Giulia Antonioli

Interested in liveness, performance and durational moments, through my curatorial practice, I aim to interweave different voices with action, allowing for embodied encounters to broaden the mere exhibitionary format. By supporting collaborations with emerging artists, I am concerned with fostering durational, relational and cross-cultural transmissions in order to seek and develop generative possibilities that foreground artistic investigation.

Drawing on public programmes and events as potential strategies that look at establishing wider collaborations within and beyond the art world, I strongly believe in the powerful gesture of bringing bodies together. This has also been the focus of the public programme I curated for the graduate project The Unexpected Beautiful Phrase in collaboration with Nottingham Contemporary, where alternative modes of learning were analysed through ideas of fugitivity and illegibility.

Throughout my research, I have been exploring curatorial practices and feminist approaches related to conversational formats – reading groups, workshops and events – that create time for care, intimacy, co-dependence and repetition. By adopting the Feminist Duration Reading Group (FDGR) in London as the overarching theme of my dissertation, I examined how it can be seen as deriving from feminist tactics and formats, and how these can potentially challenge the representational regimes of more traditional exhibitionary forms, intended as merely showing and displaying. Through the chapters, I examined the concepts of spatiality and format in relation to the FDRG, aligning them with historical examples; I then expanded on the idea of durational transmission and its generative possibility for re-enacting the latent potential of earlier undervalued feminisms in their mutual contagions across time and space; to then conclude by analysing the collective act of reading aloud as a powerful practice, that enables reflections on the texts and its materiality, but also gives insights to the complex activity of listening.

Current areas of research include exploring immersive ways of ‘reading' that expand beyond the mere eyes-on-a-page, together with an interest in challenging the documentation and mediation of performative and durational modes, acknowledging their layered spatio-temporal dimensions.