Solar system as it really is and curating in/as common/s

Tyzlik-Carver, Magda (2013) Solar system as it really is and curating in/as common/s. Researching BWPWAP [Back When Pluto Was A Planet], 2 (1). ISSN 2245-7755

Abstract / Summary

‘We have to describe the solar system as it really is and not as we would like it to be’ (‘Pluto Loses Status as a Planet’). These words by Iwan Williams, the chairman of a panel which demoted Pluto to a status of a ‘dwarf planet’ in 2006, invoke so well, though most likely unintentionally, the particular kind of space that I regularly attend as a curator and researcher. As a practitioner at work, curating and researching, I find myself often at the disjuncture so neatly defined by this statement: between the apparent real and the imaginary, between what is and what I hope for. In my practice, this space of separation is between what curating is, how it is defined and practised, and what I would like it to be. I find that it is through the practice that I am able to articulate my desires, through doing it. There it is. This fluency is less present in the writing about it, however. And there I so often mask the fact that I fail, when I pretend that what I would like it to be really is.

Perhaps one reason for this is the subject of my research which proposes to understand curating in/as common/s. If the common, as Hardt and Negri say (256), is discovered and produced through joyful encounters, then perhaps writing about curating in/as common/s should be also done with others. And so, even as I am writing it now in the solitude of my study, with books and papers scattered around me, with multiple browser windows open, with multiple versions of this paper that I started and never finished, I will attempt to practice the joyful encounter now: an event of encountering texts, words, and people, their ideas and theories, and software and hardware too, though that reminds me that not all is full of joy.

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