In an era of institutional exhaustion, intersecting and multiplying crises and a fragmented international order, distrust, to us is emerging not as a failure, but as a methodology - one in which the curator engages with lived contexts not from a distance, but from within the reality itself. With Relational (Dis)trust we refuse to participate unquestioningly in curatorial systems that continue to reproduce imperial, extractive, and exclusionary modes of knowledge, its visibility, and meaning. This proposal begins from a place of institutional skepticism - not to reject curating altogether, but to reconstitute it through alternative ways of relating, sensing, and formulating. If the curator has traditionally mediated what and how an audience sees, Relational (Dis)trust, challenges that authority by eliminating the distance between the curator and the issue/site of concern. In its place, we propose a curatorial practice grounded in proximity that is sparked from distrust - a disavowal to autonomy and coherence. We approach the curatorial as a practice of smuggling - a subversive and embodied mode of knowledge production that refuses clean institutional frames, totalized subjectivities, and linear timelines/temporalities. Rather than isolate the object of concern at a neutral site of display, we insist on embedding the curator within its social, political, emotional and ethical terrain. We add dust - disruption, confusion, and the ordinary - as a way to generate risk, environments where the curator is a disoriented agent dislocated by the mundane. Our process fosters supranational forms of relations: fragile, cross-border networks that intensify at points of antagonism, where dominant belief systems are questioned, and the distinctions between truth, fact, and figment are continually unraveled.
At its core, we deny curation as an economy of isolated, administered culture and the consensual protocols that define its legibility. In doing so, we first question the often authoritative position of the curator and artist, and the clear demarcation of the audience. Instead, we identify curation as transient, improvised, and incomplete acts, gestures, utterances, and movements within the quotidian, muddling the boundaries between the artifact of interest, and the ends to its reception. These acts, as we realize, inherently run the risk of jeopardizing the very project itself and its sustenance, however, generating this contingency is primal to our process.
Thus, curation to us is an invitation to indeterminacy. This position makes us (curator/artist/the audience) available to the inconsistencies on the field where we operate, and obscures the authority of a conscious decision, or the lack thereof. As a result, the process unfolds as accidents, deviations, and digressions, making the errant space for antagonistic relations to occur, and to be reacted to.
