The curatorial turn of curricular architecture

In this writing, I conceptualize the curricular explorations, experiments and improvisations in a collaborative high school art and architecture history course as a curatorial riffing that activated a curricular architecture from which new and differential histories emerged. Homologous with curatorial experimentation, the curriculum consisted of historical and contemporary works of art and architecture positioned alongside disparate, seemly unrelated tasks, events, and students’ memories and cultural histories to evoke from their interstices a plurality of discursive encounters, alliances and emissions. The curatorial contingencies of that curriculum will be conceptualized in contiguity with the following theoretical constructs: the movement-image and time-image of Gilles Deleuze as they activate thinking standardized figurations of curricular scope and sequence differently; thinking historical discourse as a curatorial plurality according to Michel Foucault’s notions of heterotopia and genealogy differently from hegemonic curricular constructs; and, the implications of Paul O’Neill’s concept of the curator as artist in thinking curricular creation in terms of curatorial performance.