Endings

A final post for 2021, to celebrate the fact I finished my PhD this year and passed my viva. Am delighted to have had the opportunity to do the research, supported by Birkbeck, University of London, where I taught between 2006 and 2019. In 2014, my former colleague there, Ben Cranfield, suggested I simply put in a proposal. A curatorial scholarship allowed me to start in 2015, with Ben, Patrizia di Bello and Luisa Calè as supervisors. I consider myself to have been very lucky with their excellent support, great colleagues and in the end two knowledgeable examiners – Gilda Williams and Alison Green – with whom I had a very fruitful conversation.

It’s been an interesting and enriching experience, allowing me to reflect on my work as an editor and think through how publishing can be thought of as an integral area of curatorial practice, which has also been influenced by my teaching. Reflecting on a series of past publishing projects I was involved in and looking at how certain ideas have filtered through in curatorial discourse, I have come to an understanding of how we can see publications/ing as manifestations of a complex intra-active ecology of practices and embodiments of ‘the curatorial’.