Irene Campolmi
Curator (DK)
Irene Campolmi is a curator and researcher based in Copenhagen. She has focused her work on performance for many years, through which she researches postcolonial, queer and feminist theories. Currently, she is a curator and researcher at CC Copenhagen Contemporary on the project "Yet, it Moves!" which won the Bikuben Vision Award 2021, Denmark's most prestigious curatorial award. The project explores new forms of collaboration between scientists, curators and artists, and it is developed in collaboration with Niels Bohr Institute, Copenhagen; CERN, Geneva; Interactive Minds Centre, Aarhus and Mod Lab at UC Davis.Since 2019, she has been the Head Art Program and Curator of Enter Art Program, a publicly funded satellite program of performances and talks in conjunction with Enter Art Fair.
In 2022, she was the Curator of the International Performance Festival "Walk&Talk" in San Miguel, Azores Islands and the Curator of the Performance Festival Art In A Day with the Creator Projects. She has worked as an independent curator and a researcher for twelve years in art museums and institutions across the world, including the Museum of Art in Joliette, Canada; The Power Plant, Toronto; MAAT, Lisbon; Copenhagen Contemporary, Copenhagen; KØS in Køge; MAH, Terceira; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen. She was the co-curator of the Estonian Pavilion Birth V. Hi&Bye by Kris Lemsalu at the 58th Venice Biennial. In the past, her curatorial research and practice have focused on curatorial ethics. Before joining the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen as a PhD Fellow (2013-2016), she worked as a researcher at the Max Planck Institute research group "Objects in the Contact Zone: The Cross-Cultural Lives of Things".
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I can't remember the exact moment I realised I wanted to become a curator. But I remember the desire to do make something lasting; that I remember quite well. Museums, the institution I have been fascinated the most since I was a child, would do this magic: they would keep an object within their walls, give it a space - in a gallery or in a storage- and preserve that material memory and the stories it carried from oblivion.
I definitively wanted to do something in my life that would live beyond me and the finitude of my existence. I know, it sounds like a megalomenia or an impossible dream. But, I always had the ambition that, one day, people would in the midst of their chaotic lives, remember that feeling of experiencing the infinite through a work of art - from visiting the Sixtine Chapel, to looking at the Forbidden City on a travellign agency advertisement magazine to looking at the Neolitic paitings in the Lascaux caves on an art history book.
I would have that feeling of eternity looking at these creations because they made me feel part, even with my limitations, of a larger world and an eternal history. I have always thought that if humans have been able to create objects, frescos, art experiences that would be carried by human memory for centuries, I could have also striven to do something that would have impact and therefore, last in this world.
I think the wish to create that feeling in people's body is still present in everything I curate. The only difference today is that the dream can only be achieved with fundraising, obtaining a concrete budget, organizing artists' fees, production expenses, workforce salaries, and finally follow governamental regulations.
And I must say that it's where the dream becomes challenging, the 'no-es' discourage you, and the anger of realising that you can't make your ambitious project that you hoped would change the world happen becomes real.
Here, it's the moment when one could face the option of becoming 'lazy' as you name it, for adjusting the dream to the means.
And you know, as a curator, that if you wanna keep your job, you always need to adjust the dream to the means you have at your disposal. Frequently, I asked myself whether it is not this the reason why changes are hard to take place and where tokenization becomes a compromise and a mistake. I think I agree with you that tokenization is, in many cases, an act of laziness rather than a programmatic desire to appropriate someone's identity and mis-represent it.
Every time someone in or outside the art field talks about curating as an act of care, I am wondering how could one define 'care' in the 21st century, where 'caring for someone's cause or life' is reduced to re-post some feeds on Instagram or Tik Tok.
Personally, I found motivation and strength in anger. Anger gets a lot of things done. American writer and poet, Ocean Vuong, once said that "care is anger improved; care is the aftermath of anger".
I get angry many times, when I see a show that didn't achieve what it hoped to achieve, or when I can't make the dream I ambitiously shaped throughout time. Instead of feeling demotivated by my and other institutions' limits, every time I get that bitter feeling of not having succeded, I begin to think that it is simply great to learn how to live with the lack of perfection. Museums and art institutions co-exist with that feeling constantly, because if they are publicly funded, they always lack money to support the artist's work properly; but if they are privately funded, the question is always where are the money coming from and who are these artwork benefiting in the end.
Both the artist's and the curator's job is to create the conditions to make other (the public) feel larger than their own body through this new acquired or experienced knowledge.
That's not an easy job, because it requires a certain degree of queerness, of inability to abide with the conventions.
It's like hiking a path on a mountain where the guide suggests you that you could take route 1 and 2, but you know that if you don't want to end up taking the picture of your hike in a spot full of other tourists, who have followed your same guidance, you have to take another road. And you need to be careful of the surrounding of the place where you are walking because it's exciting and dangerous at the same time.
Making exhibitions and programs in institutions and try to make changes in institutions is like walking on this unpaved hiking road.
You have to be careful, think queer and trust the intuition will lead you where you want to go.