IT

Tommaso Speretta, an independent curator currently working in Italy and internationally, reflects on his trajectory and approach to curatorial practice, exploring his passion for publishing and book-making, cruising as a research methodology, and failures that have become generative opportunities. A reflection on the relationship between certainty and uncertainty, the relational dimension of curating, and the possibilities and contradictions of independent practice.

From his academic background to the development of cruising as a curatorial methodology, Tommaso Speretta looks back on the experiences that have shaped his practice as a researcher and independent curator. He discusses his passion for publishing and book curation, the generative failures that have transformed his approach to research, and the often complex relationship between independent practice and institutions. The conversation touches on experimentation, the challenges of professional precarity, and the search for intellectual autonomy. Finally, Speretta offers a series of reflections for emerging creatives, ranging from the importance of creative exchange to the need to find a balance between experimentation and sustainability, without losing the ability to be surprised by the unexpected.

THE INTERVIEW WITH TOMMASO SPERETTA

After completing your classical education, studying communication and earning a Master’s degree at IUAV University, you began working at the Venice Biennale in 2008. It was there that you met American editor Karen Marta. You began working with her after 2011, following your collaboration with the Office for Contemporary Art Norway, Marta Kuzma and Bjarne Melgaard. Was it your experience with Karen Marta that sparked your interest in publishing? Did you learn how to curate an exhibition through the practice of editing books?
Meeting Karen Marta was one of those chance encounters that turn out to be incredibly fortunate. I was working in the communications office of the Venice Biennale, and Karen was involved in a project with Kazuyo Sejima and Hans Ulrich Obrist, with whom I would later have the opportunity to collaborate alongside her, on the occasion of one of his Interview Marathons at the DESTE Foundation in Athens. In fact, I’d already been interested in publishing. I was part of Automatic Books, a collective publishing project I was developing in Venice with three other friends, with whom I shared an interest in experimentation through the book format. Working alongside Karen later on was extremely important. Her experience, gained through numerous editorial collaborations with artists and institutions, allowed me to gain a closer understanding of the different aspects involved in conceiving and producing an art book, but also to observe how editorial work can intersect with curatorial practice. So I wouldn’t say that I learned how to curate exhibitions through editing books. Rather, I believe that producing a book can itself be a form of curatorial practice.

Your academic background has focused on design and curating. You are not, in fact, an art historian and, despite your doctoral research and teaching experience at IUAV University of Venice, your approach to curatorial practice is not typically academic. Today, you describe your research as instinctive and sensitive. Do your ideas usually develop from theory? Or does theory function more as a framework for all the other stimuli you encounter – books, films, phrases, people?
I don’t believe there is such a clear-cut opposition between theory and intuition. They are two dimensions that coexist and feed into one another. Theory often helps me imagine possible methodologies through which to construct an exhibition. Art-historical research is a fundamental component of curatorial practice. For me, the question is also how to give shape to this research through an exhibition, without necessarily having to follow the conventions of historical narration. Often, it is readings, encounters or exchanges with ideas coming from fields other than art history that suggest possibilities I had not initially considered. This doesn’t mean that I try to apply a particular philosophical concept to curatorial practice, as though an exhibition necessarily had to translate an already formulated theoretical idea into space. I am more interested in a kind of cross-pollination between different ideas, experiences and references, which gradually contribute to the development of a vision. A vision that, naturally, continues to become more precise and evolve throughout the development of a project. I think my academic background perhaps emerges most clearly when I write. Producing an exhibition often requires articulating one’s thoughts through texts, and it is at that stage that theoretical language perhaps becomes more prominent. I am not an art historian, and I imagine that had I followed that educational path, my approach would probably be different. But I don’t necessarily consider this difference either a limitation or an advantage: it is simply one of the conditions through which my way of working has taken shape.

For instance, while curating Another Body to Call Home – a new book on the work of Fin Serck-Hanssen, due to be published in 2027 – you chose to replace the traditional catalogue raisonné with personal micro-stories by the artist, connected to the works presented. Unlike many academics, you don’t tend to think in terms of chronologies and geographies. Have you ever considered the possibility that this approach might create gaps that would usually be filled by information and data?
I don’t believe there is only one way of producing knowledge from an archive. Historical information, chronologies and documentary data are fundamental, but they are not necessarily the only elements through which we can interrogate a body of material. My interest is not in opposing a historical-documentary approach to a more intuitive or affective one, but rather in recognising that the same archive can be approached through different methodologies, capable of producing different forms of knowledge without compromising the rigour of research. This is a question that runs through several projects I have worked on over the years: understanding how to develop research methodologies that do not necessarily rely on codified interpretative structures. Another Body to Call Home, Fin Serck-Hanssen’s new book, due to be published in 2027, is the second editorial project I have worked on with him, following HEDDA, published by Loose Joints in 2021. They are, however, two very different books, both in terms of their objectives and their editorial approach. Another Body to Call Home stems from an investigation into more than forty years of Fin’s photographic archive. While working through this material, I felt a particular affinity, almost a correspondence of sensibilities and frequencies, with many images that did not necessarily coincide with those for which Fin is best known. Together with him and Edoardo Ferrari, who designed the book, we tried to construct an editorial structure capable of conveying this form of tuning. In the editorial note preceding the catalogue raisonné, I refer to cruising, as does Nate Lippens in an unpublished text I commissioned for the book. Desire and the erotic have somehow become the tools through which we have navigated the archive. However, I am referring to an understanding of the erotic that does not necessarily coincide with physical attraction, but is closer to the one developed by philosopher William Haver, whose work has played an important role in my research. The erotic can be understood as a force capable of producing a form of disorientation, interrupting established paths of interpretation and opening up unexpected possibilities for connection and knowledge. This is a form of disorientation that I consider productive, because it changes the very way in which we look at and think about what we encounter. In the case of this book, therefore, it was not simply a matter of the desire emerging from the photographs, but also of the desire that guided our gaze. The selection and sequencing follow an associative logic, in which photographs taken at very different moments and in different contexts can come together and generate unexpected meanings.
The decision to replace traditional captions with Fin’s brief personal reflections stems precisely from this experience. It was not simply a matter of giving up information such as dates, locations or names, but of making room for another kind of knowledge, one that already exists within the archive but often remains hidden or is considered secondary to the data through which we are accustomed to reading it. Fin’s reflections convey experiences, memories, relationships and affective dimensions that would hardly find a place in a traditional catalogue raisonné. Nate Lippens’ text also enters into a dialogue with the photographs without attempting to explain them or bring them back to a unified narrative, becoming yet another way of navigating and reactivating the archive.

THE ACADEMIC RESEARCH AND CRUISING AS A CURATORIAL METHODOLOGY

REBELS REBEL, your first book, published in 2014, reconstructs New York during the HIV/AIDS crisis, the artistic practices of those years and the political and social response to the epidemic. One particular question had been following you since your university years: “Is installing a sculpture in a public space sufficient enough to be defined as public?”. Does this question still accompany you? What would your answer be today, in light of your personal evolution?
I believe I have found an answer to the question of public art, although the issue that originally gave rise to it continues to interest me: the relationship between artistic practice, public space and the political dimension of art. When working in this field, I think it is important to question the relationship an artistic practice establishes with space, with the people who inhabit it and with the social and political dynamics that run through it. This, however, should not become a criterion for judging the legitimacy or value of all other artistic practices. A work does not necessarily have to respond to a political or social urgency, or seek to intervene in a specific context, in order to have value.

You undertook the PhD in Practice in Curating at Zurich University of the Arts, jointly organised with the University of Reading, adopting an entirely new approach compared to your time as a doctoral researcher at Central Saint Martins in London, where you spent your time conducting archival research. You have described the experience in Zurich as a “generative failure” that led you towards the theorisation of cruising – a sexual practice involving moving through a space in search of possible encounters, often anonymous and with strangers – as a curatorial method. How did failure lead you to redefine your approach to research and curating?
The PhD I began at Central Saint Martins in London and the one I subsequently completed in Zurich were two profoundly different paths. In a sense, the second emerged precisely from the failure of the first. A failure that I recognise in two distinct aspects. The first concerned the very ambition of the research. I had started building an archive of films and videos produced mainly in the United States during the HIV/AIDS crisis, from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, also bringing them into dialogue with certain European experiences. My initial aim was to reconstruct as complete a historical picture as possible. There was no single archive to refer to, and I soon found myself confronted with an almost unmanageable quantity of material: independent films, video art, documentaries, testimonies, activist material, often scattered and difficult to access. Every new discovery led to others, in a process that made me feel a kind of vertigo, as it increasingly revealed the impossibility of achieving the completeness I was striving for. The second failure, on the other hand, concerned my relationship with the academic context. I felt that this exclusively historical-documentary approach was beginning to feel restrictive, and I sensed the need to experiment with more fluid research methods, capable of also accommodating intuitions, affinities and associations that did not necessarily fit into a reconstruction based solely on historical data. When I tried to move in this direction, however, I did not find the support I was looking for. It was an intellectually very important experience, but also a lonely and, in certain respects, unpleasant one.

What happened next?
When I decided to embark on a new PhD in Zurich, this time practice-based, I thought that curatorial practice itself might offer a way out of the methodological impasse I had encountered in London. The possibility of incorporating curatorial practice into the research allowed me to interrogate the material through different tools, considering exhibition-making not merely as a possible outcome of the investigation, but as a way of producing knowledge. If I was going to dedicate several more years to this work, I wanted it to be a genuinely generative experience, one that could lead me towards something I did not yet know. I therefore began to consider the incompleteness of the archive no longer as a limitation to overcome, but as a productive condition, while recognising that my position, experience and subjectivity were inevitably part of the research. It was in this context that I began reflecting on the potential of cruising and promiscuity as possible research methodologies and tools for rethinking curatorial practice. I was interested in navigating an archive without knowing the destination in advance, allowing myself to be guided also by desire, attraction and unexpected encounters between seemingly distant materials. In this sense, cruising offered me a way of rethinking research as an open-ended process, in which the questions themselves could transform throughout the investigation. This reflection naturally sits within a broader theoretical tradition. I think, for example, of Donna Haraway’s work on situated knowledge, which challenges the idea of knowledge being produced from a neutral and disembodied position, or Natalie Loveless, who studied with Haraway and developed the concept of polydisciplinamory, exploring the possibilities of a form of research capable of building relationships between disciplines through models that also draw on affective experience, specifically polyamory. There is another aspect that is particularly important to me. Cruising and promiscuity are experiences that, depending on the social and cultural contexts in which we grow up, can be associated with shame, stigma or the need to remain hidden. I was particularly interested in the possibility of transforming these experiences into something positive, into tools for producing knowledge, recognising their theoretical and methodological potential. In this sense, failure was generative.

In From the Logic of the Lure to the Force of the Erotic: Cruising a Personal AIDS Video Archive from a Curatorial Perspective, the outcome of your PhD, you propose transforming “the epistemological ground into cruising ground”. To do so, you started from your own experience and memories of a summer holiday in Croatia. Does this intimacy – the starting point of your research, tangible and alive in your writing – also find its way into the concrete reality of your everyday curatorial practice?
Yes, naturally. My personal experience continues to inform the choices, affinities and relationships I build through research and practice, even when this dimension is not necessarily visible or explicitly autobiographical. The memory of a summer holiday in Croatia entered my research for precisely this reason. Looking back at that beach in Dalmatia and the movements of the people passing through it, I began to recognise a series of questions in an experience that seemed, at first, entirely unrelated to academic research, questions that could be developed theoretically. I was also interested in showing how certain intuitions emerge from personal, sometimes intimate experiences, and how these can become the starting point for a reflection that fully retains its academic rigour. After all, many of the ideas I sought to develop were already present, at least in an embryonic form, in the thinking of the authors I was engaging with. My work also consisted in recognising those possibilities and trying to take them somewhere else. In the book, I begin with a kind of imaginary dialogue with John Paul Ricco, the author of The Logic of the Lure. In the introduction to his book, Ricco asks what would happen if we replaced the epistemological ground, on which knowledge is traditionally constructed, with something resembling a cruising ground. This is a provocation that struck me deeply and that I tried to develop further, asking myself what would happen if I transferred the conditions and relational dynamics of cruising into academic research. In other words, I was interested in understanding how cruising could become not merely an experience through which knowledge is produced, but a methodology capable of transforming the very way in which we conduct research.

What aspects of this experience were you interested in?
I was interested in several aspects of this experience. For example, temporality: cruising does not necessarily follow predetermined schedules, and encounters can last just a few moments or extend over time, without their intensity necessarily depending on their duration. Then there is the question of fidelity, understood not only in an emotional or sexual sense, but also as belonging to a discipline or adherence to a theoretical system. Cruising allowed me to imagine relationships with authors, disciplines and ways of thinking that do not necessarily require fidelity or belonging. I can recognise myself in a fragment of someone’s thinking, establish a relationship with that fragment, even a very intense one, and allow it to produce something within my research, without having to subscribe to the entire theoretical system from which it originates. I was interested in exploring what an intellectual relationship that does not necessarily require a stable sense of belonging or a reciprocal commitment intended to last over time might produce. This does not mean abandoning rigour or responsibility towards the ideas we engage with, but recognising that a partial, temporary or unexpected encounter can have an equally significant epistemic value. Another important reference is Leo Bersani and his idea of impersonal intimacy, which challenges the need to know someone deeply in order to establish an intimate relationship. We can recognise something in another person and feel a strong connection without this necessarily requiring knowledge of their identity or personal history. I was interested in understanding how this possibility could first be transferred to our relationship with theoretical thought and, subsequently, to curatorial practice, to the way we construct relationships between artworks and archives. Added to this are risk, the unpredictability of encounters and the mobile nature of cruising grounds, whose boundaries are not always clearly defined and can constantly shift.

In the introduction to the catalogue of the exhibition Every Moment Counts – AIDS and its Feelings, curated by you and Ana María Bresciani Arenas in 2022 at the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in Norway, you address HIV/AIDS by going far beyond the concept of illness: you place the emotions associated with it, alongside other socio-political issues, at the centre of the discussion. For instance, you examine the different degrees of urgency with which AIDS and Covid-19 were addressed. Is your curatorial practice also a form of political activism?
I wouldn’t define my work as a form of political activism in the strict sense, although this is also a distinction that doesn’t particularly interest me. Selecting certain works, constructing relationships between them, deciding which stories to tell and from which perspectives are all choices that are never entirely neutral. This, however, does not necessarily mean that an exhibition must adopt a militant position or present itself as a tool for activism. Every Moment Counts. AIDS and Its Feelings, which I curated together with Ana María Bresciani Arenas at the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in Oslo in 2022, is a fairly significant example. The exhibition brought together more than 200 works by 60 international artists and also emerged from a reflection on Tema: AIDS, an important exhibition organised by the same institution in 1993. What interested me, however, was not to present another historical reconstruction of the epidemic, nor to organise an exhibition around activist practices, as often happens with exhibition projects dedicated to HIV/AIDS. It was not a matter of questioning the importance of history or activism, both of which played a fundamental role in the response to the epidemic, but rather of freeing the works from the need to be interpreted predominantly through these perspectives. Instead, I chose to explore the different emotional temperatures of HIV/AIDS, conveying the multiplicity of feelings, desires, experiences and forms of artistic expression that this historical event has generated and continues to generate. We were interested in love, loss, spirituality, sexuality, fear and anger, but also in more ambiguous and difficult-to-define feelings that do not necessarily find a place within established historical narratives. The comparison with Covid-19, which we address in the essay, arose from the very circumstances in which we were working on the exhibition. We found ourselves reflecting on one epidemic while experiencing another. During a conversation with an artist, we wondered how many lives could have been saved if the world had responded to HIV/AIDS with the same urgency and speed with which it was addressing the coronavirus. It was a question that highlighted a profound difference: while the Covid-19 pandemic had rapidly prompted an extraordinary mobilisation of economic, scientific and institutional resources, the initial response to HIV/AIDS had been marked by indifference, stigmatisation and the association of the virus with certain minorities. The comparison was not intended to establish a hierarchy between the two, but to question the social and political conditions that determine how a health emergency is recognised and addressed. These are questions that continue to interest me and inevitably run through my curatorial practice. I do not, however, believe that the political value of an exhibition necessarily depends on its ability to formulate an explicit message or adhere to a particular position. In the case of Every Moment Counts, I was primarily interested in creating the conditions for other interpretations of HIV/AIDS to emerge, including contradictory ones or those difficult to bring back to a unified narrative. It is this possibility of expanding the field of interpretation, rather than the need to define my work as a form of activism, that interests me.

THE INDEPENDENT PRACTICE ACCORDING TO TOMMASO SPERETTA

You have chosen to work as an independent curator and remain outside the institution. Is this also a way of protecting your intellectual freedom and that of the artists you work with? What are the benefits and challenges of this profession?
On reflection, I don’t think I can say that I am entirely outside institutions. On the contrary, a significant part of my work develops precisely through collaborations with public and private institutions, both in Italy and abroad. My position as an independent curator has gradually taken shape over the years, through the experiences and professional opportunities that have come my way. I don’t consider it a position to be defended as a matter of principle, nor do I see it as opposed to working within an institution. What interests me is being able to develop projects in which I recognise a genuine possibility for research and experimentation, but also for challenge and enjoyment, regardless of the context in which they take shape. Certainly, this position allows me a certain degree of intellectual freedom. I can pursue research even when it does not yet have a specific exhibition destination, imagine collaborations that do not necessarily respond to an institutional programme and choose the most suitable context for each project. However, it often happens that research and ideas never find the right conditions to be developed and remain archived on my computer for a long time. I don’t believe, though, that independence automatically guarantees greater freedom, just as I don’t think that working within an institution necessarily means giving it up. A great deal depends on the people you work with, the working conditions and the degree of experimentation and risk an institution is willing to accommodate. Naturally, independence also entails difficulties. The most obvious is probably financial and professional precarity. Every project requires the necessary conditions to be built from scratch: finding resources, establishing collaborations and often taking care of organisational and administrative matters that end up absorbing a considerable amount of time. Furthermore, not having a stable institutional structure behind you means having to constantly negotiate your role, demonstrate the validity of your ideas and discuss the financial conditions and development opportunities of your projects. I believe, however, that the most interesting question is not so much whether to choose between independence and institutions, but rather how to maintain a certain degree of intellectual autonomy within the different conditions in which we find ourselves working.

In 2011, you inaugurated Baton Sinister, a collaborative exhibition co-curated with Bjarne Melgaard in Venice. The artist had led the postgraduate programme at the Faculty of Arts and Design of IUAV University, entitled Beyond Death: Viral Discontents and Contemporary Notions about AIDS. The exhibition was the result of an invasion of Palazzo Contarini Corfù by young artists who lived and slept there for a month. In terms of both its themes and methodology, the exhibition seems to anticipate the direction of your curatorial practice. But how do you approach the idea of appropriating a space – potentially in unconventional ways – in order to carry out research?
I don’t believe it is possible to take a single, unequivocal position on the unconventional appropriation of a space for artistic research. Much depends on the nature of the place, its ownership, the function it already serves and the consequences of the intervention. Appropriating a public space used by a community is one thing; reactivating an abandoned private building, to which an artistic project might restore a function, is another. I don’t think every form of appropriation can be justified in the name of art, but neither do I believe that unconventional uses of space should necessarily be considered problematic. It is important to assess the specific circumstances and the possibilities an intervention might open up. In the case of Baton Sinister, however, I wouldn’t speak of appropriation in the sense of occupying a space. Palazzo Contarini Corfù, on the Grand Canal, had been regularly rented for the exhibition. What happened was rather a spontaneous expansion of its exhibition function, through a collective working method that had developed over the preceding months. In 2011, I was collaborating with the Office for Contemporary Art Norway on Norway’s participation in the Venice Biennale, which was structured around two parallel programmes: The State of Things, a series of public lectures curated by Marta Kuzma, Pablo Lafuente and Peter Osborne, and Beyond Death: Viral Discontents and Contemporary Notions about AIDS, a course led by Bjarne Melgaard as part of the postgraduate programme in Visual Arts at IUAV University of Venice. I assisted Bjarne in developing the course and subsequently in producing Baton Sinister, the exhibition that concluded the programme. The course was particularly intense and demanding. The initial group gradually dwindled to just over ten students, with whom a strongly collective working dynamic developed, extending beyond the classroom. That same collective dynamic was subsequently transferred into the palazzo. Each artist was assigned a section of the building in which to develop their work. The artworks were conceived and, for the most part, produced directly on site, and the group’s almost constant presence gradually transformed the space into a place of production, exchange and shared living. We spent entire days there; some people stayed overnight, we ate together and sometimes invited friends to share that everyday life with us. It wasn’t a planned transformation: it emerged naturally from the working methods we had developed during the course.

Since 2008, you have been involved in Automatic Books, a self-funded publishing project conceived with other creatives based in Venice. Later, the creation of Camera Doppia – an independent exhibition project in Milan with Giovanni de Francesco and Edoardo Ferrari – further confirms your inclination towards collective work and independent projects. In a context marked by precarity, burnout and unhealthy competition, would you encourage emerging curators to support one another through collective work, experimenting and also investing in independent projects undertaken simply “to learn”?
Yes, certainly, although I think it is important not to idealise independent or collective work. I would encourage emerging curators to create opportunities for collaboration, including through independent projects. Not necessarily because these projects need to develop into long-lasting professional initiatives, but because they allow people to acquire knowledge and experience that are difficult to gain through academic training alone. At the same time, I think it is important not to confuse experimentation with an obligation to work under conditions of constant precarity. The challenge is to build collaborations that are intellectually and creatively stimulating, but also sustainable for everyone involved. Some of the most meaningful projects I have worked on emerged precisely from the desire to create something together with other people, often without knowing exactly where that experience would lead us. Automatic Books grew out of the desire to experiment with the book as a space for artistic and curatorial production, outside more conventional publishing formats. It was a self-funded project, built through the sharing of skills and resources, but also an opportunity to learn by doing, engaging directly with every stage of conceiving and producing a publication. Camera Doppia emerged at a different point in my career, but retains something of the same spirit. The project took shape from the desire to work together on the basis of shared interests and sensibilities, imagining a programme in which queer perspectives play a central role – a presence that, at least within the Italian exhibition landscape, I don’t think can yet be taken for granted.

Vittoria Colagiovanni

Tommaso Speretta

The text has been translated in English using AI