Curatorial Practices for Meanings, Narratives, and Contested Territories

Interview with Maite Borjabad López-Pastor, curator, architect, and researcher

Abstract

In ways never more explicit, the territories of life, meaning, justice, and modes of coexistence are nowadays under strain. In addition to the already familiar forms of dispute, there are new arenas of conflict driven by a profound rethinking of the dynamics of capital and justice as a universal aspiration including the validity of human rights as an accepted paradigm. Money, power, patriarchy, and violence have been dressed up in new clothes to be introduced shamelessly as the starting point, the means, and the end. Our attempt is to seek new responses to these phenomena with strategies such as networking, interdisciplinarity, collaborative actions, and multisite agency. Sometimes imagined as marginal or accessory, practices such as art, architecture, and urban planning have become central pieces in the processes of accumulation, and undoubtedly, a central dispute is to attain their relocation within the processes of emancipation. This conversation revolves around the idea of ​​curatorial practice as a means of knowledge construction, action and combat. The exhibition space shapes the understanding of the world seeking new answers and actions for living in it.