Towards a Care-full Constituent Museum
Lecture Presentation by Carolina Calgaro
Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
Curated by Judith Leysner
This presentation focuses on my master thesis “Towards a Care-full Constituent Museum”. This research is a practice of imagining, unlearning and re-learning the institutional sector. It hopes to bring practices of embodied care to (art)institutions, ones that for so long have been complicit in the process of harming and excluding bodies, of stealing and sanitising bodies: of separation.
Written and developed during the pandemic, this research explores how the sense of touch can be deployed in museums’ exhibitions as a transformative tool to bring people together, especially in times of crises and capitalist isolation.
Embodied experiences have the potential to dismantle the colonial authority placed on the gaze as the primary sense to experience art, rebelling against the deadening of corporal experiences.
Cultural institutions are places where collective care can be practiced, where people can envision new ways of living together otherwise. Becoming Care-full Constituent Institutions.
BIO
Carolina Calgaro (she/her) is researching and experimenting with alternative curatorial practices within institutions, which make use of notions of care, decoloniality, and disability to collectively (re)imagine the future of such hostile spaces. She recently graduated from the Dual MA Curating Art and Cultures at the UvA and VU and worked as assistant curator at the Van Abbemuseum. Her work includes the current collection presentation Dwarsverbanden and The Space Between Us. In her free time, she crochets colorful creations as a practical way of dreaming and interrelating ever-changing possible outcomes.
Visual Design by Emirhan Akın