The White Pube
In the frame of the final project of the Curatorship seminar, The White Pube joined the MA and PhD students of The Lisbon Consortium, at the HANGAR, on November 10th.
The White Pube is the collaborative identity of Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad under which we write about art, video games, books, food, life, the weather, whatever’s in our heart. We publish a new text every Sunday, which also goes out as audio on our Podcast. Besides the writing and the podcast, we also run a Successful Funding Application Library, a monthly working class Creatives Grant, and two noisy social media accounts across Twitter and Instagram. We are blowing the dust off our YouTube channel at the moment too.
As artistic/cultural institutions become increasingly global/ international/ transnational in their scope, they are faced with tremendous responsibilities: to collect, preserve, and show the (hidden) multi micro-narratives told by the many who make up the world. Alike speculative realism (Harman, 2018), and while challenging the multipolar Western institutional structures (grand-narratives told by few) that they inhabit (Gupta and Watson, 2016), such responsibilities imply a spirit of imaginative audacity, mutability, and exchange, integrating both human and non-human experiences, knowledge, and stories. Considering the danger of hegemonic absorption of dissonant practices into canonical art historical and curatorial discourses – which would imply the deactivation of conflictual questions that may defy Western notions of quality, influence, originality, work of art vs. artifact etc. –, this project aims to ask: How do the artistic/cultural practices respond to (and, therefore, (ex)change with) the different challenges – curatorial, art historical, educational, but also economic and political – posed by the collection and exhibition of works from a variety of world regions?
The discussion unfold around the idea of making proposals for (an) art world(s). Starting from the ideas sketched above and a series of workshops, the students co-wrote manifestos. The manifesto written after the workshop with the white pube can be found here.
This project is only possible with the support of: CECC (Centro de Estudos de Comunicação e Cultura, Faculdade de Ciências Humanas, Universidade Católica Portuguesa); FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia); and DGArtes (Direção Geral das Artes – República Portuguesa, Cultura)
