New process leader and curator for Grafikens Hus
New process leader and curator for Grafikens Hus
We welcome Mmabatho Thobejane as a freelance process leader and curator for our project ”Collecting Thoughts” . Together with an expert council, we will in the coming years formulate a vision for a future collection. Thobejane’s curatorial practice revolves around black and decolonial feminism. She is also curator and editor at the Mirror Institution and was recently engaged by the Center for Curating the Archive , Cape Town.
We asked her three questions about her thoughts on the project.
Hi, welcome! How does it feel to start working on this project?
– Thank you for the welcome! It feels extremely exciting. I feel really inspired and challenged by the conversations raised by the project, namely the history of collecting and archiving and what it means to collect and archive today. Primarily, I think Samlande Tankar / Collecting Thoughts is a great opportunity to not only think about but also enact, an open, possibly decolonial, notion of a museum and the acts of collecting and archiving. Investigating these questions and topics with printmaking at the foundation, I think, provides an expansive, and possibly accessible, base.
What will happen now, what can you tell us about what happens next?
– The next steps are mainly incubation and research based. Grafikens Hus has already done so much internal and external work around these questions so I’m currently immersing myself in what is documented of that work while also reaching out to and meeting members of the expert council. The expert council brings a wealth of knowledge and perspectives that are and will be invaluable to Samlande Tankar / Collecting Thoughts and will, thus, form a big part of the process, so it is important to begin my work by touching base with them and coordinating how we will work.
How will our audience be able to follow the process?
– I may be quite quiet while laying the foundations for the project and the various collaborations that make it up, but the audience will be able to follow the process via Grafikens Hus social media pages and eventually through a monthly report written in a more personal tone . The monthly report will try to document the more nuanced aspects that make up this process, which include thoughts and questions around, not only the intellectual but also affective and ethical aspects of the process. Further down the line, the audience will also be able to take part in programming related to Samlande Tankar / Collecting Thoughts. I’m looking forward to all parts of the process but especially that part.
Photo: Lou Mouw