In times after times

H: I have quite a lot of fear around the upcoming years and the state of the world. I have been brought up with this idea of things always progressively getting better, but it seems that this neoliberal idea is starting to sound more and more utopian. Of course, this sense of precariousness is related to the political realities and transgenerational trauma that may drastically vary from place to place, person to person. Yet it feels like it’s becoming less realistic to rely on any idea of permanence, any knowledge of career narratives, or the habit of projecting dreams into the future. 

What I want to say is that on a professional level, I feel extremely grateful to have been part of a space that is dedicated to talking about curating. Not briefly, not over drinks or in the ticket queue to see a show. But to actually listen to people share their practice, articulate the how’s and why’s. Yet I don’t think that’s what touched everyone so deeply. I think it was about sharing and listening, shared interests, feeling understood, just as if, for a brief moment, someone had your back. And within this precariousness, I’d say those moments of groundedness - however momentary they may be - are becoming more and more crucial.

I do miss our evening walks&talks a lot, and sometimes when I think back to Taipei it seems like another world and I question if you were really there or did I make you up.

 

F: (One week later) Finally I am replying to you. Sorry to have put you in self doubt during the wait. Perhaps this proves that I indeed exist, so do you.

Same, I also grew up learning that progression is a universal goal by default. I took fairness and justice for granted and I believed in the good. Later I realised that it’s a privilege to grow up in such an environment where this can be the reality. It’s a hard learning curve, but in a way I’m also extremely grateful that I grew up this way, so I still have this part in me. Time changes. Fear has become such a norm that sometimes I thought we don’t feel it anymore. No, it has always been there, we just learnt to live with this feeling, and somehow we have forgotten how it’s like when we don’t have to live with fear. Two weeks after Curatoké and back home, a few days ago I went to try on the wedding gown with my childhood best friend who also got engaged. We went for brunch afterwards, and we started sharing why we decided to go into marriage. I shared that it has been a mutual understanding between my partner and I that if we are married, someday if, miraculously, one of us ended up in jail, the other could visit him/her more often, because family members have one extra quota for inmate visits compared to non-family members. Then my tears started to fall at the dining table. I think fear controls you when you have someone you love you want to protect, someone you are connected to and you are in the position to support, or even just be by their side. I think as a curator when the nature of curation is about connection, from the artists to art spaces, institutions, resources to the values you want to protect could be unsafe, that’s when fear controls us.

What’s crucial and urgent, and perhaps simply wonderful about being able to come to Taipei and meet all of you at Curatoké is that we managed to create a space where we feel safe to talk about all these fears, to learn on a professional and a personal level, and that there is unconditional trust, and a lot of joy.
 

H: I am very close to my grandmother, but sometimes when I look at her I really truly feel time and politics in my body. We are similar in our nature, but my grandmother has carried fear differently throughout her life - I can see it in her shoulders, in her hips and small steps, in her way of keeping her smiles and hugs for just a few people. She keeps quiet because of the fear, I am fueled by my fear, I live in a democratic country, I hope the fear is fuel that burns up… as in fuel is a limited resource… as in that fear will run out.

I feel that in cultures that are shaped by oppression the body sort of tags along with the mind. It is not to be felt, as to protect the mind from sensing a lack of control over one’s own integrity. The physical body is a burden that can be deported, noticed, photographed, politicized, be in the wrong place at the wrong time. When we sit at the kitchen table after I return from yet another trip I can see how my grandmother looks at me with fear and awe at the same time, confusion about how one can rely on friends and colleagues, almost count them as family, how can one trust and feel as part of a community. At the same time, she’s secretly drawn to it, just as if there was a whole nother way of living somewhere out there. 

Somehow I find myself in a movement workshop in Vienna and even after a generation, my body that once belonged in my mother’s body has still not learnt to be free. The way that this word “freedom” is thrown around in some Western societies as an alibi to ignore interconnectedness only alienates me more. 

So I stick to my imaginary friends and secret communities in my head. Those drawers of sayings, phrases, kind words, images of loved ones that we invisibly carry with us. It was through reading theory that I first discovered my love language of other people giving my abstract gut feelings a form through articulation, but the first time I really thought of it was during Curatoké. How much I enjoyed listening to people articulate how they think of their work. As soon as I got back to Estonia I got an offer to take on the role of the producer of a festival that presents works from the Baltics in different contexts. For some reason (that is to be psychoanalyzed in later stages of my professional development) I agreed to it.

Minutes before my first Zoom call with the partners I was zoning out staring at the wall thinking I was going to throw up because of anxiety. Somewhere in the middle of the call, approximately 20 minutes into performing confidence, I wanted to discuss how to frame the festival in a way that it presents works from the Baltic countries, yet without making them the ambassadors of some mysterious notion of Baltic art. Trusting my own mind felt like jumping into unknown waters - am I being a snowflake gen z curator, am I making up pseudo-problems, we could just get it done with - until I remembered that Daniel had mentioned something similar in his presentation. I strongly felt the presence of our conversations and the remains of them. It was almost like a spiritual experience to see how those 2 weeks of sharings have become part of my practice, how it almost feels like having guardian angels… or something.

I’m not sure now. This text sounds like it was written by ChatGPT, it’s a bit weird.

 

F: First of all before responding to that, I want to say, congratulations to your new job offer! I was delighted by this news and so happy for you when you first told me. I was also somehow not too surprised, because I know you are super clever and talented, and they will love you! (Maybe they already do!)

‘Guardian angels’ is such an accurate term to describe how we feel about the group, this also changes my understanding of it. ‘Guardian angels’ don’t have to be dead people or spirits, they can be living people. Their presence exist in memories and co-existence in another place, sometimes not easily reachable, a bit like how I’m responding to you on this Google doc right now, it does feel a bit like talking with ChatGPT, a highly intelligent and humorous one, but I know you are real, and you are also striving and thriving in the world you are in.

I got a remark from a dear friend and previous Per.Platform artist that she observed a change in how I express— she said that I am much more confident and articulate when I speak, whereas before I used to be more laid back and uncertain. I’m not a very confident speaker and it always takes a long time for me to write, perhaps that’s why I went into performance art. I don’t really have to talk, I just have to feel and allow the material to feel me, to visualise our “conversation” through action. To listen to it, to make space for it to be heard. I thought about how in parts of my training as a re-performer for Marina Abramović’s works where I learnt to overcome fear when I perform. When there is faith in the action and material you chose, in the audience and in the space and time, with good understanding and relationshipwith your body, mind and mental state, when there is a strong and determined reason why something has to be done at this very moment, you can overcome your fear — the fear ofpain and loss, the fear of being judged, the fear of showing one’s vulnerability, the fear of happiness in the context of Hong Kong. It could be hearing from all mentors and mentees about why they do what they do, their core values, the changes they are trying to advocate and the challenges they are facing — it is the strong belief and love for the art form and the people that become the fuel to overcome all these things. All these overlapping worlds are protecting and empowering me when I’m faced with fear again, giving me reference points to how I could navigate within and around it.

It could also simply be that I just spent 10 days non-stop talking with 13 curators who are all extremely good at communicating in their own ways. There’s a difference between making poetry and explaining something to someone. When you make art or poetry with words, it’s about elastifying these words, creating layers and new viewing points in the understanding of them. Whereas when you have to explain something with words, it’s about pin-pointing and being very clear and specific. I became more aware of my role and the power I have, when to use which language of speaking, sometimes it’s a combination of both, just levelled differently. I learnt that from being with each and one of you.

I still think it’s quite a miracle that all of us, striving on our own paths and serving different communities, with extremely different personalities and characters, that we are met at this very time and space and created this bond, because of where we have been and where we are going next.

 

H: I don’t know if it ruins “magic” to take it into pieces, to think of what actually made this space so special to all of us. Could it ever be repeated? Should it? Does this speak about a larger issue or manifest some sort of structural change? 

In a sense I do think there is a lack of spaces where cultural professionals come together and talk about how they work, elaborate on their philosophies, dilemmas, past realizations and current struggles. A space that also offers a reason and space for taking the time to do some internal research - critically look at one’s own practice and try to articulate it for others. All of this accumulates into tiny ways of thinking, absorbs itself into the practices of others.

In my experience, curating can be rather competitive, as the field itself is so oversaturated. It can be difficult to find your place. Again and again I find myself writing yet another motivation letter, updating my CV, picturing the perfect candidate for the roles I apply for. In this world of personas, practical discussions and meaningless handshakes Curatoké is somewhat silent resistance. It doesn’t oppose the current “system”, but it kindly offers an alternative. A platform for sincere exchange and a proposal for collaboration. Not collaboration as in exchanging material resources but collaboration as in this… abstract agglomeration that was passed from person to person, sort of just… held. There was no need to justify anyone’s presence or purpose.

I really liked your idea of poetry not being about explaining. I think in situations where we are given the liberty to just be in the process we create poetry. We don’t explain what and why, but we wander around our completely different vocabularies and knowledge, we see where they intersect, we take unknown turns and it doesn’t really matter, because point A and point B do not exist. That’s also why I think this text is the way it is. It is just here as this exchange between you and me. Without this program we would not have this common language. And this text is not “going” anywhere. I think it’s beautiful and precious and I don’t really want to say anything super smart (haha, assuming that I could).

By the way, today I had a work shift in this vintage clothes store and that’s where I waswriting this text from. And there was a customer who started chatting with me, telling me she’s from Singapore. I asked her if she ever goes to see performances. (I am not good with small talk.) You know what? She said she often goes to Esplanade - Theatres on the Bay. She went to see Lion King and Hamilton. She said it’s not the cheapest form of entertainment, but she has learned to appreciate performing arts. I was here in the Estonian autumn and … how…

 

F: Oh my god that’s so cute! I’ve never watched Hamilton, but Lion King is a good way to enter the world of performing arts. I’ve seen Lion King three times in London. First time with my secondary school trip, second time with my family, and the third time with my partner’s family. But of course the older I watch it, the odder I find the ideologies are embedded within the dialogues, but anyhow the costumes and puppetry were stunning. 

Whether or not our time spent together could “repeat”, I had a strong feeling that it was a no on our last day. Our worlds and ourselves are constantly evolving, growing and slowing down at various speeds, even if we met one year later it could have been different, and that’s what made our time spent together so beautiful, that it is “live”. But apart from what you said about the lack of this kind of space for learning, it’s also special in a way, perhaps even “repeatable”, I felt that because we know this space is so precious, we wanted to bring the best of what we have seen and experienced about human connection and humanity to the group, and to share and celebrate this possibility not only in a form of knowledge, but to have this connection among us, and this is something that could be repeated and multiplied. I think at the beginning of Curatoké we all still had a little bit of what you said about your grandmother, a bit of fear and awe at the same time, even for a split second (or maybe a few hours to be fair). Maybe Joyu brought in a bit of the special human connections she shared with her indigenous tribe families, maybe Ang brought in a bit of that from his theatre and Indonesian culture, maybe Jeff brought in a bit of that from his queer community, I brought a bit of that from the performance art community I met when I did my first performance art workshop in Poland, you brought in your jokes (of course so much more than that lol), and so on. Way too reductive to summarise in a sentence. But I do think that the personality of the curator of the space, which is River, often sets the tone. Well, River cannot be “repeated”, or “replicated”, but I’m sure we have all been inspired by him at Curatoké, and we have all carried a little bit of everybody back home, back to our families and battlefields.

I guess we will end here? It’s super lovely to write this dialogue with you. Thank you for making this suggestion and for inviting me! We will continue this legacy of having people mistakenly thinking that we are a couple. Like we said we could talk for hours but we have a time limit. I dearly look forward to the next time we meet again.

 

H: Finding new collaborators and people who spark something in your thinking is a lot like falling in love. It’s never just work.

F: Love you Heneliis!!!

H: Love you too (super professionally)