‘Curatela’: Towards an Unhurried Politics of Attention in Post-Representational Curating sets out to examine curating as a practice of embodied criticism, mobilising affects, and how to define the cultural institution as an instigator of a new social contract in the expanded field of contemporary cultural activity. Through a curatorial approach, ‘situated knowledge’ is examined as a relational condition and a speculative ethics, only able to operate under the paradoxical processes that render the multitude of relations, making visible and tangible the histories we think with, dissent within and think for. The post-francoist Spanish context serves as the framework of this practice-led investigation; and ‘Editing’, ‘Storytelling’ and ‘Caring’ are the three chapters putting to work experiences with history.

‘Editing (Thinking with)’ is set in Spain during the indignados movement in 2011 in order to problematise the crisis of representation and criticality and to claim the need of an unhurried politics of attention, an argument that stems from Concreta, a Spanish-language journal I cofounded in 2012 in the heat of the anti-austerity movements. ‘Storytelling (Dissenting within)’ steps back to the 1990s to explore the increasing mediation and professionalisation of a cultural activity invested in diluting the boundaries between authors, participants and audiences, and the convergence of an asynchronous institutional critique that paradoxically neglects what it advocated at first. Drawing on previous chapters, ‘Caring (Thinking for)’ discusses how to address care as a constituent part of a feminist practice, set in a framework of interdependence, but also alongside the processes of civil mediation. It proposes to embed the production of knowledge and exhibition making in worldly experiences, in order to make transparent how the way we think with others leads us to hold multiple ends of sometimes divergent positions.

Mining the often-strained relations between labour, cultural workers and institutional activism, this investigation ultimately argues that the practice of curating can contribute to learning from past experiences and claim, a ‘curatela’, a sensitive middle ground to shape a set of common practices where the desire to interact with one another defines the set of conditions from which to collectively operate.