Collective for Constant Questioning (CCQ) departs from a collectively assembled set of rhetorical questions about curatorial and art practices. It proposes them to curators, artists, and researchers as a methodology to create a public platform for conversation, critique, research, reflexivity, and action. CCQ was born in cyberspace, out of the social distancing-related struggle and a shared need for another way to be together, regardless of time zones and the absence of tactility in the digital realm. As an ongoing activity, it centers questioning as a methodology for a deconstructive agency, as long as this is considered a starting point in constituting alternatives. Through this platform, CCQ strives to become a source to learn from and think with; a place to shake off old routines by instilling the habit of constant questioning.
MEMBERS
DARYA ALOUFY
I’ve always been fascinated by the underlying layers of things. The desire to explore the unseen or unfamiliar motivates almost everything I do. I prefer to learn carefully than speak, hear others rather than myself, and create connections that stem from mutuality and solidarity. I like the small, the intimate, and the personal. Throughout most of my life, I thought I would be a singer when I grow up. I love the discrepancy between my deep voice and small size. Whistling successfully is one of my life goals. Constantly attempting not to get attached to things and places, but fail often. Art that questions conventional narratives gives me hope, especially when it is made by women.
IRENE ANGENICA
I was born in Catania and studied, lived, and worked in Bologna, Turin, and Barcelona. Only recently I moved to Rome, for work, and who knows where I’ll go next. I often talk about places as if they were people I have been in a relationship with, and when I’m with someone, I always miss someone else. My curatorial practice is oriented towards discursive, participatory, laboratory, and collective practices. For this reason, I often work in the educational field, preferring an approach based on self-organization processes and shared training, avoiding hierarchical power dynamics.
ANNA GARDNER
Exhibition project manager from Auckland, New Zealand; based in Sydney Australia. Currently working in exhibitions at the Powerhouse Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, she has a background of more than ten years working on contemporary art exhibitions at Artspace Aotearoa, New Zealand, and Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki. Coming originally from an art history and art practice background, previous research interests have focused on time, trace, memory, and the archival turn, while current research is focused on the history and theory of exhibition-making, specifically the reproduction as apparatus within contemporary exhibition-making. Recent projects include managing the exhibition Hybrid at the Powerhouse, focused on industrial and critical design for future homes.
ADELA LOVRIC
Cultural worker navigating between and around journalism and curating. Currently thinking about beauty and meaning, both of which I usually find in art and acts of resistance that are in the business of (self-)liberation. As effective remedies to many ills, I value humor, poetic truth-telling, and collective agency. I often find myself at the intersection of this and that; ambiguity informs my identity. When hypercapitalist realism gets to me, I seek respite on the rocky Adriatic shores, enveloped in lavender scent, seagazing alongside my kin.
DANDARA MAIA
I was born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, but I am not a girl from Ipanema. I was given the name of a black Brazilian warrior, which somehow shaped my personality. I grew up in a small neighborhood in a gigantic city defined by its nature but also by racism. I dared to move beyond the invisible wall dividing the white middle class and the Black hustle to go to fashion school. Later, I became an academic and curator with interest in decolonial ways of curating inside and outside institutions. Fashion remains my main focus, especially related with ways of challenging hegemonic discourses in the so-called Global South.
GIULIA MENEGALE
Giulia Menegale is a writer and a curator. She holds a small Moleskine where she notes unimportant events that happen around her. Many dialogues and narrations she collected throughout the years take place in waiting rooms, trains or are the result of long virtual chattings. She likes to take pictures/screenshots of words and images in order to decontextualize them on the grid of her Instagram account. She runs multiple Instagram accounts without followers and followings only to store, organize information, and be able to find it again. Friendship is a fundamental value for her; nonetheless, disconnecting from the world and not answering calls or WhatsApp represents a form of pleasure and freedom she would not renounce too easily. She often goes for long walks; moving her body is essential for her thinking and handling feelings. Drawing from feminist thoughts, she often wonders about possible epistemological values of unpleasant emotional states and so-perceived negative affections.
CLAUDIA ROSSKOPF
I like being in motion – whether traveling or moving, sometimes just moving between desk and refrigerator, sometimes on the mountain or waves, through the city or in my head. I like change of perspectives and exchange – between curators and visitors, between students and lecturers, living creatures in general. As a child, I dealt with imagined friends; as a student, with imagined communities. Now it is museums and their dealing with continuous change, curators as players of cultural education, technology and its implications for concepts of participation, participation as self-experiment, as a principle of action, and as another buzzword. I believe that it is the art and the task of museums and curators to change perspectives and constantly create new food for thought by triggering imagination and different associations, to bring people together to reflect on commonalities.
JAROSLAVA TOMANOVĂ
I mostly read, think, write and edit. Anarchist by intuition, scared of apparatuses and public speaking. Advanced in ashtanga yoga practice, terribly bad in collective sports, especially those involving a ball. As part of group activities, so far I mostly act as a zealous troll though aiming to transform into a wise druid. I like thoughtful, informal, familial, care-full collectivity. I prefer learning by doing, generative spaces, organic structures over predefined methodologies, managerial gymnastics, and departmentalisation. Amateur tarot and witchcraft enthusiast. Always inspired by nature. Theory helps me think. Devoted to art as politics and lately interested in non-rational epistemologies and re-thinking metaphysics.