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with the participatory nature of the project, the virtual modality is
not simply provisional but indispensable.
Another aspect of the exhibition on which I spent much time
ruminating is the collaborative nature of curation. By the word
itself, I am often reminded that collaboration involves the “laboring
together” of various people, with various and sometimes overlapping
roles and forms of agency—say as artist, curator, and audience.
Through my experience with VIVA, I have been reflecting upon
whether these agencies are being rethought or redescribed and in
what ways.
In one of the previous VIVA conferences we had early in 2021, I
shared my assessment of the art world and its production in my
locality. I said that it could benefit much from more circulation
of ideas, objects, practices, individuals and roles within the art
and culture scene and outside it. I said that I was—and still am—
looking forward to seeing more collaboration among various people
to possibly transform the structure that is the art world. Who knows
what could emerge from a collaboration between, say a visual artist,
a cartographer, and an activist?
However, in the thick of a pandemic, when most communication
and social interactions happen remotely, I’m not sure whether
collaboration among individuals with various backgrounds is
being made more or less possible. Take, for instance, face-to-face
interactions outside one’s existing social circle, which may be
impractical or even dangerous—because, as we know, our social
bubbles are permeable and in a pandemic we have to guard it more
vigilantly. And if you have a social circle of people whose interests,
skills, and views are broadly akin to yours—maybe, say, because you
work in the same place—then that could be limiting opportunities
to collaborate with others.
In the case of Popo Amascual’s project, for example, she originally
proposed to interact with healthcare workers and do some sort
of ethnographic work in hospitals, but this turned out to be
logistically impractical given the protocols. Yes, this instance
might be extreme because for sure in a pandemic this would be
a very high-risk methodology. Also, one could say that remote or
virtual communication is there anyway. But for other people who
are still not coming to terms with communicating online or are
struggling to communicate through virtual platforms—and there
are those people—how much agency do they really have in the more
collaborative and expansive art world that I was initially thinking