writingascurating

Intersections of Care1

Intersections of Care is the current research process from which these intention notes originate.

Intersections of Care is a project co-developed by Loraine Furter and myself on the theory, practice and politics of display in contemporary arts approached from an intersectional feminist perspective. It started its life when co-defined and jointly written in February 2019, in the context of a dossier submitted as an application for an A/R Art Recherche – Fnrs research grant. Intersections of Care started officially in September 2019 with the help of that said grant. This research has therefore been alive for (at least2) one year now.

Intersections of Care aims at reflecting on and experimenting with display as material or immaterial dispositifs (or devices) connecting different elements in space in order to create a discourse or a narrative within an exhibition. Those devices that are usually quite overlooked are nevertheless making the link between space, the artefacts and the humans. Display stands for an interstice, an interface, through which issues of crucial importance in terms of seeing, knowing but also of power, unfold - since it contributes to model, to give shape and meaning to the singular elements that it connects.

Our research focuses on building up a series of links between a number of singular projects in a genealogy of (artistic, alternative, critical) forms of display, while at the same time contributing to certain key questions currently discussed in the art world and within society at large:
What visibility is given to what, to whom; who is speaking, what are the conditions of speech?
Who is seen, who is heard?
Who is watching, who is listening?
And more specifically: how to design a display that actively engages into issues of inclusivity, intersectionality and non-binarity, as a means to propose another reading of the artworks and of the exhibition, but also potentially as an alternative way to take position in the world?
It is about experimenting with display as a specific construction of a perspective in the (public) space of the exhibition, but also as a relational device towards certain hybridizations, other ways to produce knowledge and potentialities.

To do so, we engage into display as part and parcel of the following practices and formats: the publication (publishing), the exhibition (curating), and the institution (instituting) - the intention being to place them in a dialogue in order to open up (render hybrid) each one of them – and therefore, we hope, to construct alternative modes of building up relationships.
Indeed, we consider publishing, curating, instituting as closely intertwined, as a series of matriochkas: from display to institution, these fields are indissociable, coexisting, interwoven in the human and non-human world. Each of these strata constituting each time a modality for articulation, arrangement, demonstration, of different elements (expressions, forms, narrations, relations...) in a given (public) time and space.

In the context of this experimental process, the question of the publication taken in the broad sense plays a very large part since its beginnings. The publication is, for the two of us, a medium that we have been busy with for many years, and that each one of us has kept opening up in (we hope) very singular manners. However - and here also where this 'parallel-while-being-part-of-it' note of intentions connects and prolongs Intersections of Care, we aim at engaging with publication (publishing) as a medium and as a practice, but also, as already stated previously, as undeniably tied to those two other practices that are: curating and instituting.
Intersections of Care interrogates practices of publication and the ways in which they enter in a dialogue – or even merge, combine, articulate - with other practices, or practices that are usually deemed as 'other'. We approach publication practices in their widest sense - that is, as a modalities, as tools – “tools for thinking”3, to "make things public"4 (in the sense of giving a voice and producing links between people and things)5.
The practice of the manifesto testifies for the performative and political dimensions of publication, as well as its performative dimension; as a speech-act constituting an action on things. We relate to the Manifesto of Céline Condorelli & Gavin Wade for their Support Structures project on display, but also to Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto, around which Loraine Furter worked in relation to the notion of hybrid publication17, or to Carla Lonzi's Crachons sur Hegel, amongst many others.
We approach publication practices in the broadest sense: as a mode of exhibition which integrates a diversity of practices, such as performance, bookmaking, installation... As part of this lineage, we try to imagine, to design and to experiment with several "display-publication(s)", as a way to question space and access issues but also as a practice of care (aiming towards 'safe(r) spaces'). Indeed, if the book as an object fixes ideas and things, solidifies them, makes them almost immutable, in the modernist tradition — this tradition being the one that contributed to the writing of a story often considered as exclusive or even excluding; our "display-publications", on the other hand, intend to act as inclusive, non-binary, intersectional support structures.

The idea of closely associating certain issues related to the history of publication with those of display is to us very valid also, and precisely because, display constitutes a means, a medium by which a work is articulated to the (public) space in which it emerges, as well as to the other works that inhabit / constitute this space. Display thus constitutes an essential link in the chain of what contributes to making visible, audible, "public". Publication is in itself a (physical but also symbolic) space; a space of representation, of expression, of sharing.

Moreover, the practice of publication requires time, space - “a room of one's own” said Virginia Woolf in her eponymous book (which existed, in its original form, as two lectures given in pre-university women's associations, a few years before universities would accept them in their walls and libraries)6, but also – of course - means7.

Through the echoes and the shifting links it creates, a practice of "display-publication" could lead to other ways of producing knowledge, other narrations, in an attempt to reconfigure relationships (see our modalities working and sharing explained below). A number of other research projects contribute to nourishing our own perspectives and our plastic research around these issues of relations and hybridities.

It is customary to situate the origin of the term "curating" in the Latin curare, whose first meaning is "to take care"8. In this line, our intention is to collectively experiment with publications-as-displays that would echo practices of "care", as support for the artefacts but also for the actors interacting with them (by producing them, installing them, organizing them, contemplating them...).

To us, publishing, curating and instituting definitely collide and open up to one another through the following processes we are engaging with: writing, but also designing, translating, collecting, transcribing, assembling, gathering, discussing, reading, performing... Here, the thinking and writings of poet and artist franck leibovici resonates with our own way of approaching this, as approaching writing practices in the broadest sense, as “operations that don't expose themselves as such”9.

“Curator, in ancient Rome, was an official in charge of public duties. In the Middle Ages, “curator” was used as a term for guardian to minors and lunatics. In the 17th century, it began to signify people in charge of public institutions of display, such as museums, libraries, zoos10.”11

Here again, one can grasp to what extent the practice of curating is closely linked to public space and to practices of instituting, and therefore, once more, to the very notion of dispositif as Michel Foucault puts it: “What I am trying to identify under this name is, firstly, a resolutely heterogeneous whole, with speeches, institutions, architectural arrangements, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral, philanthropic proposals, in short: the said, as well as the unsaid, these are the elements of the dispositif. The dispositif itself is the network that can be established between these elements. Secondly, what I would like to see in the dispositif is precisely the nature of the link that can exist between these heterogeneous elements. Thus, such discourse may appear sometimes as a program of an institution, sometimes on the contrary as an element which makes it possible to justify and mask a practice which remains silent, or to function as a second reinterpretation of this practice, to give it access to a new field of rationality (…) Thirdly, by dispositif , I mean a sort - let's say - of training, which at a given historical moment, had the major function of responding to an emergency. The dispositif therefore has a dominant strategic function.”12

Display is definitely, for us, a dispositif – and that is where its very relational, juridical, political dimensions lie: “Following Foucault, it is possible to understand displaying and commenting as practices (as technologies of self) within which certain subjectivities are produced and certain hierarchical relationships organized (...). This culturally anchored regime of the gaze is the matrix on which contemporary displays unfold as well. They are based on display itself as one of the unnamed, unconscious hierarchical arrangements of an exhibition.”13

But let's come back to this “zoo”, which is mentioned in the above quotation on the practice of curating. As franck leibovici puts it: “si une antilope sauvage courant dans la brousse est un animal en liberté, la même antilope, en cage et exhibée dans un zoo, est un document. Pour suzanne briet, l'auteur de cette surprenante distinction, la mise en cage transforme, en effet, cette dernière en une occurrence de son espèce (un token), destinée à produire une forme de savoir.” franck leibovici continues with this quote by Suzanne Briet: “4. une étoile est-elle un document? un galet roulé par un torrent est-il un document? un animal vivant est-il un document? non. mais sont des documents les photographies et les catalogues d'étoiles, les pierres d'un musée de minéralogie, les animaux catalogués et exposés dans un zoo.”14

In the context of Intersections of Care, we aim at exprimenting within those perspectives, by approaching publication practices as document-making in its broadest sense, as a means to try and rethink, and reconfigure power relationships within the field. These experiments are currently developing through four main co-activities (at random): collecting guidelines and codes of conduct15 through an open call16; designing our research process through a website (that is, an online publication); giving public lectures/performances/readings about our project in a variety of contexts; working and exchanging ideas in the context of our “editorial committee” and as a duo through storytelling; gathering quotes, references, examples of works; visiting artists studios; writing as a means to document the process from a political but also from a more singular perspective. All these publication practices are closely intertwined with this Writing as curating as writing as caring note of intent.

Introduction

For quite a number of years now, I have been busy producing texts on artworks, artists, exhibitions, that I published regularly online, in magazines, books... I have been introducing/defining myself, among other things, as an art critic. Parallel to that, I have been developing a curatorial practice – so I also called myself a curator-, which I tried to render as hybrid as possible. This opening up of my curatorial practice was a process that developed both as a kind of necessity and a kind of evidence. Actually, I realise now that I have always been constantly inhabited by a need, a necessity, to make both my practice of art criticism or writing on art and my curatorial practice converge, merge, imbricate, as a specific form of (artistic) research or knowledge-production and of political positioning.

Next to that, I am also officially considered an art historian. I studied (some) art history in one of the most prestigious art history schools: Ecole du Louvre in Paris. I have a diploma in art history from Rennes university. But I don't feel like being an art historian. Actually, I know nothing. I am incapable of situating myself within the time-frame and space-frame canon of art history. I am convinced that I definitely know nothing. But what I know is that I never learnt so much as when writing on art or curating art. Much more than while studying at the Louvre or elsewhere. Because exploring and thinking with and through artworks makes you actually engage into an entire world-making, a world that combines so many layers of being and thinking and acting, so many worlds imbricated into one single singular world. A world that allows for other worlds to enter.
This is what I know.

I am also a mother. Now in the process of becoming a single mother, as I recently took the decision to split from my partner and dad of my two children. Another thing I am starting to know now is that I feel an urgent need – now, today - to engage further into trying to weave, through language, through writing, modes of relating to the works that I encounter and that are highly meaningful to me (in terms of aesthetics but also in terms of politics).

My aim is therefore to try, and think, and experiment, around a number of alternative modes of relating to artefacts; that would also consist in a practice of making worlds, of adding worlds that would (ideally) respond, relate, to the works themselves. I am aiming at finding ways to engage in a dialogue that would not only justify or support the so-called “quality” or “pertinence” of a work, but which would rather embrace the situatedness of this specific encounter, echoing both the political and the personal dimensions of these combining works/worlds.
My writing could then maybe also become a work/a world.

I am here particularly grateful to a number of figures that helped me arrive to this point.
I am thinking of – at random - Carla Lonzi, Hito Steyerl, Elisabeth Leibovici...
At random too: Loraine Furter, Sirah Foighel Brutmann, Sofia Caesar, Clémentine Coupeau, Greg Nijs, Laurie Charles, Cécile Ibarra, Nolwenn Dequiedt, Stijn Van Dorpe, Patrick Bernier & Olive Martin, the movement Engagement in Belgium.
At random again: my sisters, my mother, my (dead) father, my children, Emad, Zakaria,
Anne Boyer, Anne Carson, Kathy Acker, Eileen Myles, Fred Moten ...

- but also, for the negative part: the violence of the art world, competition, harassment and sexism in workspaces, sudden and sometimes violent deaths.

Learning from Carla Lonzi

Discovering the artistic, political and personal trajectory of Carla Lonzi has been a foundational moment in figuring out my intentions for this project. In Carla Lonzi's life and work, I perceive the intertwining of the artistic or creative, the political, and the personal layers – as precisely what I would like to engage into: trying to grasp and embrace through writing these various dimensions through which one engages in a relationship with an artwork-body of work-artist.

Giovanna Zapperi's book, Carla Lonzi: un art de la vie. Critique d'art et féminisme en Italie, proposes a renewed reading of the shifts in the life and work of art critic and feminist Carla Lonzi, those shifts having deeply influenced Lonzi's writing practice but also her personal and political positionings and choices. What Zapperi shows in particular is that, whereas Lonzi's professional, political and personal trajectory was until now perceived as a series of ruptures from one position to another – from art criticism towards feminism, for instance, or to put it otherwise: from arts towards politics, the author shows how these shifts were rather the result of a process in which “self-consciousness”, and the awareness of Carla Lonzi's own condition of being (at random) a woman, a wife, an art critic, a political subject, a historical subject... intertwined and combined in order to explain the process of Lonzi's entire life and work.

Carla Lonzi's Self-portrait, published in 1969, is a book-montage of conversations recorded with 14 different artists, a process through which she deconstructs art criticism and invents a style of writing based on subjectivity, on exchange and on non-linearity. This experiment, and the critical perspective that Lonzi develops through this, are very influential in the questionings I intend to dive into. In line with Lonzi's Self-Portrait, I would like to ask the following questions again, today, and try to experiment around them, both from a curatorial and a critical perspective: how to grasp, through writing and publishing, the specificity, the singularity of the encounter between the viewer/critic, the artist, and the work itself? How to record, how to process, how to render the situatedness of this encounter? What kind of knowledge does that writing process produce? What is at stake there, also in political terms? How to write on art without embodying a power position, such as judging, evaluating, positioning oneself as an expert? And so many more questions...

What surprised me a lot is that Giovanna Zapperi's book, though focusing on the singularity of Carla Lonzi's approach to writing, to curating, and to creativity from a political and more particularly from a feminist perspective, was written in a format that remains in the end very “academical” and “research-oriented”. One my goals would be to go further into questioning those research and writing processes from a creative and feminist perspective - to try and make it “radical” - if this can be.

I also intend to develop this experiment through problematising the role of the art critic, and more precisely its authoritarian structures. The thinking and practice of art critic and curator Lucy Lippard1 would also be a reference to relate to in that sense : “when making feminist comics or demonstrations or exhibitions I always made it as a writer in an expanded field”. Furthermore, in a lecture she gave at Vera List Center for Arts and Politics in 2014, Lippard also refers to a number of artists (Rheinhard, Judd, Morris, Robert Smithson...) whose writing practices also came as a challenge to the power position of the art critics. I guess the writings of Robert Smithson are a focus point in my own research and experiment process, but also – closer to us - Coco Fusco's artist-writer practice. And there will be for sure many more.

Referring to the 1970S women's movement2, Lippard also insists on how feminism changed drastically art writing while aiming towards a decrease of the distance between artist & viewer : instead of withholding secrets and jargons, it is about writing about art as a bridge between images and words, about writing in a way that expands definitions of art, that challenges the gap between seeing and reading – while at the same time acknowledging the possibility of a failure. As Lippard says: “avant-garde artists said “there were no boundaries to art, anything can be art as long as the artist says it is – this could be extended to art writers””. I would like to test out that form of writing as curating as caring in this expanded field.

To come back to Lonzi, a very meaningful reference is also Vai pure. Dialogo con Pietro Consagra (“Now you can go”) - in which she transcribed a four-day discussion with her partner and artist Pietro Consagra, which gives her the floor to explain, from a feminist perspective, for which reasons she decided to split from him – a momentum in her parcours to express her very critical view on the male-egocentric-artist cliché or commonplace, but also to develop a reflection on withdrawal strategies3 as support or care4 towards one's own personal, professional, and political practice. Indeed, for Lonzi, the subordination of women is directly linked to what allows for the figure of (male) artist to act and to be what he is: “Nous disons à l'homme, au génie, au visionnaire rationnel, que le destin du monde n'est pas d'aller toujours de l'avant, comme son désire de dépassement l'y pousse. Le destin imprévu du monde tient au fait de prendre un nouveau départ pour que les femmes parcourent le chemin en tant que sujet. (…) Nous nions le mythe de l'homme nouveau, que nous tenons pour absurde. Le concept de pouvoir est l'invariant de la pensée masculine et par-là de toutes les solutions finales. Le concept de subordination de la femme suit comme une ombre celui de pouvoir. Toute prophétie qui part de ces postulats est fausse.”5

“Il n'y a pas de ligne d'arrivée, il n'existe que le présent. Nous sommes le passé obscur du monde, nous réalisons le présent.”6 Another of Lonzi's book “Nous crachons sur Hegel” (1970) is also very important for me in the way it develops both as a critical perspective on (art) history and on feminism7. Lonzi's refusal to be(come) what one is expected to be, in particular when it comes to gender and therefore to power positions - “le Sujet imprévu”8, as Lonzi puts it - prolongs to Valerie Solanas or Monique Wittig's refusal of being identified as “women”. What does it mean (for a woman, a daughter, a sister, a mother...) to refuse “filiation” - reproduction9 - to break from linear history – to withdraw again10? A refusal that implies breaking from the patriarchal system of value, while the price to pay may well lead to non-recognition, silence, invisibility... What would it mean concretely then, in terms of (an ecology of practice of) writing, to position oneself as an “Unexpected Subject”?

“La spécificité de notre tâche consiste à chercher partout, dans chaque événement ou problème du passé et du présent, ce qui relève de l'oppression de la femme. Nous saboterons tout aspect de la culture qui continuera tranquillement à l'ignorer.”11

Learning from The White Pube1

I have been exploring the series of writings developed recently by The White Pube (https://www.thewhitepube.co.uk/), who introduces themselves like this:
The White Pube is the collaborative identity of Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad under which we write about art. 99% of all exhibition reviews are boring and don’t really say anything except describing what’s in an exhibition and telling u when it ends. Cba for that. We started The White Pube to actually state how art makes us feel (happy, bored, angry or in love for example); we fall through feelings, and write about the art on the way. With strong language and adult content, TWP can be found here on this website but also on Instagram and Twitter. It might look all big and proper but we cannot stress enough that it is simply the two of us thinking out loud from our respective childhood bedrooms in Liverpool and London. We are the opposite of old white men with posh accents and there’s no office, salary, or registered company involved here. Yes, we understand this is the maddest job we will probably ever do, being critics. We have part-time jobs on the side actually, and some generous readers fund what we write through Patreon. So, if u are new here or could do with a reminder: a heads up that we are not here to be professional or polite, not here to cheerlead, and we are not doing this to suck up to powerful people in the art world. We’re not the smartest people or the most entertaining. Just want to write about art that makes us feel some type of way, and to sometimes critique this industry as a whole and the mad ways it fucks people over. (...)”

I am very grateful to The White Pube for many reasons; one of them being that they don't claim any authoritarian position, nor do they claim any expert knowledge of art history:
“Art History is a lens through which we are supposed to be able to grapple and place things, a consistent framework that allows us all room to breathe, a map to chart our course. So, why is it so often a tool through which we exclude & abstract? (…) A small group of white men living in Paris in the 1900s, one or two men in New York, some across Germany. It is trite, but not incorrect, for me to declare that ART HISTORY as it stands is a visual history of the West. It is singular, linear, immutable to change or overhaul, revision or rereading. (…) I have a hot take for u: Does anyone acckcchually care? I fuckin don’t. I think actually, NO ONEE REALLY CARES about the exact kind of egg tempura Da Vinci used (b that a Japanese frying technique or not), Caravaggio could be dead for all I know, and Picasso should stand trial tbh I don’t give a single flying fuck about the man. I cannot even remember one single Titian. Mariah Carey holding the I don’t know her sign. Let’s be honest, how much of ur life rn is affected by Marcel Duchamp? It’s not that much. How often do you really reference like… Walter Benjamin? These references mean something to someone, but honestly in my life, I am more affected by Game of Thrones, Diljit Dosanjh or Sidhu Moosewala’s newest single, the whole Marvel franchise, Ariana Grande & when Love Island is back on. So whose history is it? If this matters to someone who is that person? Since we are taught to only talk about art, write about art, understand art in one specific singular way; why is this specific set of obscure references a requirement that’s seen as a barrier to entry? What does that mean for people like me when we look that in the face and say that we don’t care? If that requirement is there, what do the people that meet that requirement look like?”2

To me, these positions prolong and try to continually put in practice some of the most pressing preoccupations of Carla Lonzi (among others, for sure), and in a way that is definitely contemporary3. Also in terms of form or format, it seems to me that their work could be described as a 3.0 art history or art criticism or writing on art. Just like one would do on a blog or on Facebook, they develop forms of real-time, processual writings as means to echo the situatedness of the encounter, of the discovery, of the shared moment with the works.
Their writing is actively engaged in an intersectional perspective, trying to make explicit criticism towards white male capitalist tendencies within the contemporary arts field, whether they be institutions, artworks and the artists themselves. I intend to position my own experiments with those stakes in mind.

From arts criticism to a critique of the arts to creativity

One of the main goals of this research-experiment will be to try and navigate these passages from arts criticism towards a critique of the arts (world, system, ecology...) towards trying to embrace creativity in the broad sense – “creativity” in the sense that Carla Lonzi approached it. Indeed, I would like to try to think, experiment, navigate through a number of writings on art that have influenced me – whether they be described as art criticism or writing on arts, or fiction, or even poetry.

In terms of writings on art that actually introduce themselves as such, one of my main references is the series of texts that Hito Steyerl publishes on e-flux on a regular basis. These are for me very stimulating pieces of writing on art, in particular in the way that it combines a critical perspective on art history, on contemporary political issues and on contemporary artefacts. Earlier then this, I perceive Marxist art historian John Berger's work1 as essential in setting up the premisses of a critical perspective on art history (whose (his/her)story is this?), but also on the “male gaze “and the power issues at stake in the world of representations. My world is constantly traversed by these questionings, from John Berger to Hito Steyerl's text In Free Fall2, up to Linda Hentschel's Pornotopic Techniques of the Observer3, to Paul Preciado's PhD: Gender, Sexuality, and the Biopolitics of Architecture: From the Secret Museum to Playboy4. And so many more...

My aim would be to experiment with an open, a wide approach of what writing on arts can mean, as “Oscar Wilde called criticism the highest form of biography” (Lucy Lippard) - which would also mean allowing space to explicit and assumed subjectivity, a subjectivity undeniably connected to a form of situatedness. I am also thinking about the assumed subjectivity of Elisabeth Lebovici's book title: Ce que le sida m’a fait : art et activisme à la fin du XXe siècle5.

This research will/may sometimes lead to a series of experiments with different formats that may relate more to fiction or poetry, and maybe explore “a number of “minor” forms of expression such as the conversation, the journal, the manifesto, in a way that suggests a reversal of the masculine and the feminine, of the public and private spheres.”6.

My research will be about approaching the practice of publication in the broad sense, in line with Lionel Ruffel's publication “Brouhaha. Les mondes du contemporain”: “Ce qui caractérise le contemporain, c'est que "l'on passe d'une représentation et donc d'un imaginaire du littéraire centré sur un objet-support : le livre, à un imaginaire du littéraire centré sur une action et une pratique : la publication. "Publier" retourne à son sens originel: rendre public, passer de l’expression privée destinée à des correspondants précis à l’expression pour des publics de plus en plus divers. Il existe autant de littératures que de possibilités de publication : livres, performances, lectures, salons, groupes, espaces numériques divers. Chacune de ces littératures crée un espace public spécifique. Par ailleurs, cette ère de la publication déborde largement le cadre de la littérature. L'exposition et la performance (dans les arts visuels et les arts de la scène) sont en ce sens aussi des modes spécifiques de publication, qui deviennent ainsi le grand concept transversal permettant de penser les expressions artistiques et culturelles."7

Keeping constantly in mind that this process will try to exist through (ideally) a kind of “deculturation process”, where one would try to free oneself from the academia and the usual tropes of arts criticism, from the formats of a theoretical or political essay – or maybe just try and open them up, or rather assume their (usually hidden, unclaimed) situatedness.

I am thinking, amongst others, of some of Fred Moten's work, which constantly reopens and borrows from poetry/slam/oral/pop culture. His writings deploy in back and forth movements from existing on the paper page to being read out loud8 or even, one could say, performed. As an example, I would take his reading/lecture/talk titled An Ecology of (Eloquent) Things9, which took place during Hard Truths: A Forum on Art and the Politics of difference (April 8, 2011)10, in which he addressed the life and work of Thornton Dial11. This “publication” (in the broad sense) also appears, though a bit different, in Moten's book Black and Blur (consent not to be a single being)12 - the formula here between brackets being also very meaningful to me, as a claim to remain hybrid, mutable, in constant movement.
Moten's lecture starts with a reading of excerpts from Karl Marx, and then a quote from Antonio Negri & Michael Hardt: “The poor … refers not to those who have nothing but to the wide multiplicity of all those who are inserted in the mechanisms of social production regardless of social order or property.” - while one of Thornton Dial's works, A Monument to the Minds of the Little Negro Steelworkers, is projected on the screen behind him. Fred Moten says “I” while he claims positioning his discourse “within a specific Black Marxist frame and problematic but also within a certain radical aesthetic and social interventions made over the last 40 years in Italy that follow upon the roots of Arte Povera and autonomous thought”.
Further on, he asks: “Where can the work of (re)creative thinking be done in the midst of the commercial enclosure of the art world, in the vocational enclosure of the university, in the ideological enclosure that one might call, even though both of its terms need radically to be called into question, the intellectual’s public? The ascriptions of “self-taught” or “outsider” are expressions of desire and anxiety that redouble the structures of deprivation-in-privilege to which they react.”13
Many other examples come to my mind, such as (at random) Anne Boyer, Kathy Acker, Gloria Anzaldua, Anne Carson... all these names are constantly feeding into my world.

This all remains in line with the “augmented publishing/publication process” that Loraine Furter and I are experimenting with in the context our common project Intersections of Care, where we develop various forms of display-publications. Intersections of Care is definitely feeding into these writing experiments, in the sense that it is also about experimenting modes taking care of the artworks, the art world.

Translation practices14 will also be explored, as a series attempts to render hybrid, to open up the formats, the meanings, to constantly reconfigure relationships... Keeping constantly in mind that I am a white privileged woman, which therefore requires remaining very cautious on many levels, especially when it comes to intersectionality, one of my intentions is also to let myself become captured15 in the sense that Gilles Deleuze puts it, or rather contaminated, in the sense that Anna Tsing puts it: "How does a gathering become a “happening,” that is, greater than a sum of its parts? One answer is contamination. We are contaminated by our encounters; they change who we are as we make way for others. As contamination changes world-making projects, mutual worlds—and new directions—may emerge. Everyone carries a history of contamination; purity is not an option. One value of keeping precarity in mind is that it makes us remember that changing with circumstances is the stuff of survival."16 I will let myself and my work be contaminated by my encounters.

However, a constant thread – or “fil rouge” – within this research process will be fed the following questionings: how to imagine and compose a text/publication in the broad sense that takes care of the works, of the artists, of the art world? What forms of writing will respond to and care for their forms of life17? Which form of life of mine will contribute to take care of them?

Methodology

“The program will be conceived as an ambulatory process that will allow for traveling between a series of relationships (...). It is a means for identification in the conduct of a project. But these markers are the limits or the provisional contours which overflow, exceed our capacities to foresee. In other words, we plan something, but at the same time, we do not know in advance how it will work. It is in this indeterminacy that a series of relations supposed to allow the passage will be constructed. The program imagines itself there, in the dynamics of this construction: between two points, we have a myriad of possible relations. The question that is played out during the development of the program and during its realization is therefore the following: what relations will we select and how will we build bridges between each of them?”1

“i think it's fair to say that most of us spend hours each day shifting content into different containers. some of us call this writing.” 2

“There is singularly nothing that makes a difference a difference in beginning and in the middle and in ending except that each generation has something different at which they are all looking. By this I mean so simply that anybody knows it that composition is the difference which makes each and all of them then different from other generations and this is what makes everything different otherwise they are all alike and everybody knows it because everybody says it.”3

“Composition is not there, it is going to be there and we are here. This is some time ago for us naturally.
The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything. This makes the thing we are looking at very different and this makes what those who describe it make of it, it makes a composition, it confuses, it shows, it is, it looks, it likes it as it is, and this makes what is seen as it is seen. Nothing changes from generation to generation except the thing seen and that makes a composition.”4

I am currently developing, as a first step, a kind of chronological journal, which consists in gathering various materials, whether readings, artworks, quotes, images, writing essays or trials, conversations, relationships – be they private or more intimate.

Parallel to that, I am trying to actually start writing on a number of specific artistic practices, through which I also hope to be able to experiment and reflect on my work. It all also goes along with giving attention to a number of personal, intimate, processes while trying to engage also with them through writing.

The Intersections of Care research process definitely constantly feeds into all this.

Another layer is also trying to think-through what writing on art may mean, or rather how it can manifest itself.

One example of an experiment I could think about would be making use of Anne Boyer's “Suggestions for Roundabout Reading”5, that she shares as a teaching experiment with poetry, and experiment myself with it in the case of a “Roundabout Reading” of an artwork. I am thinking about her “Difficult Ways to Publish Poetry”6 protocol in A Handbook of Disappointed Fate.
I am thinking of Kathy Acker's mental drawings in Blood and Guts in High School, as those kinds of mappings of imagined or dreamed spaces7, with architecture, fantasies, animals, poetry and the rest – that could also become an inspiration for roundabout readings of works.
But there could be many other possible trials, for sure.

A second moment will be devoted to experimenting with combination processes of all these materials, and with and around the different layers that come out of that.

References – partial, temporary, so many names missing

Fiction / Poetry

Kathy Acker,
Blood and Guts in High School, Penguin, 1984.
Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream, Grove Press, 1986.
New York City in 1979, Penguin Modern, 2018.
Essential Acker: The Selected Writings of Kathy Acker, Grove Press, 2002.
“Writing, Identity, and Copyright in the Net Age”, The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Vol. 28, No. 1, Identities (Spring, 1995), pp. 93-98.
Kathy Acker and McKenzie Wark, I'm Very into You. Correspondence 1995–1996, MIT Press, 2015.
Kathy Acker in conversation with Angela McRobbie at the ICA, 1986, https://vimeo.com/332422834
Georgina Colby, Kathy Acker: Writing the Impossible
https://www.ica.art/learning/thinking-art
Anne Boyer,
Garments Against Women. Boise, Idaho: Ahsahta Press, 2015.
A Handbook of Disappointed Fate. Brooklyn, New York: Ugly Duckling Press, 2018.
The Undying: Pain, vulnerability, mortality, medicine, art, time, dreams, data, exhaustion, cancer, and care. New York, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019.
Anne Carson,
The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos, Knopf, 2001.
If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, Knopf, 2002.
Antigonick, New Directions, 2012.
How to like "If I Told Him a Completed Portrait of Picasso"Author(s): Gertrude Stein and Anne Carson, The Threepenny Review, No. 97 (Spring, 2004), p. 24.
Rachel Cusk,
Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation, Picador USA, 2012.
Coventry: Essays, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019.
Saidiya V. Hartman,
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, W. W. Norton & Company, 2019.
Ursula Le Guin,
The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Ignota Books, 2019
The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination, Shambhala, 2004.
Deborah Levy,
Things I Don't Want to Know, Penguin Books, 2018.
The Cost of Living, Penguin Books, 2019.
Andrea Long Chu,
Females, Verso Books, 2019.
Fred Moten,
B Jenkins, Duke University Press, 2010.
Black and Blur, Duke University Press, 2017.
Eileen Myles,
Acceptance Speech (for the Presidency of the United States of America) - 01.01. 2017
https://archive.org/details/EileenMyles.poetryproject.01.01.2017
Maggie Nelson,
Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions, University of Iowa Press, 2007.
Bluets, Wave Books, 2009.
The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning, W. W. Norton & Company, 2011.
The Argonauts, Graywolf Press, 2015.
Adrienne Rich,
A Human Eye: Essays on Art in Society, 1997-2008, W. W. Norton & Company, 2009.
Lisa Robertson,
The Baudelaire Fractal, Coach House Books, 2020.
Gertrude Stein,
Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, Vintage Books, 1990.
Marjorie Perloff,
Wittgenstein’s Ladder. Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary, University of Chicago Press, 1996, p.16.

Art history/Art criticism/Writing on art/Creative Writing1

John Ashbery,
Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles, 1957-1987, Harvard University Press, 1991.
John Berger,
Ways of Seeing, Penguin, 1972.
David Antin,
Definitions Caterpillar Press, New York, 1967.
Autobiography, Something Else Press, A Great Bear Pamphlet, New York, 1967.
Code of Flag Behavior, Black Sparrow Press, Los Angeles, 1968.
Meditations, Black Sparrow Press, Los Angeles, 1971.
After the War; A Long Novel with Few Words, Black Sparrow Press, Santa Barbara, 1973
Talking, Kulchur Foundation, 1972. New edition: 2001.
Talking at the Boundaries, New Directions, New York, 1976.
Tuning, New Directions, New York, 1984
Selected Poems: 1963-1973, Sun & Moon, Los Angeles, 1991.
What It Means to Be Avant-Garde, New Directions, New York, 1993.
i never knew what time it was, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2005.
Radical Coherency: Selected Essays on Art and Literature, 1966 to 2005, University of Chicago Press, 2010.
Camille Pageard, Les digressions critiques de David Antin, postface aux Essais choisis sur l'art et la littérature, 1966-2005, future , juin 2017. http://f-u-t-u-r-e.org/r/57_Camille_Pageard_Les_digressions_critiques_de_David_Antin.md
Huit histoires pour John Baldessari, contrat maint, 2000.
Hélène Bertin,
Valentine Schlegel: je dors, je travaille2, future et le CAC Brétigny, 2018.
Douglas Crimp,
AIDS : Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism. Cambridge, MIT Press, 1988.
AIDS Demo Graphics. Seattle: Bay Press, 1990.
On the Museum's Ruins. MIT Press, 1993.
Melancholia and Moralism - Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics. MIT Press, 2002.
Before Pictures. University of Chicago Press, 2016.
Hal Foster,
«Critique d’art: Une espèce en voie d’extinction» (2001), in Design & Crime (2002), Les prairies ordinaires, 2008.
Linda Hentschel,
Pornotopic Techniques of the Observer — The Origin of the World (1866) by Gustave Courbet and the Pleasure of Scopic Penetration, In: Härtel I., Schade S. (eds) Body and Representation. Schriftenreihe der Internationalen Frauenuniversität »Technik und Kultur«, vol 6. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden.
Elisabeth Lebovici,
Ce que le sida m’a fait : art et activisme à la fin du XXe siècle, JRP/Ringier ; La Maison rouge, 2017.
franck leibovici,
des opérations d'écriture qui ne disent pas leur nom, Questions Théoriques, 2020.
low intensity conflicts un mini-opéra pour non-musiciens (2008-2016), mf, 2019.
bogoro, avec Julien Seroussi, Questions Théoriques, 2016.
(des formes de vie). une écologie des pratiques artistiques. Les Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers, Questions Théoriques, 2012.
des documents poétiques, Presses du Réel, 2007.
Jeff Khon, Melanie O’Brian,
Judgment and Contemporary Art Criticism3, Artspeak, 2010.
Carla Lonzi,
Autoportrait, JRP Ringier, 2013.
Crachons Sur Hegel, Une Revolte Feministe, ETEROTOPIA, 2017.
Giovanna Zapperi, Carla Lonzi : un art de la vie. Critique d'art et féminisme en Italie, les presses du réel, 2018.
Claire Fontaine, "We Are All Clitoridian Women: Notes on Carla Lonzi’s Legacy", e-flux, Journal
#47 September 2013.
https://www.e-flux.com/journal/47/60057/we-are-all-clitoridian-women-notes-on-carla-lonzi-s-legacy/
Carla Lonzi, Art Critic and Feminist. Introductory Remarks. Art criticism undone, http://www.travellingfeministe.org/site/spip.php?article32
Giovanna Zapperi,
Challenging Feminist Art History. Carla Lonzi's Divergent Paths, in V. Horne, L. Perry (eds) Feminism and Art History Now, London, I. B. Tauris 2017.
Lex Williford (Ed.),
Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: Work from 1970 to the Present, Touchstone, 2007.
Lucy Lippard,
Changing: On Not Being an Art “Critic”, Lecture at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, 2014, https://vimeo.com/78286430
John Cunningham,
Anguish Language: Writing and Crisis, AC Books, 2017.
Renate Lorenz,
Art Queer. Une théorie freak, B42, 2018.
Lucy R. Lippard,
Projecting a Feminist Criticism, 1976, Art Journal Vol. 35, No. 4 (Summer, 1976).
Lyn Hejinian (Ed.),
A Guide to Poetics Journal: Writing in the Expanded Field, 1982–1998, Wesleyan University Press, 2013.
Grant Kester,
The Device Laid Bare: On Some Limitations in Current Art Criticism, e-flux journal #50 — dec 20134.
Helen Molesworth,
“Why is the sky blue and other questions regarding writing”, documents, Fall 1996.
Nicholas Mirzoeff,
The Visual Culture Reader, Routledge, 2012.
Beatriz (Paul) Preciado,
Gender, Sexuality, and the Biopolitics of Architecture: From the Secret Museum to Playboy, PhD, dir. Beatriz Colomina, Jan 2013.
Lionel Ruffel,
Brouhaha. Les mondes du contemporain, Verdier, p. 107-108.
Ali Smith,
Artful, Penguin, 2012.
Hito Steyerl (all writings)
Gail Scott, Robert Glück, Camille Roy (Ed.),
Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative, 2004.
Ruth Behar, Deborah A. Gordon (Ed.),
Women Writing Culture, University of California Press, 1996.
Annika Bender,
Death of an Art Critic / Tod einer Kritikerin, Presses du Réel, 2007.
Olivia Laing,
Funny Weather. Art in an Emergency, Pan Macmillan, 2020.
Crudo, Picador, 2018.
The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking, Picador, 2014.
Joanna Russ,
How to suppress women's writing, University of Texas Press, 1983.
Isabel Waidner,
Liberating The Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Literature, Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2018.
Celeste West,
Words in Our Pockets: The Feminist Writers Guild Handbook, DustBooks, 1986.
Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson,
Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, The University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Susan Sontag,
Against interpretation, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966.

Other essays / Feminist practice

Gloria Anzaldua,
This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981), co-edited with Cherríe Moraga, Duke University Press, 2015.
Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), Aunt Lute Books, 2012.
This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation, co-edited with AnaLouise Keating, Routledge, 2002.
Mona Chollet,
Chez soi. Une odyssée de l’espace domestique, Zones, 2015.
Judith Halberstam,
The Queer Art of Failure, Duke University Press, 2011.
Audre Lorde,
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. The Crossing Press. 1984.
Uses of the Erotic: the erotic as power, Tucson, Arizona: Kore Press, 1981.
Your Silence Will Not Protect You : Essays and Poems. Silver Press. 2017.
Sara Ahmed,
The Promise of Happiness, Duke University Press, 2010.
On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life, Duke University Press, 2012.
Willful Subjects, Duke University Press, 2014.
Living a Feminist Life, Duke University Press, 2017.
What's the Use? On the Uses of Use, Duke University Press, 2019.
Kirsten Grimstad and Susan Rennie,
The New Woman’s Survival Catalog, 1973.
May Joseph and Jennifer Natalya Fink (Ed.),
Performing Hybridity, 1998.
Melissa Gregg,
The Affect Theory Reader, Duke University Press, 2010.
Anna Tsing,
The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton University Press, 2015.

Exhibitions Histories

Martin Beck,
About the relative size of things in the universe, Utrecht ; London, Casco ; Four Corners Books, 2007.
Tony Bennett,
The birth of the museum: history, theory, politics, London ; New York, Routlege, 1995.
Johanna Billing,
Taking the matter into common hands: on contemporary art and collaborative practices, London UK, Black Dog Publishing, 2007.
Claire Bishop,
Installation art: a critical history, New York, Routledge, 2005.
Marcel Broodthaers, Benjamin H.D., Broodthaers: writings, interviews, photographs, Cambridge Mass., MIT Press, 1988.
Benjamin H.D. Buchloh,
Essais historiques I, Villeurbanne, Art-Edition, 1992.
Essais historiques II, Villeurbanne, Art-Edition, 1992.
A.A. Bronson, Peggy Gale,
Museums by artists, Toronto, Canada, Art Metropole, 1983.
CollectifF,
MJ, Manifesta journal : journal of contemporary curatorship. Teaching curatorship n°4; Artist & curator n°5; Archive: Memory of the show n°6, Milano, Silvana, 2008.
Marianne Eigenheer,
Curating critique, Frankfurt am Main, Revolver, 2007.
Reesa Greenberg,
Thinking about exhibitions, London ; New York, Routledge, 1996.
Anna Harding,
Curating the contemporary art museum and beyond, London, Academy Ed., 1997.
Jürgen Harten, Marcel Broodthaers,
Der Adler vom Oligozän bis heute : Marcel Broodthaers zeigt eine experimentelle Ausstellung seines Musée d'Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, Section des Figures : Städtische Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf, 1972.
Susan Hiller,
The producers: contemporary curators in conversation, Gateshead, BALTIC, 2001.
Pierre Leguillon (dir.),
Oublier l'exposition, Art Press Spécial, n°21, Paris, Art press, 2000.
Lucy Lippard,
Six years the dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997.
Sharon MacDonald,
The politics of display: museums, science, culture, London ; New York, Routledge, 1998.
Paul O'Neill,
Curating subjects, London, Open Editions, 2007.
Jean-Marc Poinsot,
Quand l'oeuvre a lieu : l'art exposé et ses récits autorisés, Dijon, Les presses du Réel, 2008.
Julie Reiss,
From margin to center: the spaces of installation art, Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 1999.
Mary Anne Staniszewski,
The power of display: a history of exhibition installations at the Museum of Modern Art, Cambridge Mass., MIT Press, 1998.
Afterall series
Sophia Yadong Hao,
Of Other Spaces – Where Does Gesture Become Event? Presses du Réel, 2019

Translation / Translation Studies

Daniel Gile (Ed.),
Why Translation Studies Matters, 2010.
Sherry Simon,
Gender in Translation, Cultural identity and the politics of transmission, Routledge, 1996
Anne Carson,
see above
Lawrence Venuti (Ed.),
The Translation Studies Reader, Routledge, 2000.
The Translator’s Invisibility. A history of translation, Routledge, 1995.

To add

Ariana Reines https://www.artforum.com/contributor/ariana-reines

https://rundog.art/net-art-roulette-on-press-refresh/
https://www.thewhitepube.co.uk/in-defence-of-criticism
Sadie Plant, Zeros + Ones
https://www.duuuradio.fr/episode/craig-owens-portrait-d-un-jeune-critique

https://hyperallergic.com/562293/concordance-by-susan-howe-new-directions/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=WE050920&utm_content=WE050920+CID_bde187c7504e2bf7b7d48e08c6ee1d51&utm_source=HyperallergicNewsletter&utm_term=Susan%2520Howes%2520Feminist%2520Poetics

https://hyperallergic.com/540537/questioning-the-very-form-of-the-book/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=WE050920&utm_content=WE050920+CID_bde187c7504e2bf7b7d48e08c6ee1d51&utm_source=HyperallergicNewsletter&utm_term=Questioning%2520the%2520Very%2520Form%2520of%2520the%2520Book

Decolonial love issues

The researcher’s erotic subjectivities: epistemological and ethical challenges*
Katrien De Graeve
Ghent University. Centre for Research on Culture and Gender. Department of Languages and Cultures katrien.degraeve@ugent.be
Valerie De Craene
KU Leuven. Division of Geography and Tourism. Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences Free University of Brussels (VUB), Cosmopolis valerie.decraene@kuleuven.be
https://www.academia.edu/39969778/The_researchers_erotic_subjectivities_epistemological_and_ethical_challenges?email_work_card=title

María Puig de la Bellacasa, ‘Nothing comes without its world’:
thinking with care
(on writing-with)

Antigonick – Traduit en français par Edouard Louis (éditions de l'Arche).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEfJKjOg3ZU