Curating is Writing the Future. A Portrait

Solo exhibition by Stijn Van Dorpe at Eté 78 - one of Caveat's partners.

Curated by Stijn Van Dorpe in collaboration with Convivial, Florence Cheval, Fonds du Logement, Olivier Gevart and initiated by Eté 78 and Caveat.

As a kind of anthropologist, Stijn Van Dorpe started his exploration of the Eté 78 space and its surroundings, which he describes as a micro-environment. In doing so, he wants to investigate the space, mechanisms and potentiality of art. The micro-environment involves the exhibition space, the private collector’s house, and other actors in the same street: a social housing project (Fonds du Logement), a 'giveaway' library, a centre for vocational training of refugees (Convivial)… as well as the protagonists related to these spaces: the artist himself, the owners/co-initiators of the art space, the art collector, the curator, Fonds du logement's civil servants, Convivial's teachers…

Van Dorpe approaches the whole context of this micro-environment at short range, as a kind of test case to analyse and open up the art space and the relational positions floating around it. Van Dorpe uses the concept of third space (situated between institutional art space and other places created by society) in order to describe this opening up of different spaces towards one another, the creation of interstices between them, which also functions as a means to shift the ecology of the art field towards the wider society.