Photos by Lù Chén
Here, Not. Dialogues on art and the making of here is an edited collection of conversations, photographic work, and text, that investigate how cultural and artistic practices deal with belonging, identity and access in the urban spaces of Helsinki.
Border thinking helps us reflect on how cultural work participates, everyday, in the global and local dynamics through which we produce geographies that are accessible, safe, and home for some and not for others. In the book, these reflections develop together with fourteen arts and cultural workers based in Finland. Their contributions focus on what is happening across and beyond the threshold of the art gallery, how art sits and is bridged into the city.
Contributors: Alejandra Alarcón, Francesca Bogani Amadori, Micol Curatolo, Lucy Davis, Amy Gelera (S.U.R.), Lotta Hagelin, Naomi and Wanda Holopainen, Impropias Collective (Mercedes Balarezo Fernández, Yes Escobar, Paola Nieto Paredes, Daniela Pascual Esparza), Alice Mutoni (Ubuntu Film Club), Muniba Rasheed, Eliisa Suvanto (Porin kulttuurisäätö).
Edited by Micol Curatolo. Design by Lù Chén.
Find the book at:
PUBLICS, Helsinki (FI)
Lot Projects, London (UK) 18.8.2024
Under the Leaf Book Fair (FI) 7-8.9.2024
TULCA Festival, Galway (IE) 9.11.2024
Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin (IE) 14.11.2024
Border thinking in contemporary curating, master's thesis
I expand on the themes, research and making of the book in my Master's thesis 'Border thinking in contemporary curating: dialogic research on arts and culture in Helsinki', May 2024, MA Visual Cultures, Curating and Contemporary Art, Aalto University, Finland.
The thesis is available on Aalto University's public archive.
'The thesis presents border thinking as a critical methodology for independent and grass root curatorial practice. Thinking with borders promotes an awareness of how global processes of space modification and exclusion appear in artistic and curatorial work via its linguistic registers, work structures, and the engagement with different identities and forms of belonging. Thereby, the thesis investigates how border thinking is reflected in the spatial, visual, written, affective, and relational languages of cultural production. Such analysis reckons with the thresholds held within all artistic work. Hence, the methodology advocates for a variety of site-specific work, as well as fostering diverse and critical representation. Thinking with borders is a work of caring and allowing for specificity and otherness. The aim is to nurture a constellation of accessible and inclusive spaces, which would develop from wider and richer participation. The thesis argues that border thinking supports processes of recognition in the social fabric of a cultural production, and it holds a potential for change within the different experiences of its locality and its current infrastructures.
The research develops in conversation with more than twenty Finland-based practices and initiatives and alongside the making of the book Here, Not. Dialogues on art and the making of here (attached to the thesis in appendix). The publication is an edited collection -based practitioners, two photographic inserts, and an opinion piece. Through artistic production, exhibition making, community building, and artistic research, the contributors to the book provide strategies and methods to respond to and act within their urban and professional infrastructures, creating alternative places of belonging, dialogue, and navigation.'
Dance & Here, Not.
In October 2023, performer Daniela Pascual Esparza and I have presented the collaboration initiated by this project at the AHRA2023 Conference, with the paper 'Here Not: Dialogic research on dance, curating, and the making of place beyond the art gallery', University of Portsmouth. Read more here.