Re/visiting

Abstract

In the summer of 2023, I received a surprising proposition from TURBA's managing editor, Dena Davida, inviting me to republish the chapter I contributed to the 2019 Curating Live Arts anthology (Davida et al. 2019) and reframe it in the context of the present issue. I accepted with enthusiasm, enticed by the opportunity to revisit an earlier piece of writing and understanding that such a privilege rarely presents itself to writers, let alone to early career writers! But as I gave the proposition more thought, I realized that it fittingly presented itself ten years after the inception of the curatorial project I discussed in my original text, Collective Walks / Spaces of Contestation. The exercise then provides an incentive to critically reflect on what has happened in the last decade, from both personal and socio-political perspectives. And indeed, there is much to take stock of. Re-reading my article, I am struck by the naiveté that transpires through the ideas I devised at the age of twenty- five, when I was taking my first leaps into the world of professional arts curation. Enamored with theory, unencumbered by convention, and moved by boundless energy, my younger self thought of artistic practice as a prism through which aesthetics can effectively mold the social. I wasn't so naïve as to believe that art can change the world, but I was convinced that the radical power of art lay in its capacity to disrupt, if only momentarily, the seemingly natural order of things. I thought of site-specific performance as a means to breach the surface of banal sociability. I conceived of aesthetic interventions into everyday life as tools for the creation of interstitial pockets of possibility.