Curating As Open Process: Conversations Between Political Ecology And Artistic Research

Curating As Open Process: Conversations Between Political Ecology And Artistic Research

Exhibition tour 2026

In this article for Art + Australia, I reflect on curating as an open, durational process: one grounded in listening, exchange and the gradual thickening of relationships across places, disciplines and knowledge systems.

The text traces a series of projects developed through and around the Cosmopolis platform, which I initiated at the Centre Pompidou in 2015. Rather than treating exhibitions as fixed arguments illustrated by selected works, I consider curating as a responsive method: a way of following artists’ research, identifying shared concerns, and creating conditions for dialogue between political ecology, artistic experimentation and situated forms of knowledge.

Across projects such as Cosmopolis #1: collective intelligence, Cosmopolis #1.5: enlarged intelligence, Cosmopolis #2: rethinking the human, Rethinking Nature and Green Snake: women-centred ecologies, artists and collectives address the colonial, capitalist and patriarchal structures that have shaped dominant ideas of nature. Their practices challenge the separations between human and non-human life, mind and environment, culture and ecology. They also foreground forms of knowledge that have often been marginalised: Indigenous cosmologies, community-based research, embodied practice, ecological memory, spiritual traditions and local environmental expertise.

The article follows a number of artists and collectives whose work is rooted in specific social and ecological contexts, from river systems in Sichuan, Tibet, Nepal and Bangladesh to contaminated landscapes in Campania and the Niger Delta. These practices do not simply represent environmental crisis. They generate tools, relationships and vocabularies for thinking otherwise: through mapping, film, ceramics, performance, seed preservation, collective pedagogy, participatory research and speculative storytelling.

At stake is a broader understanding of what art can do. The artists discussed here are not only cultural producers; they are researchers, collaborators, educators and civic actors. Their work shows how artistic practice can help build transnational conversations without flattening local specificity. Open-process curating, in this sense, becomes a way of sustaining attention: to places, to histories, to non-human life, and to the forms of responsibility required by shared ecological futures.

Read the full article in Art + Australia: Curating as Open Process: Conversations Between Political Ecology and Artistic Research