We proudly introduce to our European friends and colleagues an exciting new initiative that has been bubbling away down in the antipodes.
Curatorium is a collective of anthropologists, artists, activists, makers, and thinkers. It’s an attempt to create the space for those who work differently to find one another; a shared experiment in creative and critical thinking, that we hope will generate new affirmations and critiques of what anthropology makes possible.
Curatorium aligns with projects that immerse themselves in the questions and challenges of knowledge, while grappling with representations, methodologies of making together, co-creative expressions, and forms that also amplify the many urgent efforts to
decolonize the future.
We want to look together to find new kinds of traction and relational force in the world… and, by extension, new forms of accountability, and new vectors for potential tension and discord, that unfold both with, and within, the worlds in which we work.
Curatorium has been established by Victoria Baskin Coffey, Jennifer Deger, Sebastian Lowe, and Lisa Stefanoff. In coming together here, we profoundly acknowledge the many First Nations scholars, filmmakers, curators, and artists whose critical-creative engagements continue to both challenge and transform anthropology, radically sharpening our sense of the situated political, ethical aesthetic stakes in such work.
We acknowledge too, a great indebtedness and respect for the ground-breaking legacies of Australian anthropology in areas of visual, sensory and media anthropology. It’s our hope to contribute anew to the opening, reconfiguring, and energising of the discipline.
Curatorium officially “launched” at the Australian Anthropological Society’s conference in November, 2021.
In partnership with The Australian Journal of Anthropology (TAJA), we will be curating a one-off, online-only special issue of TAJA scheduled for publication in early 2023.
Until then, we are planning a series of online events in 2022 and 2023 that we are calling The Curatorium Sessions and The Curatorium Jam Sessions.
For those interested in joining these events, please visit the website, or alternatively you can contact the team and/or join the emailing list: Curatorium.Collective@gmail.com ; or follow them on Instagram.