“Crip curating” arises to perform a curatorial practice from the crip theory, the rare, the fragile and the constantly mutating. We will see how the interest in “cripping the curatorial” helps to destabilize the current system that we can observe in institutional curating and ask questions about why we understand curating as we currently understand it, activate it and question it to be a promise of dialogue and change. A curatorial project has the opportunity to stir up issues around health, care, body politics, which are currently questions that stand out in the cultural and artistic system in general, as many artistic spaces reveal themselves to normality as bearers of the complexity of human relations.
Irene Mahugo (Madrid, 1995) is a scenographer and researcher in performing arts, being part of the research group ARTEA (https://archivoartea.uclm.es/) and carrying out a thesis entitled “Horizontal revolution. Cuerpos crip en el espacio público: la revuelta, la fiesta y la representación” at the UCLM (Cuenca, Spain). Between September and December she is doing a research stay at ESAP (Porto) with the research group of Estudos de Artes Performativas (CEAA).
For her, the Horizontal Revolution arises from the interest in designing strategies or methodologies to generate other forms of vindication away from violence or force, proposing, in this case, the curatorial profile as the necessary connection and link in complex social contexts and realities. It is born from the desire and urgency to create spaces for reflection from a crip time or slow time around rest, creative thinking, artistic practices and the sharing of one’s own experiences and information as vindication strategies; thus prioritizing wellbeing and valuing the accessibility needs of each one.
In her thesis, the researcher explores the threads that connect the body, illness, trauma, vulnerability, political control, among other concepts; linking them in turn with the experience of artistic work and its processes.
In order to design the paths between these connections, she puts in dialogue a selection of artistic practices of different formats (mainly from the world of performing and performing arts), contemporary literary pieces, personal experiences (such as autobiographies and diaries; the own experience from the links with the disease and with art, assuming the position of enunciator subject), collective experiences (from the curatorial process as artistic practice and common work to the development and writing of manifestos) and media representations (press, celebrities and social networks) that function, all of them with their own characteristics, as case studies. From there, curatorial experiences have been developed between Madrid and Barcelona, which serve as guides to continue organizing other exhibitions, meetings, common work from a crip theory of care, individual and collective needs, listening to the body and shared space.
The aim of the project will be to confront and try to hybridize reflections from the art world, feminisms, anti-capacitism… Questioning and raising, proposing to make uncomfortable as the diverse body makes uncomfortable, facing conversations that we still have pending. Conversing and dissenting from complicity and alliance to expand the subject of anti-capacitism (against the capacitist system) within the world of culture and art and how we can educate to generate an inclusion for both the viewer and the artists.