Programmatic Pragmatic

(2025)

Presentation at the Universities Art Association of Canada (UAAC) conference, York University, Toronto.

October 16-18

Part of the Curatorial Untethering panel chaired by Erin Silver and Melanie O’Brian

– Tairone Bastien, The Feral Will Not Be Curated: On Working with the More-than-Human

– Nya Lewis Williams, On Inheritance: Curatorial Practice and Methodologies for Historical Recovery

– Christof Migone, Programmatic Pragmatic: You and I Are Water Earth Fire Air Of Life And Death

– jake moore, The Practice of Rounding

Conference programme here.

ABSTRACT

Curating is arguably always time-based. Exhibitions open and close. They are temporarily tethered. They may be located in one place but they effectively reconfigure it, they oscillate it. Exhibitions are teeter events. Structural and systemic stasis are nevertheless endemic realities we are forced to grapple with. The imposed austerity and precarity pair looms large. This nefarious and debilitating pair has a deleterious effect on artistic and curatorial practices writ large, but especially those that have a critical backbone or attempt to innovate in ways that challenges set institutional parameters or audience expectations. Remaining nimble can be one way to thwart ossification. Becoming itinerant, even if only metaphorically, can inject fluidity in the otherwise stultifying rigidity of the routine scenario of yet-another curatorial output. The 12-year long curatorial project, You and I Are Water Earth Fire Air Of Life And Death, may best be described as a throughput, a polynode, a transient. Once a year, on December 12th from 12 noon to 12 midnight, it asks for 12 hours of your time. The 2025 edition will mark its halfway point. As the assembler of this slowtime-based curatorial project, there is no illusion that this event resolves or even palliates any of the vexed conditions outlined above. As an ongoing failed attempt however, it may contribute both pragmatic and utopic tenuous tenets to the conversation.