Paranormal Curation
This presentation will share details about a platform that I produced for Agnes called Paranormal Curation. First, I’ll describe the formal structure of the project, and then I will share a bit of collaborative writing that occurred on either end it, which remixed and repurposed some of its methods.
So, Paranormal Curation is a project that was produced adjacent to an exhibition called a guest + a host = a ghost, which took place earlier this year in the Etherington House, and on which I worked as its ‘Shadow Curator.’ Shadow Curating is a concept that was originally proposed by the Scottish curator Nuno Sacramento in 2011 on a long-term project called the town is the venue. The Shadow Curator is a figure who Sacramento describes as “constantly proposing a layer of enquiry and analysis with regard to all aspects of a project, in order to contribute to a consolidation of the methodology.”
My own use of Shadowing Curating for the Agnes exhibition tried to push Sacramento’s idea a bit further – and evolve or mutate the figure of shadow into that of the ghost. Throughout my process, the figure of the ghost became a key avatar and collaborator on the program’s design, as well as on the stated themes of the proposed activities.
So, with the ghost in mind, I initiated a learning platform for collaborative “paranormal” curatorial experimentation, which took up the Etherington House’s abandoned broom closet as its headquarters. The closet-based projects that emerged involved 12 Kingston-based artists, curators, and writers over the course of four months, who were ushered into the main exhibition through the portal of Paranormal Curation’s dusty micro-institute. Over time, the broom closet experienced its own re-imaginings, with the humble nook functioning for us as a writing room, a book and PDF repository, an amplification system, a recording studio, and a radio station.
The organizational structure of Paranormal Curation tried to shape itself around the complicated relationship that ghosts have with their publics. I wanted to develop a program for artists and curators that – like the ghost – had the ability to modulate and play with its forms of publicness, operating on different registers of visibility and legibility. This resulted in the stacking of three scales of collaborative activities, a Micro-Activity, a Meso-Activity and a Macro-Activity, with each of these having their parameter of publicness dialed up or down in specific ways:
First there is the Micro-Activity, called the Shadow Library. This functions within a relatively closed guild of practitioners, with members of the Shadow Library acting as one another’s public. The activity explores the production of hand-written marginalia and material alterations of books and PDFs as ghostly acts of mediation, haunting a text’s future reader. With the Shadow Librarians Hilary and Peggy, various haunted and overgrown publications were produced. Some selections from the Shadow Library are here for you peruse after the event if you’re interested.
Secondly there was the Meso-Activity, called House Band. This activity functioned more publicly in the space of the exhibition itself. Its aim was to covertly embed sound into the Etherington House, haunting it from its own architectural margins. Sound was explored as a tool to alter the way in which a site is navigated and sensed by a visitor, sometimes imperceptibly. This activity culminated in the production of a collaborative 15-minute soundscape with bandmates Bojana, Jung-Ah, Mo, Brandon, and Elyse, which builds around a deconstructed cover of Madonna’s county-dance hit, Don’t Tell Me. This was embedded into the staircase of the Etherington House as a loop near the end of the exhibition and will soon be released on other formats.
Lastly was the Macro-Activity, called Phantom Market. This activity is still ongoing and has yet to really emerge – but it has the highest publicness parameter of the platform. In considering the aims of Agnes Reimagined, to return the Etherington House into a home, the Phantom Merchants proposed to take this idea to a somewhat absurdist point, by placing the Etherington House on the local real estate market through the form of a Kijiji AD. The small working group that formed around this idea, with Bojana, Andrei, and myself, together discussed the ethics, humour, and performativity of this proposed gesture – and we’re still in the process of determining if and how it could circulate publicly.
One last structural element to note about Paranormal Curation is that the program is meant haunt itself. Each activity is intended to run at least twice, back-to-back, and with different groups when there are enough committed participants. This creates a sort of crease or fold in the platform, which becomes a point of translation. In other words, when one round of Paranormal Curation ends and another begins, the guild that has previously formed around a specific activity inducts its new members through the codification and teaching of its shared crafts. With this translation aspect to the platform, participants in Paranormal Curation are required to become para-gogues or peer-agogues of their own workshop activities, externalizing their otherwise ephemeral, home-grown methodologies in a way that allows for them to be taught and used by the activity’s future practitioners, and beyond.
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To make a slight pivot now: On either end of the Paranormal Curation platform there were two critical, reflexive writing practices that took place. The first was taken up by myself through the production of what I called the Infra-Ordinary Journal. This journal simply contains daily entries of descriptive writing, inspired by George Perecs’ Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, capturing a steady flow of miniscule events and sounds that take place in the Etherington House over the first two weeks of the exhibition.
The other writing practice emerged collaboratively near the end of the project between me and the writer and curator Dylan Robinson. I had been in conversation with Dylan over the course of the Paranormal Curation project, going on regular walks together at Little Cat, where I would give updates on the exhibition and the related learning platform I was coordinating. We had discussions about the ‘turning away’ from a site as a site-specific response – about the colonial loudness of the Etherington House – and about finding ways to break down and interrupt insistent architectural demands and ambiences.
On one of these walks, an affinity was generated when discussing the “Marginalia Relay” method that had been invented by the group of Shadow Librarians. Their activity was discussed as a haunted interpretation of book “thickening.” This is an 18th century material reading practice, which resulted not in not a reduction of a given text, but rather its wholesale transformation through an amplification of marginalia. Significantly thickened books and volumes often “deranged” rather than reiterated the conceptual trajectory and goals of the printed text. (I’m paraphrasing the multigraph collective here)
On our walk, a connection was made between the Shadow Library’s practices of thickening with Dylan’s own exploration of the dramaturgical tradition of Regietheatre – an act of radical adaptation of an existing opera or play, which doesn’t seek to centre that which is being derived from.
Following this, Dylan and I devised our own altered process for the thinning, thickening, and redirecting of texts, building this through remixing the dynamics that were produced and tested in the Shadow Librarians practices. Our modified structure for thickening was then applied to derange and fully transform the Infra-Ordinary Journal’s descriptive portraits of the Etherington House’s architectural atmospheres.
So, I wanted to end my presentation today by reading first an excerpt from the original Infra-Ordinary journal, followed by an excerpt of the altered text that Dylan and I produced through this method. This is meant to highlight a unique capacity of Paranormal Curation’s invented and codified methods to be reapplied and remixed in different contexts and scales, where they can mobilize sets of adjacent “sister” practices.
So first we will hear the Infra-Ordinary Journal text, describing a moment in the home in its early empty state, and then we will hear that same entry after it has been haunted by the altered Shadow Librarian process devised by Dylan and myself:
The Infra Ordinary Journal – February 18th
There’s knocking on a door upstairs. No one answers. Then a door opens. Likely Agnes staff. Frost on the glass. Bird sounds bleeding into the home. Someone is heard whistling a tune. Footsteps then enter the House. A person enters wearing a long white parka. I emerge and say “hi.” They say nothing back. They walk to the staircase as if they are looking for something. They peer up the stairs, pausing for about a five seconds. Looking and waiting. They seem to see nothing, or they see what they want to see, but I don’t know what it is. Then they turn around, and walk in the other direction without saying a word. Now they are walking away from the house. I hear them leaving. The sound of their wet boots on the polished concrete.
And now here is the same entry after having passed through a few rounds the collaborative thickening method:
A open door opens to an open door to another open door
This one has a view of more open doors
And the still chandelier
And the frost on the glass
Flakes seen through thick curtains
And then sound of a door opening on another open door.
A hand-written note on the door that reads:
A score for a visitor: Approach the house and then suddenly walk away, then enter the house, and then walk away, then walk away again. Down the ramp, hear your wet boots on polished concrete, terrazzo, composite. If you can leave, and then do leave, and then see leaves, you’ve left it, and then you can leave the house again, just like this, leaving it again and again and again.