As part of the Helsinki Biennial 2023 Art Mediation Forum, ViCCA Aalto University has initiated the project The Curatorial School of May, which has produced six thematic guided tours and a publication. 

The publication, edited by Patrizia Costantin and Bassam El Baroni, features writings by Filipa Ramos, Adeena Mey, Livia Nolasco-Rozsas, Cyane Findji and Myriam Gras, Aska Mayer, Martina Šerešová, Micol Curatolo, and Julia Fidder. The book design is by The Rodina.

Download the PDF here.

My text NEVER OURS: a story about how to move and where to look as island visitors starts from two fundamental questions: On the level of audiences, how does one activate the stories, suggestions and knowledges collected by the Biennial? And, what does it mean to be in Vallisaari as island visitors and through an art exhibition? 

I present the two strategies of a. choreographing movement and b. telling stories as ways of opening up the examples offered by the Biennial's artworks while grounding the implications of their stories in our imminent surroundings. Starting from the history of Vallisaari, the text touches upon practices of storytelling, nomadism, policies of urban planning, feminist critique, and border thinking. The chapter unpacks the visual politics of movement on different scales: between individuals; in relation to geographies; societal in terms of forms of settlement; microscopic in terms of "contamination", etc. Moving together is presented as a mediation strategy that zooms into our surroundings to notice and then trace out larger entanglements and power structures. As we move, we make place. As we tell stories, we make worlds. We participate to shifting meanings, value-making and relations that are implicated and close to our everyday actions, and which directly impacts people and nature. The text introduces how the curated spaces of an exhibition or of the public urban environment contribute to, but also might help noticing, these tensions. The argument poses that by paying bodily and visual attention while walking, and by bodily testing new perspectives (for example by breaking small behavioural norms), we can activate alternative ways of "moving into thinking". It is knowing that a different "moving into thinking" is possible and noticing its real-life implications, that will hopefully linger with us after the Biennial and spark a form of participation which the text calls political, in the sense that it is active and takes responsibility through small processual decisions. 

The text lays out the interests and questions which are further explored in two thematic guided tours that I curate and facilitate on the 16th and 23rd August 2023. 

The Curatorial School of May features Clément Béraud, Micol Curatolo, Julia Fidder, Cyane Findji, Myriam Gras, Aska Mayer, Iida Nissinen and Martina Šerešová with professors Patrizia Costantin and Bassam El Baroni as part of Helsinki Biennial 2023 Art Mediation Forum.