Curatorium is a collective of anthropologists, First Nations scholars and performers, scientists, designers, environmental philosophers, historians, filmmakers, artists, and activists. We came together in an attempt to create the space for those who work differently to find one another. To find ways of working together that might generate new affirmations and critiques of what anthropology makes possible.
In 2022 we hosted The Sessions, an online lecture series featuring Anna L. Tsing, Michael Taussig, Steven Feld, and Jilda Andrews.
In 2024 we published a double special issue of The Australian Journal of Anthropology, Epistemic attunements – Regenerating anthropology’s form. This Curatorium special issue of TAJA is a one-off, likely never to be repeated experiment in academic publishing. Together with our contributors, we co-created a series peer-reviewed articles that challenge the traditional form of the academic article. We built a website for the 11 custom designed, peer-reviewed intermedial articles that have been curated into two themed issues, FORM and REACH. This project was a huge undertaking that we pursued without institutional funding or support, motivated, perhaps naively, by the potential and possibility of working with and remaking existing structures so that we might model a path in a direction that others might be inspired to follow.
Our gratitude goes out to each of our contributors and to our editorial collective for their sustained commitment and creativity toward producing this double special issue. There have been so many lessons learned and horizons expanded.
Curatorium aligns with projects that immerse themselves in questions and challenges
of knowledge creation, while grappling with representations, methodologies of making together, co-creative expression, and formal experimentation that amplify the many urgent efforts to decolonise the future. We search together for new kinds of traction and relational force in the world and, by extension, new forms of accountability. In doing so we seek to work with emerging vectors of tension, discord, and tenacity unfolding within the worlds in which we work.
Curatorium profoundly acknowledges the many First Nations scholars, filmmakers, curators,
and artists whose critical-creative engagements continue to both challenge and transform anthropology. The provocations and critiques that they have brought to the field have radically sharpened our shared reckonings of the situated political, ethical, and aesthetic stakes in such work.
We acknowledge too, a great indebtedness and respect for the ground-breaking legacies of Australian anthropology in areas of visual, sensory and media anthropology. It’s our hope to contribute anew to the opening, reconfiguring, and energising of the discipline and its transdisciplinary reach.
Curatorium Editorial Collective
Victoria Baskin Coffey
Jennifer Deger
Caleb Kingston
Sebastian J. Lowe
Lisa Stefanoff
Contact: Curatorium.Collective@gmail.com
Follow us on Instagram: @c_cltv