of contemporary art and culture; she’s is an organiser, instigator, collaborator, educator, net worker, sharer, things which perhaps aren’t always directly associated with the creative (and competitive) profession of curating. That, besides the out-of-the-ordinary projects that she has (co-)realised up to date, is all the more reason to go and ask her about her motivations, convictions and drives.

AW: I’ve been reading through the many texts and e-mails related to the different projects you have realised independently in the last 5 years or so. Most of those projects involve collaboration and collective efforts of learning and thinking through the changes, or the potential that art might have for change. What place do these collaborations have in your profession as a curator?

AF: Collaborations are the things that have taught me the most about curating and what it might involve. The first projects that I did were collaborations in Belfast with artists, like Phil Collins, Eoghan Mc Tigue and Susan Phillipz, and we co-curated these projects together. It became clear to me then that there wasn’t really a ‘scene’ in Ireland, and certainly in Belfast, in terms of institutions or even the profession of curating. So in effect the artists were doing it themselves, and I learned so much from exactly that. Curating is for me a dynamic activity; it is something that gets worked out in dialogue.
The idea of the curator being ‘the author’ of an exhibition or a project is the kind of certitude that has always worried me. I’ve never felt comfortable with that because there is so much to learn from working with others. Partly that is a critique of the power play and that absolute assurance associated with the role of the curator. I prefer to think by a collaborative sharing of the authorship power – on a political level – and it’s way more exciting! It wouldn’t be fair however to say that collaborations are easy, some of them in fact have been very tough, but I’m finding that the rhythm of it allows you to go deeper and to be much more precise because you share skills and knowledge.
Another thing that I find truly amazing– thinking about the problematic of what people assume is curatorial work – there is so much more activity involved in running an art space, or developing a large project than just curating. That’s hidden and not talked about at all! Things like lobbying, budgets, pr, fundraising, hugely responsible stuff, that often takes away from the time that you have to focus on the very precision of thinking through a project with the artists and what they’re doing. And when you work collaboratively I guess you can share that load or be more direct about who carries what load in the whole process. So I guess there are many reasons why I really enjoy and prefer working in that way.

AW: You’d suggest that institutions should be run by teams rather than by single directors?

AF: Not necessarily, but I think that if one tries to pursue all aspects of the job, one would lose out on one aspect in favour of another – some people really like juggling all of that but I don’t see why we should have to and I instead prefer to be as precise as possible.
A good example for me right now is a project that I’m working on with Frederique Bergholtz and Tanja Elstgeest, (If I can’t dance I don’t want to be part of your revolution) we came together last year to share ideas because we were all invited to curate a theatre festival or theatre platform type context and it became so clear so quickly that we should actually collaborate. It gave us possibilities to not only think around our own ‘site’of curation – in terms of the local context – and the option to collaborate. It stretched both time – the possibility of developing an ‘expanded’ kind of content – and space. This of course, most definitely, relies on being extremely generous, open and creatively supportive towards each other, because when people aren’t like that things can turn sour very quickly; and that, for sure, has happened to me too.

AW: Could you elaborate on this particular collaboration; how do you work together, who adds what to the table and how has that informed the project? You for example have managed quite ambitious international projects.

AF: We learned an incredible amount from each other and in a way we make each other way more ambitious for what we can develop together. I’m the one who’s always worked free lance whereas both of them curated in very heavily programmed, extraordinarily busy institutional situations, and they’ve taught me so much more about thinking ‘long term’. Mutual support is what collaboration really gives. And, in the Visual Arts one needs friends and allies, as anywhere else.
I have decided to be freelance; it’s a conscious choice right now because I’m most inspired by thinking in a context specific way: I really like tothink about  what is appropriate to say at a certain time in a certain place? I think personally I can get very dragged down by the rudiments of the institution. That is not to say that there aren’t any interesting places; people like Maria Lind  Charles Esche and Vassif Kortun  and many others manage to insist on revamping the institutional space into something quite dynamic and I’m full of admiration for that.. For me, independent curating allows that constant change of pace, change of audience and change of situation – even if you loose out on taking up a long term relationship with a more specific audience or relationship with the place you are in.

AW: Your projects differ quite radically: some of your projects took the format of more traditional exhibitions whereas others have much more to do with ‘thinking about art’ – you once called art ‘a machine for thinking’ and this idea, it seems to me, comes back in many of your initiatives. These last ones are incredibly interesting, and important in terms of pushing the debate on contemporary art, yet also rather difficult to understand or to grasp if one wasn’t there. And the very structure of these also renders it less clear, who is the audience and who is ‘maker’, as many people are actually both. How do you consider the inherent differences in these projects as they are obviously both part of your professional activity?

AF: I’m beginning to think about it more and more, but I’m a little worried that the discourse around art could be in danger of erasing artistic practice. I would hate for that to happen because I feel that the discussion and enabling structures around visual art are really important – that is absolutely a huge part of the motivation of my work, based also on that old situation in Ireland where there simply weren’t many institutional structures. There were so many frustrated artists. So when people talk about the saturation of the art scene, that there would be too many curators or administrators, I’d say: “no let’s have more!” Or: “let’s have artists as curators”.  Both CORKCAUCUS (Cork 2005) and the Paraeducation Department (Witte de With 2003/04) were very much thinking about, exactly these possibilities; to share or develop knowledge in a way that didn’t actually demand a spectacle or an exhibition They were completely focused on knowledge production within art, and it was about trying to think through enabling structures for artists, curators, and thinkers and anybody else who might like to be involved.

AW: What kind of structures do you mean exactly? Thought structures? Communication structures?
AF: Yes those and mutual exploration. For example with the Paraeducation Department (a collaboration with Sarah Pierce) we enacted a reading group ourselves. Our first meetings were really interesting because some people were so much more academically equipped than others in the group who became important for formulating incredibly sophisticated ideas that were mediated through art and not through theoretical language. Sometimes we’d be grappling over a sentence from Zizek and an artistic example would be far more eloquent at that moment than something that we might say otherwise.

Developing the Paraeducation Department was also a quite distinct reaction to the criticism that had happened to Catherine David in Witte de With who was criticised by Raad voor Cultuur that curatorial project was elite and non-spectacular. And we responded to her question “what’s wrong with a minimal articulation when it’s needed?” Sometimes things are delicate and fragile and they need to be articulated minimally in a small and gentle way. This could also be the responsibility of the art centre or institution. And that’s also why we set up the Paraeducation Department, because we were trying to think about the idea what education could be if not, as is normally the case, trying to get a mass demographic [audience] in. We focused on thinking about education in terms of exchange, of meetings or people trying to read a book together, like a gentle moment that can sustain larger activity. And why shouldn’t the art centre facilitate that too?

AW: I was just about to mention that most of your projects have some kind of aftermath, is it part of the deal?

Both on a curatorial and a political level I got annoyed with the idea that curators are holders of knowledge and information exclusively. I think it is very important to find ways to learn together or even be together and to dare to say ‘I’m trying to figure it out’. Finding out how art is a machine for thinking.
I do think that art practice itself is also a site of research which is beyond language and it should be given more space – in tandem with other developments. I just went to the Istanbul Biennial and I think the organisers [Charles Essche and Vasif Kortun] managed to achieve both these focuses perfectly. They focused on artistic practice and production ànd created very dynamic moments of exchange. I think that if that kind of balance can be maintained [developed?] that would be very important. I’m focused on artistic practice as defining the site of research because it’s part of this ‘If I can’t dance…’-project. We have invited artists to work three times with us over the whole year and we tried to ask incredibly simple questions on a curatorial level. We didn’t really dictate models, because we are going along on the journey with them, and they are going to define the site of research for us and not the other way around. This has kind of flipped things for me and I’m really enjoying that. We chose quite experienced artists like Mattie Braun, Gerard Byrne or Johanna Billing who have kind of established practices and have clearly defined their site of inquiry already. And we trust that we’ll come to the end of the year and we’ll all know a hell of a lot more than when we started.

This ongoing exchange takes place in your curatorial life; you build up solidarities and networks with people. I’m convinced that it’s very important to realise that the network is much broader than where you happen to be located. Cork Caucus was about that idea of establishing solidarity, a network of people that would sustain you artistically. This is where knowledge gets developed and why it is inevitably ongoing. The mechanism of an exhibition is simply not enough to describe what goes on in art, or what goes on at the practice level.  What we used to articulate in terms of particular artists oeuvres, or curatorial oeuvres I suppose, should be democratised. That is what Paraeducation was about. I hope that everybody grasps the method – it’s not an artwork, but just a method of working.

AW: When you speak about education do you refer to the way in which the art institution communicates with the audience?

AF: We tried to play with the notion of education: I was invited to organise a part of TRACER (www.tracerrotterdam.org) to mirror the curatorial activity of the space. I collaborated with the artist Sarah Pierce and we thought what if we mirrored another activity of the space? We thought about what education might be and what it means.. Many people feel uncomfortable with the word education. But if you look at a lot of the rhetoric behind our professional practice (curating), it does claim this position of informing, thinking through, trying to develop ideas, which I think, on a broader scale one could call educational. And it is interesting to me, to reclaim the term on that level. Especially now that Manifesta is developing the idea of the school again in Nicosia, there are so many projects that are starting to think in similar ways. There must be something in the air. We’re all looking for ways of mutually supporting the development of ideas.

AW: You are currently, temporarily, running the Curatorial Training Programme at the Appel. Do these ideas inform at all the way that you deal with that position?

AF: One of the things I’m really trying to focus on is writing. Because there’s a huge need for better critical writing and thinking about visual arts – and there’s been such an emergence of micro-publishing as a kind of curatorial practice. So I’ve been trying to urge the participants on the CTP to think with a pen in their hand. It comes down to another kind of relationship with art, it’s much slower, and it’s more detailed, more open: it’s a kind of voicing of the experience.
All I can say is that I love the job and that it is bringing many of my interests together. Especially the questioning of the term [job] curating itself. I’m very interested in ‘the specific’, in focusing on existing, and often amazing, bodies of knowledge. For example this year we’re collaborating intensively on a seminar project with the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, where Anke Bangma has developed a fantastic programme of visiting thinkers, artists and writers. And we’re also going to work a much more refined debate about the idea of what curatorial knowledge might be. So I’d like to get into the specifics of that. I’m very interested for them to become aware of the debate around the curatorial practice as a mode of knowledge production in itself.

AW: these are ideas that appeal to me also in relation to ‘curating’ the various issues of A Prior Magazine. However, you are analysing this curatorial position but also a theoretical position, ideas, concepts of how we can all work together. This however also seems to me to centralise that curatorial position even more.

AF: That’s a valid point and I recently spoke to Paul O’Neill, a very thorough thinker, artist and writer.  He actually suggests that the constant analysis and critique of curatorial practice by curators, is in fact a dynamic that we’ve set up in order to sustain ourselves. He also charges us of only looking at the models from the last 20 years; as if we’re all fearful of going back further. Everybody just wants to be constantly and dynamically reinventing the wheel. … So, I’m guilty as charged. But I’m actually quite happy to work in a kind of museological method. I do appreciate that there are orthodox historical and canonical ideas which are perfectly valid as well. And I’m not that precious about insisting that things should have to be different. I find it more interesting to think that there is a bunch of methods out there. It then comes down to thinking about what one needs to use, what scenario one needs to set up to be appropriate for a particular practice, or a group of practices. So, on that level I would say that I’m not someone who would offer an authorial point of view or dictate a theme – I’m probably working in more organic ways. 

AW: Do you consider that to be a response to the way in which art practice has developed over the course of the last century (arbitrarily) with slight changes of direction in the 60s and the 90s? There has been an alternative art history developing. Is your interest in rethinking curatorial positioning a response to that?

AF: yes, I guess it just purely comes from reaction. At Goldsmith’s where I did an MA in critical theory I was told that questioning is what criticality is all about. Questioning is completely our duty as Spivak would say: That’s what we should be doing. But I would also say that I probably react also on a much more personal level like the notion of these kind of curatorial structures and setting them up and trying to create very local dialogue or thinking about the local follows directly from being in Ireland, in Dublin and seeing what went on there and how much more dynamic it was for me in Belfast. And now I’ve been involved in helping to set up the MA in critical theory in Dublin. These are things that I totally believe in! Actually, fundamentally education and those possibilities for young people, young artists and thinkers, are so important within any locale; everybody has the possibility, and everybody has the intellectual or artistic possibility, it is just such a shame these things are wasted because the structures aren’t there to encourage it. I am, I hope in a good way, quite reactionary. I’m always thinking first about why (have I been invited), where (to) and what (can I say) right here, right now.

AW: could you briefly elaborate on the project Cork for Caucus? How do you feel that this has been a successful project? I’m interested to hear about the local mechanisms but also about how your system has been successful.

AF: I was invited with Charles Esche and Art /Not Art to develop a project in Cork, European Capital of Culture in 2004 by the ‘National Sculpture Factory’ whose director is very innovative. What we did was very much generated by Charles, who had developed two workshops beforehand, one in Indonesia and the other in Korea. These were about the ideas of how to communicate so that experience from all over the world comes together, artistic experience as well as real experience without always being sanctified or justified by the West. And he found that the structure of the workshop was useful but it was also often too short. And so the possibility with Caucus was that we could do something that would be a lot longer. I had just finished the Paraeducation project and was thinking about these ideas myself.
Another direct critique was of the whole idea of the Capital of Culture. Because these cities of culture are often very spectacular: all about prestige and fireworks. But “what is it?” We wanted to ask what might be the cultural intelligence of a city, how to sustain it, stimulate it, and gain from it; and then to project this locale, within a worldwide system of ideas. To think about Cork and the Planet: Cork and Korea; Cork and Ankara; Cork and Belfast, …. It was about artists who came from everywhere, whether that be the rest of Ireland or the rest of the world. Our aim was that it would be thinking about “who are we as artists? Do we have the possibility of being politically effective? Is our project something that might help imagine the world differently?
The point of departure for staging this in Ireland was that Joseph Beuys had this idea to develop the Free University in Ireland, for completely different reasons than we might think about Ireland now, because it was underdeveloped, completely unsoiled no industrial  and for him there were lots of pagan, mystical resonances. And he actually did an application with Caroline Tisdall to the EU at the time to try and develop it. These seemed like interesting aspects to connect with again, or to revisit. We wanted to set up a Free University-like structure again.

We had three weeks of discussions and talks as well as artistic production. And it was very successful in staying together with all these interesting minds, artists, thinkers, writers, for long enough so that the sustained conversation became incredibly interesting and focussed. There were many different people coming in so there was input from everywhere, and we were able to collectively bring along the idea. We had hired a small school building and tried to make it really open for and to everybody, trying to create a very gentle space.

AW: Do you feel that your practice, which develops itself among similar recent activities so is perhaps part of a wider development, has to do with the fact that institutions and art centres, more particularly museum, have difficulty in (re)presenting everything that contemporary artists are doing – I’m consciously not saying making or art works, because so many artists don’t make objects as works, but think or are thinkers, or activists, or social actors….

AF: Ultimately when you’re trying to develop projects or work with practices that aren’t highly visible that can be very tough to communicate. So than it becomes about how you communicate that and about what you’re there for. It is more and more difficult to justify yourself within local government and larger government scenarios and within the age we live in because it is so consumer oriented and people aren’t satisfied. It is up to us to fight for institutions to be something else. Ultimately I think that artists will always surprise you; as soon as you define a structure that facilitates various kinds of invisible practices, perhaps there’s going to be a whole new generation of people working in an incredibly visual or object-based way. The cliché today, you have to remain flexible, but ultimately what it comes down to is: why you’re doing what you’re doing. It isn’t easy, those fights are getting harder and harder and that’s why the concept of solidarity is also very important.