“Playing with Curatorial Practices”
Clara Rocha & Bia Morgado

Clara and Bia presented the challenges of visiting big art exhibitions like the São Paulo Art Biennial and the Documenta in Kassel. In their experience, these mainstream cultural events appeal to many but are accessible only to a few. Most visitors engage in far and expensive travelling and research and plan exhaustively beforehand. Regardless, once on-site, they are confronted by impossible scales of spectatorship.

 

Confronted with this scenario, Clara and Bia created a protocol for sharing labour and harbour intimacy in the context of such large-scale events. Accordingly, one person would research the exhibition and prepare a series of instructions for the other, who would carry on the visit guided by these given prompts. Their complicity fostered durational, playful and critical encounters with art and allowed them to develop a curatorial practice for meaningful engagements and collectivized spectatorship.

 

Towards the end, they invited us also to play. We all gave it a go at one of their instructions, created in response to the work of artist Jorgge Menna Barreto - which was being exhibited in the Liverpool Biennial 2021 at the time.

Paola Debellis Alvarez