Incidents of Travel / Near-Future Artworlds Curatorial Disruption Foresight Group

Following earlier editions of Latitudes’ ‘Incidents of Travel’—first developed during a residency in Mexico City (Casa del Lago, 2012) and later in Hong Kong (Spring Workshop, 2013)—the initiative took on a new iteration in San Francisco. Three specially commissioned tours functioned as expanded studio visits with artist Amy Balkin; the artist-curator collective Will Brown (a collaborative project by David Kasprzak, Jordan Stein, and Lindsey White); and outsider librarians Megan and Rick Prelinger. While rooted in the Bay Area, these tours also connected with Latitudes’ research into the carbon cycle.

As part of the residency, Latitudes organised the closed-door seminar ‘Near-Future Artworlds Curatorial Disruption Foresight Group’, first developed in May 2015 for the International Curatorial Retreat in Bari, Italy. Conceived as an evolving forum for informal dialogue on megatrends and the future of contemporary art institutions, the seminar convened participants from the Bay Area with expertise in institutional prototyping and emergent forms of usership. In the San Francisco iteration, emphasis was placed on cross-pollination between design thinking and curatorial thinking. Discussions also touched on the notion of the post-disciplinary, as well as question of appropriate speeds, scale or periodicities of institutions.

Latitudes further contributed to two of Kadist Art Foundation’s online initiatives: first, a ten-day Instagram take over; and second, participation in the One Sentence Exhibition (OSE), for which curators were invited to write or select a single sentence, with each word hyperlinked to an image, video, text or website. The result is a compact architecture that accompanies readers as they navigate far-reaching corners of the internet.