Paper long abstract:

The paper builds on my early fieldwork on contemporary art and curatorial practices in Mexico City (2016), as well as on a recent book on contemporary aesthetics (2022).  The aim of these fieldwork-based inquiries has been to both problematize the mediatory role and increasing influence of curatorial practice in contemporary life and to evaluate the ethical, political, and aesthetic implications of curation for imagining other ways of living and being human. While "anthropo-curation" or "curating anthropos" designates the conceptual side of these inquiries, "curatorial design" refers to the research design register. Anthropo-curation and curatorial designs are two intimately interconnected forms of work: concept work and fieldwork, respectively.

In my current curatorial design I focus on media practices situated in a marine mise-en-scène dubbed The Strait and the Sea. Specifically, I follow and juxtapose three kinds of practices indexing three different yet intriguingly related ways of life: an inventor, composer, and engineer's sound work and musical records of encounters with grey whales, sperm whales, and bottlenose dolphins in the Sea of Cortez; the hydrophone recordings, spectrograms, drone footage, and photo-identifications by a team of cetacean scientists who run a research sailboat and a bio-acoustics laboratory in the Tyrrhenian Sea; and the multimedia online platforms of fishers who produce audiovisual diaries of interactions with marine mammals in the Strait of Gibraltar.

By juxtaposing these human practices, marine life, signals, noises, instruments, and communication attitudes, the paper explores the ethical, existential, and ecological implications of anthropo-curation.