Othered by (the rhetorics of) care. Curatorial ethics and the politics of “witchification”

The intervention focuses on the structuring relationship between curatorial ethics and social justice in the contemporary arts space, taking Italian Freudomarxist philosopher Luciano Parinetto (1934-2001) as a starting point. It intends to place at the center of a series of methodological reflections on responsibility in curatorial practice an overlooked Italian source together with a vast international panorama of critical literature in the field of the politics of sexuality and anti-colonial aesthetics, both in the context of philosophy and in the context of curatorial studies. The ambition of the talk is to re-circulate Parinetto’s analyses of the nefarious solidarity between heteropatriarchal epistemologies and colonial epistemologies in a context, that of critical practices in contemporary art, where they have rarely circulated and where they would be able to provide concrete methodological tools to the consolidation of what Maura Reilly calls in 2018 'curatorial activism'. The intervention proposes to support the formulation of a possible curatorial ethics on Parinetto's thought and in particular on the notion of "witchification" through which the philosopher already qualifies the processes of subalternation with respect to gender, sexuality and race by relating them to class alienation. Witchification and a constellation of other related notions (such as the conceptual triad body-revolution-utopia, the idea of diverse-perverse and the conception of queer liberation)  help us to think body politics outside of a democratic paradigm that operates, according to Parinetto, a flattening of radical differences into a 'swampy equality'.

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This lecture will be livestreamed on the Department's YouTube channel.

All times stated in Eastern time.