INSTALLATION

The post-Mexican incurable-images, collaborative dialogues, and conceptual constellations interwoven and installed in this book belong, perhaps, to a nascent ethical orientation that examines the relationship between assemblages, truth, and the future. This ethically driven form of curatorial work eschews the form traditionally taken by the relationship between subject and truth: confession, meditation, essay, reflection, and autobiography. This curatorial ethics of assemblages orbits around the conceptual territories of a new vitalism and the etymological registers of “installation.” It is an ethics of endurance specific to our current states of curation that continuously demand us “to manage to fold the line and establish an endurable zone in which to install ourselves.” Thus framed, “installation” is less an art historical form or a narrative genre inspired by our recent anthropological inquiries, cinematic and media art experimentations, research-led art practices, moving-image montages, paradigm shifts, and conceptual headaches. Rather than aiming to be displayed, exhibited, screened, and curated in the traditional sense of the term, this difficult ethical practice of installation shifts registers from recognition and visibility to that of imperceptibility.1 It recruits and cultivates forms of expression attentive to the singular mode of anthropological inquiry enabled by curatorial work. More importantly, this ethics of installation is expressed in the sense of wrestling with the temptation to “impose a form on the matter of lived experience.”

The questions which arose from this experience are posed insofar as they strive to convert this intervention into a stage exit of sorts, connecting at various points a series of detours initiated years ago in the anthropological, artistic, curatorial, and cinematic archives. These archives have already morphed into uneasy methodological mise-en-scènes and an increasing disenchantment with the epistemological and pedagogical conventions serving as the decidedly solid ground for experimental regions of life. They have turned into fields and disciplines, into hardened and competitive territories and material cultures, into matter divested of radiant memories. The disenchantment had to be met with creativity and formal and relational experimentation and on more than one occasion some of my interlocutors – from artist Eduardo Abaroa to anthropologist Roger Bartra – felt anthropology, even under the sign of experimental ethnography, was a discipline not equipped to meet the challenges posed by the direction our intellectual lives were taking.