The context of this collaborative experiment is a six-month seminar and lecture series programmed by Javier Toscano at the Escuela Adolfo Prieto in Monterrey in the state of Nuevo Leon in Mexico. Toscano had secured the support and funding from CONARTE (Consejo para las Artes de Nuevo León) to initiate a series of pedagogical workshops/seminars led by twelve scholars and curators with different backgrounds and research interests and agendas. The research and intellectual interests ranged from media anthropology and theories of the image, to Guattarian schizoanalysis, to questions of site-specificity and social art practice, to documentary film practice, issues of cultural geography, and to the legacy of Marxist thought in contemporary labor practices. Among the guests were Lucía Sanroman, Brian Holmes, Franco Berardi, Lourdes Morales, John Holloway, and others. Toscano framed the seminar around the theme of “Curaduría and Crítica / Curation and Critique.” All the guest lecturers were asked to participate in this project in order to help the same group of nine participants rigorously to develop new conceptual tools to think about alternatives to those exhibition-oriented and site-specific curatorial gestures that bring “aesthetic relief” in urban landscapes marked by the aura of “emergency.” The seminar and lecture I was to give set out to be “adjacent” (Rabinow, 2003) to these pressing issues of “emergency,” “crisis,” and intervention in situ, in relation to the specific urban landscape of Monterrey.

The participants – artists, curators, educators, and writers involved in the cultural and art life of Monterrey – were interested in experimenting with conceptions of curation beyond those dominant curatorial modes at work in contemporary art worlds. The point was not only to theorize curatorial work. Rather, the aim was to perform a series of conceptual exercises that would: 1. anchor the proposed concept of the “incurable” as a limit and outside to curatorial practice; and 2. rethink the question of “intervention” by remaining alongside the “emergency” that anchored the city of Monterrey. Captured by sensationalist and neo-liberal forms of mediation, Monterrey was, indeed, a city that ailed from the very trope of emergency: emergency had acquired the pathological status of an incurable disease.