While ‘Collective & Collaborative Curating’ is literally on everyone’s lips and phenomenal in the art world, but why is it necessary; what has it suggested; how has it been practiced and embodied, particularly in the performing-arts context?

In terms of how it works, the collective or collaborative curatorship has enacted a shared and horizontal leadership structure compared to the preconceived solo-genius curator with the top-to-bottom power structure. Furthermore, in this volume we, as a collaborative team, aim to reflect this current in a variety of cultural and institutional contexts. From examining its historical backgrounds and case studies to reimagining tuning-in and not-yet-landing issues and methods of collective curation, we acknowledge curating is not understood as a hermetic, linear process, but rather as an evolving, often negotiated practice shaped by both global and local dynamics.

We propose a cluster of several entry points to approach intersectional notions and practices of collective and networked ecosystems of curating. Together with the authors and contributors for this issue, we aim at decentralizing and decolonizing existing super-curator modes and theoretical approaches, in order to understand other ways and histories of curating and its fabulous fabulation, performing the connectivity and transdisciplinary practices between minds, languages, and movements in a collective curation. Through artist-led case studies, art-based curatorial collectivity demonstrates social engagement with communities of an internet of things. In performing arts, curating collectively as tuning-in and embodied practices performs the process of what arrived, is arriving, and gestures in the future and not yet while memories and archives of curatorial practices is a becoming of post-curation.

By consciously choosing these intersecting clusters rather than a linear chapter structure, this volume reflects the fluidity of collective curatorial processes. Each of the articles could be accessed and navigated via continually recombined keywords between the clusters, discovering unexpected connections and tracing the rhizomatic structure of curating. In the editorial Q&A session, we reflected on our collaborative process as an editorial team and presented it as unfinished. The result is not a closed system, but rather an open space for thinking and reading that invites an understanding of collective and collaborative curatorial practices as fluid, multifaceted, and transformative processes.

Sigrid Gareis & Nicole Haitzinger & Gwendolin Lehnerer & River Lin