Esercizi decoloniali: il contributo di una pratica curatoriale situata

Abstract

This paper chronichles a curatorial experience based in Naples: the intercultural workshop of urban photography entitled Crossing Sights, started in November 2019 and still active. Rather than analysing the phases of the laboratory in a punctual and exhaustive fashion, the paper aims at commenting on the criticalities, limits and possibilities I have detected as a co-curator. My “enunciation” is situated in the interiority of an unperfect West (Cazzato 2019) and it employs the concept of curating as a practice of hospitality. In addition, it argues that the “decolonial curating” is an anti-racist practice of “listening” (Bayer, Kazeem-Kamiński, Sternfeld 2018) that is open to the "epistemic diversity" and to the "pluriversality" (Mignolo & Tlostanova 2006).
The premise of my investigation is that we need to move beyond decolonization, towards "decolonialisation" (Borghi 2020). Born into the modern-western thought, curating can reply to this call by proposing itself as an exercise of deconstruction of "whiteness". The goal of curating should be to consider art as something different from modernist notions; therefore trying to work curatorially means to activate such work in terms of contents, opening the colonial archives, epistemics "de-linking" from modernity and “epistemic disobedience”, and ethics, positioning oneself and practicing self-critique. Central to the investigation is the main theme of Crossing Sights: "Neapolitanity", a label which serves the predatory objectives of capitalism and globalization. A trap that the laboratory has tried to criticize by adopting/embracing/employing the point of view of "others", and by shifting the attention from aesthetics to "aesthesis" (Mignolo 2019). Finally, while commenting on the strategy adopted in order to overcome the "coloniality", I suggest curating as a decolonial exercise generating gestures of anti-racist hospitality, that may help to think decolonially.