Curating Time, Contingency, Anachronism, Flirtation

This thesis is about curating and temporal paradoxes, resistances and perversions in relation to contingency, anachronism and flirtation. It is a theoretical and practical investigation, which considers the poetic and political potential of these three temporalities, incorporating them as mode of curatorial research. Contingency in institutional management processes, anachronism in curatorial narratives, flirtation in encounters in exhibitions, are regularly perceived as accidents to be evaded, outdated premises, or trivial and insignificant social behaviours. They are disregarded by dominant orders because they detach from control procedures, normativity and systems of power. Nevertheless, they remain in the domain of power even as their opposites. My project investigates the conceptual counter-power of these temporalities to intervene with time-scales and agendas that frame and define the concept of temporality in curating. It explores critical and creative strategies to suspend, anachronize and pervert material and symbolic orders inscribed in curatorial chronological apparatuses. The proposal is to re-create the suspended state of Being and not-Being of contingency, to reenact the ontological out-of-jointness of anachronism, to re-stage the oscillation of flirtatious encounters, thus to materialise places of encounter between theory, art, and people. It intends to transfer the discursive significations of these temporalities from avoided, reproved and diminished domains into intensified and embellished written and exhibited embodied metaphors of time. The intention is to flirt with the possibility of giving life to them for short moments, blinks or disjunctures of chronological time