You can read an Introduction to Paranormal Curation below, or you can simply navigate directly to the **Resources, Activities + Schedule** page, where you can read about specific activities in the platform, and sign up for participation.
Excerpt from Blank Groove (2022) by Neven Lochhead, currently installed at Etherington House as an activator of this platform.
Background on Paranormal Curation
This artistic learning platform was designed as part of my contribution as co-curator to the micro-residency and exhibition project A guest + a host = a ghost at Agnes Etherington Art Centre in Kingston, Ontario, which is situated in the gallery’s historic Etherington House and open to the public from Feb. 8 - May. 8, 2022. The platform’s themes and interest in “haunting” were mobilised through various early discussions with the initiators of that project, including Sunny Kerr, Michelle Bunton, Dylan Robinson and Hadley Howes. A core concern that arose around those discussions was the difficulty and trouble of approaching the Etherington House - fraught as it is with its colonial architecture - as an hospitable site for discursive exhibition practices, artistic production, contemplation, and acts of collective flourishing. It has been continuously discussed and emphasised, from various angles and positions, how the consistent “colonial loudness” of the historic house can not only make it a stifling environment for artistic thinking, but also produces an act of violence and erasure through its insistent Victorian architectural desires. How can we productively work from within such a charged site, as artists, curators, and organisers? How could this place become more hospitable to diverse voices and practices?
Paranormal Curation is one attempt at a creative response to these questions and concerns. It represents an effort to stay with this trouble of the site, while also attempting to find ways for participants in the platform to not be completely immobilised by its overwhelming complexities and histories - to find our way through the trouble by taking up acts of thinking, making, reflecting, and laughing together. Throughout the design of the platform, **I will try to initiate peer-to-peer learning activities that will enable the participants of Paranormal Curation to not only create and implement special projects for and with the Etherington House, but also potentially transform some of its conditions, narratives, and mediations with a public. In short, in this platform I have tried to employ artistic learning as a way to “break down” the historic home into sets of accessible building blocks, producing lighter, workable materials, situations and grammars that can be used to start to (re)construct a more hospitable dwelling - one in which generous acts of study, play and joy can be nurtured and maintained.
Lastly, Paranormal Curation also aims to explore “haunting” not only as a mode for attending to and “staying with” these troubles and shadows of the historic site - its eerie invisibilities, vibes and ambiences - but also takes up haunting as a methodology through which to carry out experimental forms of contemporary curatorial practice. Throughout, participants will be encouraged think about the figure of 👻 the ghost 👻 as a collaborator or avatar with whom we can speculate about alternative modes for mediating and engaging with “the public” - that other ghost that haunts our exhibition projects. To summarise, the “paranormal” here will be taken up by participants first as a way to become attuned on the inherent shadows that are embedded and hidden in this site and situation, and secondly, as a way to consistently pull our thinking about exhibition-making away from the curatorial “norms” of display, engagement, and critique.
Participating in Paranormal Curation
The successful carrying out of each proposed activity in Paranormal Curation is dependent upon the summoning and sustaining of what I am calling activity-specific “Curatorial Guilds.” These will be small assemblages of artists, curators, students, thinkers and Wanderers, who in this first iteration of the platform will be composed through a mix of members from the two invited groups: the Agnes Etherington’s Rehoming Agnes Playgroup and Queen’s University’s Situating the Curatorial Graduate Seminar, as well as a set of Wanderers who stumble upon or be interpolated by the platform. Since participation in the platform is (of course) non-mandatory, it is my hope that the Curatorial Guilds that will form around each activity will be driven by a shared affinity for the given topic, medium or craft that is being proposed, pursued, studied or invented through the specific prompts. By organising our groupings through this voluntary process of “befriending” a common idea, issue or practice, members of the Curatorial Guilds will be capable of generating their own customised group methodologies that are propelled by the shared energies, curiosities and enthusiasms that they are already bringing to the activity. Here, it is the forming of relationships, with both the topics at hand and between the peers in a given guild, that is of greatest importance. We will attempt in Paranormal Curation what may be understood as form of “Do-it-Together” arts education, as described by Neil Mulholland below:
*“Do-it-Together” art education can be seen to form part of a broader curatorial turn perhaps insofar as it is the ‘taking care of’ relationship that inculcates new forms of organisational learning, *rather than vice versa. (Re-Imagining the Art School, page 84)
How can you use Paranormal Curation?
Whether you are an artist, curator, student, scholar, writer, performer, educator, Wanderer, regional tourist, etc., I encourage you to approach this platform as a potentially generative “scaffold” or support structure for your ongoing practice, research, making and learning. In each activity that I have designed, there is an effort to organise its structures in such a way that will encourage peer-to-peer learning dynamics to both emerge and guide the aims of the projects. This means that your own knowledges, interests and ongoing projects can not only find a home within Paranormal Curation, but can also be pursued and developed through your engagement with this platform, using the generative support of its sustained discursive communities, which I take responsibility for activating and nurturing. In other words, this platform may ultimately have nothing specific to teach you! It is not a tutorial or a course, where knowledge is transferred in a top-down structure. However, it could offer you some of the following resources, dynamics and situations that may help to mobilise and develop your ongoing thinking in new ways: a live and porous exhibition context at the Agnes, a testing ground for customisable collaborative grammars, effective enabling constraints for catalysing artistic production, joy-driven curatorial workflows, exposure to ‘phantom’ publics and markets, and the befriending of other paranormal contacts...
Micro > Meso > Macro Explained
As you will read in the Resources, Activities + Schedule page, each activity of Paranormal Curation is assigned a different scale, moving through Micro Activity, to Meso Activity, to Macro Activity. One of the intentions of this approach is to communicate to you how the activities try to nest themselves into one another, with their respective discoveries and outputs capable of feeding into and propelling neighbouring activities that will be occurring across the platform, amplified into other scales and on other timelines. Another way to think about this is to understand that in Paranormal Curation, as with ghosts, every act leaves a trace, and these traces then get carried forwards and backwards across other levels of the platform, in turn “haunting” its past, present and future composition. It should also be understood that participants do not need to participate in all of the scales of the platform in order to meaningfully contribute and use it as a tool. For example, you are more than welcome to decide to enter for just the Meso Activity, or alternatively participate in only the Micro and Macro Activities - whatever is conducive to your preference and capacity, scheduling constraints, and reflective of your affinity to the topics.
An artist’s rendering.
Lastly, on this topic of Micro > Meso > Macro, it should be understood that these different scales of the activities in Paranormal Curation are not necessarily representative of their levels of difficulty, importance or time commitment. However, these scales do communicate a measure of the differing levels of “publicness” that are involved in each activity. For example, the Micro Activity in Paranormal Curation functions through a relatively private and “closed” context, involving only the participants in the activity’s assembled Curatorial Guild, whereas the Macro Activity operates very much in a public realm that is more “in the wild” and will require greater mediation and interaction with those outside of the activity’s assembled guild. Through these different scales of publicness represented and explored in the Micro, Meso and Macro Activities, the program itself seeks to operate with a ghostly and haunting behaviour, fluctuating throughout its willingness and desire to appear as a perceptible entity, and actively modulating the legibility of its outputs, the volume of its enunciations, the visibility of what it leaves behind...
How to Join an activity’s Curatorial Guild?
The process for joining a Curatorial Guild in order to take up specific activities in Paranormal Curation is rather easy. If you are reading this, you are welcome to simply email me at [email protected] expressing you would like to join an activity as a guild member, and I will add you to the list of participants and any related communications. Please note, you do not need to be a curator in order to join in a Curatorial Guild and participate in the activities! The framing of these group assemblages as Curatorial Guilds is a purely conceptual move that serves to focus a group’s attention on acts of mediation and care (core curatorial concerns) **as well as on the production of a shared craft (a key solidarity for any legitimate guild structure).
With that, I hope you can spend some time scanning the Resources, Activities + Schedule page, and that you’ll be in touch with me at some point to take part in Paranormal Curation!