Bassam El Baroni – författare

In a so-called post-neoliberal world, it can seem like culture is stuck in a perpetual presentism where history and the future are but mere data points for speculative calculations of gains, and culture seems all but a string of endlessly repeating commodities. In such an environment, can we rescue the future for art, for curating and the curatorial, and for culture more generally? Do we need to? What function do concepts like the future and futurity play in the field of curating and the curatorial? What use is 'the future' to curators and others working within the field of the curatorial? The Edinburgh Companion to Curatorial Futures is the first curatorial studies volume to engage with the increasingly ubiquitous concept of 'the future' and its exponential growth in the fields of artistic research, curating, art and academia. What is it we need to know as we think towards the future?

The revisioning of our infrastructural futures, local and global relationalities, and historical and political legacies.Forming a comprehensive picture of the multiple processes, regulations, institutions, technologies, networks, and operations that we have come to understand as the distributed infrastructural arena in which we act, yield, and plot is a perennial challenge. Over the past decade, a growing number of artists, theorists, curators, and researchers have moved from “institutional critique” to “infrastructural critique,” or toward “infrastructural speculation,” in which they explore the potential of creative infrastructure-related visions and scenarios. In attempts to counter the impasse of “the cancelled future,” art has immersed itself in systemic critiques and propositional thinking, addressing major challenges, such as the rampant financialization of the economy and runaway climate change. From questions around space settlements to the possibility of repurposing blockchain infrastructures and financial instruments for redistributive purposes, and from the diagrammatic potential of infrastructural thinking in artistic practices to scenario planning and economic strategizing, this collection of new essays brings together critical analysis from a broad group of contributors engaged in the revisioning of our infrastructural futures. Their interrogations span local and global relationalities, historical and political legacies, as well as future-oriented infrastructural hypotheses.