Hannah Zafiropoulos: Lecture

Following the recent interest in live action role play in art contexts, this talk presents ongoing research on the potential of larp in curatorial practice. It argues for the development of procedural authorship as a methodology of practice-based research within the emergent field of ‘the curatorial’. ‘The curatorial’ is defined by its ambition to move beyond representation to open up a space of renewed democratic participation that allows for greater levels of participant agency in the process of meaning and the production of new knowledges. Larp is situated as a form of curatorial practice that employs simulation as a post-representational mode, borrowing the term ‘procedural authorship’ from video game theory to understand how a curator may ‘write’, or create the context for such participation. The talk will first ground this thinking in a brief history of curatorial practice before discussing its possible applications, before introducing several experiments currently being undertaken by the speaker in varied contexts.

Bio

Hannah Zafiropoulos is an independent curator, researcher and writer based in London. She holds a BA in History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, and an MA in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art, London. This year she is a participant in the year long curatorial research residency CuratorLab at Konstfack, Stockholm, in partnership with Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm, where she will co-curate the public programme alongside artist Dora Garcia. Her current research focuses on the potential of performative curating within political and activist art practices. Using live action role play as a starting point, she considers the role of the curator as procedural author, employing the language of video game theory to experiment with the ways in which curators can create spaces for open-ended participation in the production of new knowledge. From 2017-18, she will be Visiting Lecturer on the BA Architecture course Assemble! Performative Sites of Radical Democracy at Oxford Brookes University, using larp as a pedagogic tool in the design of democratic spaces.