Open call: Young Curators Academy 2021

Creating and curating no-thing: care and repair in communities, the new international, the new local beyond the pandemic, planetary consciousness, & other narratives

Open call for participants
Deadline: June 9, 2021
In the course of the 5th Berlin Autumn Salon, Maxim Gorki Theatre Berlin is calling for participants to be part of the digital edition of the Young Curators Academy, initiated by Shermin Langhoff (Intendant of Maxim Gorki Theatre Berlin) and Ong Keng Sen (Artistic Director of T:>Works Singapore and the international Curators Academy, Singapore).

The Young Curators Academy
The Young Curators Academy (YCA) is an artistic and activist platform for discovering alliances, exploring affinities, and consolidating solidarities. The YCA intends to nurture public debate, focus artistic conversations, and act as an amplifier for energies and intensities of resistance. The YCA invites interested individuals who work at the crossings of art and activism, in particular those under challenging political, social, and economic conditions, to apply for a place in the Academy to share their knowledge, reflect on, and deepen their own practices from parallel experiences, potentially empowering each other during the process.

The YCA explicitly welcomes intersectional makers—young artists, thinkers, writers, program producers, curators—who are both creating their own events or developing new forms of authorship and curation. In this context, the term “young” is understood as having a pioneering practice, and the curators as individuals who are part of different communities and desiring to activate them. The program is designed for those who are initiating transfers between different micro-contexts, and enabling relocations of the self, as well as new lines of flight beyond patriarchal borders.

The 2021 digital edition (DYCA) responds to the different worlds after the intervention of the pandemic. It is an opportune time to reconsider expression, resistance, activism, and communication in the translocal contexts of the participants.

Our aims
Sustaining a digitalized and differentiated practice of care and repair for specific contexts, creating a multiplicity of “local worlds” in the new international beyond the pandemic, critically engaging the internet, pioneering situated curatorial collectives online focused on diasporic, transcultural, and inclusive activations of diverse communities.

There is a need to contextualize, specify, as well as expand on differences in the care and repair of this all-pervasive capitalism, that has exploited affective, cultural, intellectual, immaterial, and digitalized labour.

As Saidiya Hartman clarified, “Often the way people think of care is as an incredibly privatized thing. I mean, caring for ourselves, partly, is the way we destroy this world and we make another. We help each other inhabit what is an otherwise uninhabitable and brutal social context” (“On Working With Archives: An Interview With Writer Saidiya Hartman”).

The DYCA attempts to critically engage through a collaborative, interactive work platform, focused on creating and cura- ting no-thing. No-thing is the space and time in between the productive things that cognitive capitalism has accumula- ted. In particular, no-thing reconsiders value in a post-pandemic world. Appropriating Jean Luc Nancy: “Nothing is not nothing. Nothing is something, it is a something of no-thing” (”Love and Community: A Round-table Discussion with Jean-Luc Nancy, Avital Ronell and Wolfgang Schirmacher”).

No-thing moves critically beyond general cognitive capitalism (after merchantile and industrial capitalism) that has stressed the production and objectification of knowledge, thought, experience, and the senses. At its extreme, no-thing can be the space and time in between the internet as we know today, where the worldwide net has globalized perspectives by mediating difference into palatable sound and sight bytes for all.

The DYCA will conclude on the potential of planetary consciousness. This was written about by Paul Gilroy in his book Postcolonial Melancholia: “The translocal impact of political ideologies, social relations, and technological changes that have fostered a novel sense of interdependence, simultaneity, and mutuality in which the strategic and economic choices made by one group on our planet may be connected in a complex manner with the lives, hopes, and choices of others who may be far away.” Planetary consciousness has since been developed by Achille Mbembe as “an ethics for a common custodianship of the Earth, continuing life for everyone and everything” (“On the Need and the Desire to Repair the World: Requirements for a Planetary Consciousness”).

Application
View more information on the mechanics and the application here.

Application deadline: June 9, 2021

Contact: yca@gorki.de