Abstract/Summary

The thesis Echoing with a Difference––Curating Voices and the Politics of Participation, probes participatory curatorial practices that entail agonistic relations, embodying, voicing and instigating conflicts. Taking the global wave of the post-financial crisis protests in 2011 as an entry point, the thesis critically discusses its impact on participatory artistic and curatorial practices, and the ambivalent manifestations of this impact in collective vocal utterings. Here, the focus lies on my own curatorial projects – The Infiltrators (Tel Aviv, 2014), Preaching to the Choir (Herzliya, 2015), (Un)Commoning Voices and (Non)communal Bodies (Reading, 2019), and Voice Over (Maastricht, 2020) – and how they respond to changes in perceptions of identity and to the silencing of alternative voices. Focusing on both the potential power as well as the challenges of participation, the thesis reexamines participatory practices that make use of the human voice between the conversational to the antagonistic (Bishop, Kester, Marchart). Building from postcolonial, feminist, and critical theory, I formulate participatory curating and research not as a simple echoing of others but as an interpretation and reverberation with differences, following Spivak who analysed Ovid’s tale arguing that Echo’s repetition marked a difference which disclosed the truth of self-knowledge. This embodied, performative position (Rogoff, Garces, Bala), entangled between the personal and the professional and relating to gender constructs in research and curatorial discourse (Buurman, Richter, Fournier), searches to connect to other bodies and voices to create a collectivity based on situated knowledge (Haraway). Infiltrating the borders between the participatory and the performative as well as between the representational and the political realms, this practice-based research attempts to define what the role of a participatory curator might entail as a conflictual mediator. The thesis therefore serves as a call for curators to embody polyphonic contradictions and to imagine different futurities, through the notion of preenactment (Marchart) – an artistic enactment of a political event that has not yet occurred; to function as a double agent in the liminal sphere between the wish to generate conflicts and the need to maintain their borders.