raphael daibert
hearing from, gathering with, writing towards, learning otherwise
teaching
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Curatorial Practice as Contact
seminar at UdK ~ winter semester 2025/2026
seminar description:
„§2.1. Contact is the conversation that starts in the line at the grocery counter with the person behind you while the clerk is changing the paper roll in the cash register. It is the pleasantries exchanged with a neighbor who has brought her chair out to take some air on the stoop. It is the discussion that begins with the person next to you at a bar. It can be the conversation that starts with any number of semiofficials or service persons—mailman, policeman, librarian, store clerk or counter person. As well, it can be two men watching each other masturbating together in adjacent urinals of a public john—an encounter that, later, may or may not become a conversation.”
(Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, Samuel R. Delany, p. 123, 1999)
This seminar was an open invitation to “think, act, recollect, fuse and circulate together with our communities-to-be”, as Cruising Curators collective proposes with their practice. Drawing primarily from queer writer Samuel R. Delany’s notion of contact, the main idea is to study – in an improvisational and being together sense of the word, as put by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney – the curatorial as a practice focused on the coincidental, the ephemeral and meaningful encounters a city can provide.
seminar at UdK ~ winter semester 2025/2026
seminar description:
„§2.1. Contact is the conversation that starts in the line at the grocery counter with the person behind you while the clerk is changing the paper roll in the cash register. It is the pleasantries exchanged with a neighbor who has brought her chair out to take some air on the stoop. It is the discussion that begins with the person next to you at a bar. It can be the conversation that starts with any number of semiofficials or service persons—mailman, policeman, librarian, store clerk or counter person. As well, it can be two men watching each other masturbating together in adjacent urinals of a public john—an encounter that, later, may or may not become a conversation.”
(Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, Samuel R. Delany, p. 123, 1999)
This seminar was an open invitation to “think, act, recollect, fuse and circulate together with our communities-to-be”, as Cruising Curators collective proposes with their practice. Drawing primarily from queer writer Samuel R. Delany’s notion of contact, the main idea is to study – in an improvisational and being together sense of the word, as put by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney – the curatorial as a practice focused on the coincidental, the ephemeral and meaningful encounters a city can provide.
With the brilliant participation of guests Ana Druwe, Luise Leon Elbert (Cruising Curators), Clementine Butler-Gallie (ReRouting Project), Cláudio Bueno and students: Sana Al-Kurdi, Ben Behrends, Mina Buker, Maria Eglau, Paulina Graw, Jiwoo Lee, Paula Pleuser, Mira Reeh and Luna Schamal.