Abstract
As socially engaged practices grow within the curatorial field, the use of attention becomes a crucial ethical decision. How and to whom attention is given centers on concerns of visibility, belonging, and the determination of those characteristics within a community’s negotiated communicative space. Exploring Simone Weil’s ethics of attention through and alongside incarceration-focused curatorial projects, this article positions her writing as a potential framework for attentive curation. The resulting pathways found in Weil’s writing offer means of transforming the curatorial into a self-silencing act of witnessing that serves underrecognized voices. This research parses how Weilian attention redefines inquiry as the process of listening to and incorporating others’ perspectives as primary sources of knowledge. Looking towards an ethics of Weilian attention with examples of incarceration-focused curation reveals how upholding the insights and articulations of marginalized individuals promotes social wellbeing and works towards the realization of justice. Thousand Kites, a prison-based project connecting inmates and the public through the radio and internet, provides the central case study for a curatorial project aligning with Weilian attention.
Highlights
The paper turns back to the ethical demand made of the curator and their responsibilities as the silent listener—namely, the need to relinquish the self. As it builds a portrait of attentive curation, this paper looks at how incarceration-focused curation involves complex intersections of suffering, silencing, and calls to witness
As evidenced in Thousand Kites, attention can be generative in curatorial service
Szuberla and Kirby thought through the practical connection they could forge at the earliest stages of Thousand Kites when they incorporated the prisoners’ musical taste into their radio programming
Summary
The compounding political, economic, and social forces in the United States prison-industrial complex propagate a racialized carceral system that, as Angela Davis states in her seminal text. Interrogations of witnessing and exposure, while not new, remain integral to prison-based curatorial practices They continuously navigate social attention and critically examine its effect on narrations of experience as a way to expose the realities of the oppressive and appropriative structures that silence marginalized incarcerated voices. It involves an ability to detach from a curator’s personal interests, the nature and criteria of the spaces in which they work (including goals of profit and marketability), and the expectations of the artists or participants preceding the encounter so that those no longer serve as overarching objectives It reflects on how those culminating factors potentially recreate and enact harmful power dynamics and removes oneself from them so that the curatorial event serves the other’s needs. By organizing available resources and finding the most accessible channels through which to project incarcerated voices, Szuberla and Kirby’s efforts demonstrate how communication and meaning-making can provide an attentive movement for justice
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