Curating Publics in Brazil: Experiment, Construct, Care

Grounded in case studies at the nexus of socially engaged art, curatorship and education, each anchored in a Brazilian art institution and framework/practice pairing – lab/experiment, school/construct, clinic/care – this dissertation explores the artist-work-public relation as a complex and generative site requiring multifaceted and complicit curatorial approaches. Lab/experiment explores the mythic participatory happenings Domingos da Criação (Creation Sundays) organized by Frederico Morais at the Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro in 1971 at the height of the military dictatorship and their legacy via the minor work of the Experimental Nucleus of Education and Art (2010 – 2013). School/construct examines modalities of social learning via the 8th Mercosul Biennial Ensaios de Geopoetica (Geopoetic Essays), 2011. Led by chief curator José Roca and Pablo Helguera as pedagogic curator, the 8th edition’s regional artist residencies, neighborhood cultural center, and mediator team brought an expanded pedagogy to the center of the curatorial project. Clinic/care explores transdisciplinary practices in art and health via the Farmácia Baldia de Boa Viagem (Baldia Pharmacy of Boa Viagem) at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Niterói, focusing on the use and study of medicinal plants featured as part of Carlos Vergara’s exhibition Sudário (Shroud) in 2013-2014. Amidst the complexities of each situation a set of contingent, relational and contextual “lessons” emerge as a possible fount for imagining a socially engaged curatorship grounded in a praxis of experiment, construct, care. One shaped by the legacies of post Neoconcrete art practices, decolonial pedagogies, Joaquin Torres García’s famous upturned map of the Americas as a gesture of radical locality, and the vital anti-colonial tradition of Oswald de Andrade’s anthropophagy. Drawing on its etymological roots of curare – to care – here curating affects a network of molecular learning and activism derived from a poetic and political contagion of encounters – of ideas, practices, people and contexts – and an ethical commitment to place