Ecosophy and socially engaged art. A practical investigation into contemporary curatorial production

T his research unfolds through a sequence of curatorial projects that I carried out in Britain and Italy, and explores the implications of embedding Félix Guattari’s ecosophy into socially engaged curatorial practice.

Moving In / Moving Out addresses ecology as both a matter of ethical values (Fowkes, 2006) and of socio-political critique (Miles, 2014), and questions curating as an authorial and selective practice. Looking at ecology through the lens of Guattari’s ecosophy (1989) – an ethico-aesthetic articulation of everyday praxis that rejects hierarchies and favours interdependence – Quid Pro Quo: Negotiating Futures explores the effects that the notions of transversality and heterogeneity have had on the identity and ethics of my practice.

Questioning the theoretical underpinnings of the work of selected curators (O’Neill, 2012; Thompson, 2011; Lind, 2010; Jacobs, 1993), Practices of Sustainability uses ecosophy to challenge hierarchical mental habits that still shape contemporary art production. “Vulnerability”, “grounded listening” (Gablik, 1992; Kester, 2005) and interdisciplinarity are understood as tools for a renewed ecology of practices (Haraway, 2016).

My activity as communication coordinator at Manifesta 12 Palermo identifies the curatorial with a networked series of activities and movements of associations (Latour, 2009) that engage with the unknowable potential of what is called “the public” (Arden, 2014).

Riflessioni sull’Abitare addresses the aesthetics as a place for a collective ecocritical inquiry (Morton, 2009), and plays with the traditionally opposed categories of proximity and distance to question how identities and relations are formed, perceived and challenged.

Ecosophy enables an understanding of the curatorial as an agency and responsibility shared by all involved in socially engaged art projects. In these projects, the curator is not an “enlightened expert” (Rancière, 1991), but an engaged citizen who uses a passionately weak (Majewska, 2019), interdisciplinary and critical practice to transform the mentality of life in the shared οἶκος.