Author Information
Carolina Lio Rodrigues, Istituto Marangoni London, United KingdomAbstract
This practice-based paper considers how curatorial work may operate as social infrastructure through the case of Visible, an international platform for socially engaged art. Drawing on the author’s position as a co-curator of Visible since 2020, the paper argues that the curatorial task in socially engaged practices also involves creating the economic, relational, discursive and temporal conditions through which situated practices can continue on their own terms. The argument brings Visible’s transition from an award model to Situated Fellowships into dialogue with debates on participatory art, institutional critique, care and the curatorial. It proposes that infrastructural curating should be understood as a practice of accompaniment: providing resources, research, publishing, translation and long-term relation while remaining alert to unequal power, the pressures of representation and the risk that institutions convert community knowledge into symbolic capital. The paper discusses the fellowship model alongside projects including Waral Prakalp, Mujeres Muralistas Soi Noma, GOODLand and CLIMAVORE. Rather than claiming that art solves social problems, it identifies how particular curatorial arrangements can help sustain spaces of collective knowledge, ecological attention and political imagination. The paper concludes that socially engaged practices require forms of institutional support that value duration, reciprocity and contextual autonomy.
Paper Information
Conference: ECAH2026Stream: Arts - Social
Published: Wednesday, September 23, 2026
This paper is part of the ECAH2026 Conference Proceedings (View)
Full Paper
View / Download the full paper in a new tab/window
To cite this article:
Rodrigues C. (2026) Art as Social Infrastructure: Curating Practices Through the Visible Project ISSN: 2188-1111 – The European Conference on Arts & Humanities 2026: Official Conference Proceedings (pp. 447-456) https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2188-1111.2026.34
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2188-1111.2026.34
Comments
Powered by WP LinkPress