Our Future Is Elsewhere
Cotswold, UK
July 8 - July 10, 2016
GABRIELA ACHA | FRANCESCA ALTAMURA | TAMAR CLARKE- BROWN | NATHALIE BOOBIS | ANDREW BROWN | ASHLEE CONERY | W. GIOVANNI GONZALES | TAMAR HEMMES | JAY CHUN CHIEH LAI | SAMANTHA LIPPETT | CHRISTIAN LÜBBERT | HELENA LUGO | ERIK MARTINSON | KATY ORKISZ | JOHN KENNETH PARANADA | CECILY RAINEY | MATEUSZ SAPIJA | YING-HSUAN TAI | BAR YERUSHALMI | ELENA ZAYTSEVA | JESSICA ZISKIND
Our Future is Elsewhere is a collective project and a deliberate stepping aside. We leave the room where you found this poster, the room of formal curatorial training and its tendency to become yet another exhibition during the MFA Fine Art Degree Show. We choose another ground.
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From 8 to 10 July 2016, the graduating MFA Curating cohort convened at The Owl Barn in Gloucestershire for a working retreat. We treated the countryside as a studio and a seminar. Mornings opened with shared readings and situated listening. Afternoons moved through workshops on regenerative practice, scenario building, care protocols, and ethics of collaboration. Evenings folded into conversation, shared meals, and notes towards a common language. We documented what we learned, not as a catalogue, but as a living syllabus.
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The retreat was an act of mutual care. We tended to ourselves in order to tend to others, to artists and to publics. We addressed the conditions that now shape cultural work: climate breakdown, accelerating automation, and geopolitical instability. Rather than rehearse crisis, we practised active hope. By this we mean a disciplined form of attention that links analysis to action, imagination to responsibility, and critique to repair.
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Our purpose was strategic as well as reflective. We articulated principles for a regenerative curatorial ethics, drafted methods for co-authorship with communities, outlined pathways for low-carbon production, and proposed ways to measure value beyond attendance. We treated collaboration as the new normal, not a special project but the ground rule for how we research, commission, communicate, and care. We tested tools for partnership across disciplines, from fieldwork and mapping to co-writing and peer review, so that exhibitions can operate as ecosystems rather than events.
We met to share experiences and anxieties, and to exchange tactics and plans. We spoke, we listened, and we refined our questions. In doing so, we widened our horizons and pulled our futures into the present tense. If our future is elsewhere, it is only because we are learning to make elsewhere here: a place where curating builds the conditions for coexistence, invites invention, and holds open the possibility of a more just and generous world.
