365 Curatorship : Interview with Raphael Fonseca

Could you tell us a bit about what guided your curatorship in this first edition of Curadoria 365?

RF : Any selection of works for a virtual curator is a challenge; in the case of Curadoria 365 specifically, a differential is the fact that the starting point is the work of the dozens of participating galleries. These galleries have very different profiles and include only a few works on the platform. Unlike, therefore, the curatorship of an exhibition where direct dialogue with the artists is essential and everything is thought according to our wishes and the limits of the projects, here my look receives a first “filter” which are the selections previously made by gallery owners. Bearing this specificity in mind, I began to perceive some points of dialogue between some works and I chose to select those that go against something that has interested me in recent years: the place of metamorphosis, of transformation, of an appearance of the body in a state of change before the public eye. As with almost everything I do, it was the images themselves that made this kind of connection possible; I didn’t get to the platform and tried to “illustrate” some kind of previous cut.

How do you see the possibility of curatorships via virtual platforms?

RF : I think that, as I have learned since last year, there are many ways to think about this relationship. I tend to think that the experiences with audiovisual and the works done for the digital language — such as gifs, audio works, webart and the like — tend to be happier and bring their experimental character to the visualization on the platforms. It is interesting to see the works photographically, but it is undeniable that the experience of seeing a painting, sculpture, drawing and even a photograph via the web is not like seeing them in person; we lose scale, our body’s relationship with those materials, its relationship with architecture and — perhaps most importantly — we cannot see how other people react to that same work. Anyway, at a time when staying at home remains the safest way to enjoy the visual arts, virtual platforms are welcome, make it possible for people all over the world to view those works for free and, to a certain extent, can even have an educational character for the public.