Curating Contemporary Art (MA)
Lydia Antoniou
Nothing gentle will remain is a publication inviting artists and audiences to speculate on how we gather together, now and in the future. The publication condenses a year-long exchange with Open School East and contributing artists Josefin Arnell , Pauline Curnier Jardin, Paul Maheke , Dipesh Pandya , Naïmé Perrette with Sara Giannini and Sam Keogh.
The project was initially conceived as a series of artist commissions to be presented across Margate this spring. These were to engage with the different timescales, paces and rhythms of a seaside town – from its ancient myths to its daily tides – ultimately inviting audiences to come together and take up space; to explore what might happen if we spill over and ooze out.
Nothing gentle will remain now reimagines this proposition and takes the form of a publication that combines research material and artist commissions. The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and worldwide protests against police brutality and systemic racism, have called into question our notion of collective gathering, turning it from a naively utopian intention, to something seemingly impossible, to a necessity in order to demand real and significant change. Our intention to imagine collective futures and take up space has become a reality, something that thousands of people are doing right now, despite the many threats and dangers of claiming public space at this time. As the project progresses to its next phase, we will continue to speculate on what collective gathering means in 2020 and beyond.
Nothing gentle will remain is a collaboration between Lydia Antoniou, Caterina Guadagno, Nora Kovacs, Titus Nouwens and William Rees, in partnership with Open School East.The title is borrowed from CAConrad’s poem of thesame name, published in ECODEVIANCE: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness (2014), with kind permission from CAConrad.
On Wednesday, June 24th I got suspended from the RCA, together with 190 students– losing all access rights to my email and Zoom account – because I wasn't able to pay the remaining £375 of my tuition fees within the designated deadline. Moving through feelings of profound grief, intolerable emptiness and persistent anger, one among many things that was very clear to me, though by no means new, is just how interconnected we are. How misleadingly and violently we have behaved and treated others under neoliberal assumptions and practices within institutions. My fellow peers and collaborators are the main reason I am currently able to write this statement. The above paragraph is an important fragment of my statement since it allowed me to solidify the questions and notions that were embedded in my curatorial practice and research throughout my studies at the RCA. Open forums of facilitating exchanges within the experimental space of art, between the oppressed, ungrievable bodies that exist in the postcolonial, patriarchal, sexual binary epistemologies of the hegemonic discourse have acted as catalysts to my perception of individuals as collective bodies of organising and solidarity building, rather than as individuals who engage with displayed artworks alone within cultural institutions.
Lydia’s curatorial practice and research explore the potentialities of public programming to generate alliances across disciplinary and institutional thresholds, through bodies’ assemblies towards the production of common space. Building upon her architectural research on the production of commons through forms of solidarity and cooperative networks that emerge from the oppressive politics of neoliberalism, her current research focuses on the potentialities of feminist resistance and collective care. These act as catalysts of a durational process, towards the construction of a hospitable space for the other in the governing process of the hegemonic discourse, through general assemblies.
Existing in this rather strange, fascinating moment in which the canonised institutions are still required to represent and reproduce a type of canonised, suspendable citizen by the discourse, Lydia identifies the need to perceive the interdisciplinary nature of the arts as an experimental field. Performing space, performing through space, or even producing space through performative action is enabling the potentialising of existing spatial structures and curatorial practices, through collectively claiming the rights of bodies to appear.
Lydia's curatorial practice is deeply enmeshed in her research as she usually occupies herself with contributing to collaborative projects. Together with Angela Blanc, she has convened While Standing in Line for Death; a durational feminist filmmakers' salon, she is a member of para_site_sight_cite; an artistic exchange platform oscillating between Athens and London and co-founder of the film production company based in Athens, RM productions. Lydia has contributed to public programmes and exhibitions at the Benaki Museum, the Onassis Cultural Center, the SNFCC, Greek National Opera, Athens and Epidaurus Festival in Athens, documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel, Royal College of Art, the Feminist Library in London, Open School East in Margate, Institute of Anxiety in Prague, Greek Pavilion of Venice Biennale and Berlin Biennale in Germany.
