David Ayala-Alfonso

The Autumn of 2024 was unexpectedly transformative, taking me through places that compelled me to rethink my efforts to imagine ways to revitalize curatorial practice. I spent the previous weeks at a university campus in the Southeastern United States, working on the latest installation of my travelling exhibition, Never Spoken Again. I had come to think of university museums as ideal places for developing my curatorial ideas because they provide a captive audience, already prone to engage in meaningful discussions from various backgrounds and disciplines. However, through the installation process, the spatial conventions of the university museum — and its limitations — became increasingly evident. At smaller institutions, it is easy to remind oneself of the intense materiality of the space and its infrastructure: the lower ceilings, inventive choices to visually separate the space from contiguous facilities (curtains, screens, the insufficiently concealed electric sockets, and the awkwardly located columns and other structural modifications that coexist with the exhibition design, in various ways. In such spaces, suspending disbelief the way larger institutions ask us to is a difficult task. And this is a good thing.

Then, sometime in October, I was walking through the Living Collection at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Passing through the Rock Garden, I found myself surrounded by specimens from Europe, then China, Japan, and Chile — Chile? It was quite a specific choice paired with no South American companions. The collections in the garden openly narrate stories of exploration, politics, soft and hard diplomacy —even chance. The devices of the botanical garden — taxonomic beds, glasshouses, specimen labels, library collections — create an orchestrated illusion of order, its aesthetic qualities staging the existence and importance of the scientific apparatus. It all seems to recreate a colonial fantasy where order silences the wilderness. Just like in the case of the large encyclopaedic museum, this model makes invisible much of the infrastructure that sustains the collection — there is no visible equivalent of the taped socket or audio cable, and the visible ones seem to belong there, as part of the technical paraphernalia that sustains life outside their original environment.

Scientific apparatus carries a distinct authority and a sense of purpose, and it is easy to be persuaded by its choices: the disaggregation of species and habitats, the isolation of a specimen in the botanical illustration and the pressed herbarium specimen, the curatorial choices of a particular display. Fragmentation is re-narrated to make sense in a world dependent on entanglements, assemblages, and collaboration. At the same time, the living collections in the open gardens and the glasshouses create a renewed sense of space: the keyword is living. Both through scientific procedures and ecological adaptation, the living specimens create their form of adaptation to the conditions of the gardens. As a byproduct, they probably nurture underground connections and promote the emergence of non-vegetal species, partly organising a form of ecological cohesion. Disaggregation begins to fade away, creating space for new forms of togetherness — like a community of migrants creating spaces and dialogues with the local population, fostering new forms of kinship. 

These thoughts led me to think about the botanical garden as a metaphor, not for order, but for the cohabitation of what seemed before as disconnected and where unexpected connections can flourish — not conceptually, but materially and ecologically. Together with the inherent qualities of the community cultural centre (its intense sense of locality, unconcealed infrastructures, predilection for engagement over spectacle, and activation through community agency and self-organisation), the metaphor of the living collection of the garden could become a model for a future of the curatorial. That is a model for radical openness, which privileges community integration and participation, but also an ecological thought that enables the emergence of the material and conceptual unexpected. For this model to fully flourish, any curatorial endeavour must take place in a kind of an ecological setting, as an interconnected array of living collections, community-organized archives, and visible infrastructures, dismantling the aesthetic and spatial codes for the exhibition and promoting stewardship and shared responsibility over aesthetics and design. And ecologically and metaphorically, overflowing its niches and mobilising the underground substrate for new forms and connections to proliferate.