CCQ departs from a collectively assembled set of rhetorical questions about curatorial and art practices and 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 to find another way to be together, regardless of time zones and the absence of tactility in digital togetherness.
CCQ works towards devising unique ways of integrating practice and theory, realizing a relationship towards the apprehension of learning that is not bound either to individual improvement or achievement but rather based on determining what needs to be learned through a collective experience of questioning and spending time together. Therefore, CCQ invites its guests to its native environment of an online gathering to convene and deliberate on selected questions with the aim of sharing the main points of the conversation in the public domain.
CCQ is based on a voluntary, unremunerated dedication of its members’ intellectual and emotional capacities and their shared value system prioritizing equality, solidarity, and justice.
CCQ aspires to platform diversity in its practice. Its members and guests are curators and art researchers from various geographical and socio-cultural perspectives and backgrounds.
CCQ is an invisible glue that connects its members, contributors, and audience at a time when creation and engagement with art are paralyzed by the consequences of the pandemic, such as insecurity and precarity.
CCQ explores what it is to act as allies rather than competitors and operate as a collective, exploring ways of interdependency and support.
CCQ operates as a collective and understands rhetorical questions as a request that the listener leans their ears towards the position of the question as well as their own.
CCQ seeks deconstruction of dominant power dynamics through questioning tangled matrices of power and processes of inclusion and exclusion towards sustaining a potentially system-changing impact.
CCQ gives voice to those who are brave enough to shake their own ground in order to find strategies to dismantle their own privileges and embedded biases.
CCQ searches for alternative understandings of the value of art and rejects conforming to instrumentalist, reductionist, and capitalist attitudes.
CCQ supports curatorial and artistic practices that create spaces of diagnosis rather than ambitions of heroic healing.
In the avalanche of digital production and representation, CCQ aims to explore alternative languages, be it onsite, online, and/or in between, to activate imagination against the perils of the attention economy.
CCQ uses its website platform as a source to learn from and think with; a place to shake off old routines by instilling the habit of constant questioning.
This Manifesto will change within CCQ’s process of questioning.