TURBA: I’m really curious about the origins of Frakcija No. 55. We don’t know what motivated it, how it all came together in the beginning, and especially, why did it happen at that time and not twenty years earlier?
Petra Zanki (PZ): It started at the Choreographic Platform Austria in Graz 2009. Florian was talking to a programmer and she said, “Oh, I wish these dancers ‘would do something’ for us.” And we were talking and talking, and I just thought how interesting they were, the group of people who were there. And they were all curators. I was a choreographer and dancer. So, I thought how interesting it would be to make something. At the time I saw the piece that Tea had made with the reading by Marguerite Duras, La maladie de la mort. I was obsessed with that . . . how beautiful it was, and I wanted to meet this person, Tea. Then we went to Graz, and it was all this new world. I reached out to her because I really wanted to do it with somebody else, share the idea of a curator’s piece. And that’s how it started.
TURBA: You said there were a lot of curators there at that platform. Were they calling themselves curators?
Florian Malzacher (FM): No, I guess that is the point. My colleagues were usually rather referring to themselves as programmers, program directors, etc. There was a certain distrust of the term with its origin in the visual arts. A feeling that there was something pretentious about it—and that it was perhaps competing with the role of an artists. On the other hand, with a group of former theater studies students from Giessen, we had already founded in 2000 in Frankfurt the curators’ collective Unfriendly Takeover. I am not even sure why we called ourselves curators. Maybe inspired by Hans-Ulrich Obrist, an important reference at that time. When I joined steirischer herbst festival in Graz in 2006 “curator” was part of my offi cial title. But within the performing arts that was rather rare.
Tea Tupajić (TT): We purposely chose it for our performance work The Curators’ Piece that was performed by a cast of international curators. But the framework for the performance, conceptually and also structurally later on, was the notion of a “trial against art,” in which Petra and I took as a premise that we accused art of being guilty because it hadn’t saved the world. And the one thing that was necessary to understand about the root of that is that we come from the former Yugoslavia. Our wars were in the 1990s, and we were also quite young when we made The Curators’ Piece. We were raised by watching the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia on the television. In the forefront of our minds, of course, was the question of responsibility. It’s a metaphorical question: “Who was the one who was supposed to save our world from wars?” And so, when we opened the discussion on The Curators’ Piece, we really focused on the idea of responsibility. What is your responsibility within the program choices that you’re making, as well as what kind of consequences do your choices have for society? Quite often, the curators were reluctant to call themselves curators. They called themselves a bridge between artists and an audience, a friend of the artist, whatever. But when we said, no, you do have a responsibility and you have to assume it. It’s then that the conversation rose to another level, and it also enabled this issue of Frakcija to be framed in that way.
FM: Well, to be honest, aft er all these years, I still don’t understand why, in this trial, curators defended art and not artists. As if they were the legal representatives of art. Was it to prove that the curators were the reason for all the misery in the world? [laughs]
TT: It’s one of those questions that is impossible to answer. I think it has a lot to do with the history of our trials, that we were constantly, historically, trying to find someone to blame. You keep going higher up the responsibility ladder. This is how we came to the curator. S/he was also a symbolic, imaginary figure of somebody who could have made certain choices.
PZ: I believe it was also about a certain time, because suddenly seeing, at least for me, so many curators in one place at the Austrian platform who were talking about works of art. They were all from festivals or [production] houses. It was they who were choosing the artists. It was important for us to ask them questions. The curators have more power than the artists.
TURBA: Another question was about the symposium Beyond Curating: Strategies of Knowledge Transfer in Dance, Performance, and Visual Arts in Essen, Germany, in that same year. Were you all involved in that as well? It was focused on dance and visual arts. We were wondering why theater and music weren’t at the table for that issue of Frakcija.
FM: I am surprised to hear you say that. For me this edition was mainly about theater—but I have a very wide definition of theater. It can also include parts of choreography, performance art, installation art, etc. And we had authors from very different fields. For me the issue could also have been called “Curating Theater”—but of course that would have created misunderstandings. You are right though that we had no focus on music specifically.
TURBA: We had only four presenters from contemporary music and sound arts at our 2014 symposium on performing arts curation in Montreal because the whole discourse on curation hadn’t seemed to have emerged yet in that fi eld. But we wonder, was there a connection then between the Essen conference and your journal?
PZ: Something happened before that, at the International Network for Contemporary Performing arts meeting when we really started working on The Curators’ Piece. We talked to Florian about how we could make this piece happen with the ten curators I had met. And Tea liked the idea. The suggestion first came from Florian to visit this event in Berlin.
TT: I think by that time we had already published Frakcija, and that this is why they invited us for the presentation.
FM: We should just clarify that The Curators’ Piece is not the same thing as this edition of Frakcija. The Curators’ Piece came first, as an idea. It is a performance directed by Petra and Tea, I was just one of the performers. The concept for a special issue of Frakcija, the work of the three of us, was developed in parallel.
PZ: They invited us to the Beyond Curating conference to present our work. We started the conversation, and we asked a couple of people to work on the glossary of terms.
TURBA: In another vein, Yves Sheriff, one of TURBA’s editors, was very impacted by this issue of Frakcija at the time it came out. So, a decade later he asks, “Where do you think the outpourings or retractions and the identity territories that are shaping curatorial projects stand now? Have the preliminary suggestions for performing arts curation suggested in Frakcija been quickly overtaken by the margins of a new representation of the world, or have they caught on and so established themselves as models?” What do you think the impact of the journal has been?
FM: Well, the question of impact is complex of course. Yes, the magazine played a role in forming the discourse but it was also a moment in time when things emerged in different ways, initiated by various people. There was momentum, and Frakcija was part of this. And in the last ten years the discourse has evolved as has the curatorial praxis, especially with younger generations.
TT: It’s my impression that the biggest contribution that Frakcija made at the moment is that it established the concept of curator. The curator stopped being this ambiguous bridge between an artist and an audience. When we first started the project, it was perceived as something that would put a curator and the artist in a conflictual power relationship. And nobody wanted to be in that power relationship. After The Curators’ Piece and Frakcija, a lot of educational programs were founded in this new fi eld of curating. So, the biggest difference I see now is that people are deliberately using and claiming the title.
PZ: We were really surprised when we started doing this and were looking for other resources that we didn’t find any. It’s an interesting thing to be the first publication ever on the subject of curating performing arts. The first edition sold out quickly to universities everywhere in the world! And then we came to them saying, “Hey, we should probably do a second edition.” We published a second edition, but then budgets and funding were tight, so we couldn’t do more.
FM: Frakcija came at a moment when things started changing in the way in which festivals were perceived and what role curatorial thinking could play. It was not a sudden change, and it happened rather with the emergence of a new generation of curators. And an even younger generation today is very much informed by it—and, I would say, often even more by the discourse than by praxis. But maybe this is also already changing again since paradigms are shifting fast. Obviously, there is much more diversity, collective curating, and so on. These changes in curatorial discourse provide a lot of possibilities. In Frakcija we had a conversation with an older generation of curators, producers, theater scholars in which they described the beginning of many festivals and venues in Europe in the 1980s. It was clear: basically, none of the protagonists of that time was interested in curatorial concepts. A conversation with young protagonists today would be very different.
TURBA: On a similar note, another co-editor of TURBA, Sandeep Bhagwati, asks, “Could you expand on the subject of the usefulness or uselessness of providing theses through curation in the live arts? Have you seen, and maybe pursued, more fruitful approaches to curating live arts and to writing about it in the years since?”
FM: I used to be a theater critic before becoming a curator, and that informed my understanding of the work quite a bit. You always refer to concrete artistic works, your thinking is developed from concrete works. A lot of writing in theater studies, at least at that time, worked the other way around. One had a thesis and then looked for work to prove this theory.
TURBA: There is the exception of the artist-curators, of course, writing about their practice.
FM: Yes, but what is actually even more interesting than artists curating a festival or a venue is how curatorial thinking has entered artistic work itself. There are quite a few artists that see their artistic work at least partly as a curatorial process. For me that is much more productive than the increased curatorial discourse that circles mainly around itself, especially in the visual arts.
TT: I agree strongly with Florian’s thoughts and desires. That was such a beautiful and precious time. We’re from a time when writing about art came from watching art. I would be really interested in raising consciousness and awareness of all this knowledge that curators from the previous generations have, like those from the 1980s and 1990s. They were practitioners who understood art through watching a lot of art. They were also involved in the practical problems of creating festivals and connecting the art to their communities. It would be really nice to tap into that knowledge and make it into a discourse.
PZ: I was thinking in a completely opposite direction. So you call TURBA hybrid. And I was thinking, how interesting it would be to see where that specific form can go in a more experimental way so that it’s not only about what it means to be curating, but how that process can evolve into something else completely. It would be more interesting to see what kind of hybrid forms are happening there in the future and that are completely dissolving the form and creating new things.
TURBA: Moving on to co-editor Tawny Andersen’s question, “How has the institutionalization of the performing arts affected the role of the live arts curator, the economy and ecology of the performing arts world?”
PZ: We often think this system in which I’m living right now in the US is the harshest. In Italy, it’s the harshest of all the systems because it doesn’t allow for artists to fail and experiment as much. It only allows for success. So you measure yourself in terms of that success. Otherwise, you’re not able to survive or, you just move to Europe. I lived through different systems like socialism/ communism, and there were no arts other than state art or folklore. And then things started changing, evolving; individualism was allowed. And then we moved to Western Europe, finally becoming a part of something that we had all dreamed about. And then with the same idea of an American dream, you moved to America because you only see the shiny part, and then you see the downside. But you learn to live with it. I choose to live here, although it’s very difficult for me.
TURBA: And so, where is everyone’s home right now?
TT: I’m in Amsterdam.
PZ: I’m in Brooklyn.
FM: Berlin.
TURBA: And where do you think the art world has moved in the last decade?
FM: That’s actually the hidden question in this conversation. If Frakcija would be published now, what would be its obvious shortcomings? Let’s say there are three dominant topics at the moment. The first are the questions about postcolonialism, which we did address through an Eastern European perspective. But besides this, the topic was absent, and the word isn’t mentioned. Secondly, can you imagine a publication not having the word identity politics in it today? And, in a way, related to that, there is the question of collective curating. Which is a big thing for younger curators. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, there is the question of the climate catastrophe. Environmental questions appear in Frakcija a little, but they are not the main issue as they hopefully would be today. But—actually, I am rather happy and surprised that all of these topics are at least present somewhere in the publication. Obviously today they would have to play a much more central role.
TURBA: I really like that reflection as a last set of critical thoughts. What a lovely reunion.
Florian Malzacher is a performing arts curator, dramaturge and writer, a graduate of the Institute for Applied Theater Studies at the University of Giessen. Current projects include Training for the Future (with Jonas Staal) and the discourse platform The Art of Assembly. Among his recent publications are Empty Stages, Crowded Flats: Performativity as Curatorial Strategy (2017, with Joanna Warsza), and Gesellschaftsspiele: Politisches Theater heute (2020, English edition forthcoming).
Tea Tupajić is a theater and fi lm director, who studied at the Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb. She initiates long-lasting projects exploring the potential of art when encountered with complex political issues. Her projects The Curators’ Piece (2011, with Petra Zanki), Variete Europe (2013), The Disco (2015), Spy School (2015), DARK NUMBERS (2018), and Bosnian Girl(2021) were presented internationally.
Petra Zanki is choreographer and theater maker living in Brooklyn, New York, graduate in Comparative Literature and French from the University of Arts and Philosophy in Zagreb. Her performance works include Paces (2010), The Curators’ Piece(2011, with Tea Tupajić), and Pleasant Place (2019). Growing up in Croatia during the war, Petra’s interest remains the transformation of pain into landscapes of beauty for the benefit of humanity.