Leire Vergara

The programme of Advanced Practices (Curatorial/Knowledge) within the Department of Visual Cultures of Goldsmiths College of London has allowed me to envision new possibilities for my own position as an academic researcher and a professional curator. The ongoing discussions and debates opened between the teaching staff, guest speakers and student colleagues during the seminars of Advanced Practices (Curatorial/Knowledge) have given me the opportunity to reflect widely on the relationship between curatorial practice and knowledge production. My interest within these discussions, and concretely regarding my dissertation, has lied in thinking what kind of knowledge curatorial practice can or should produce in contrast to other disciplines and methods of scientific, humanist or artistic research.

As a consequence of all this, the context of this study programme has been an essential source of inspiration for my PhD research and my curatorial practice of the latest 5 years. In this sense, projects like EL CONTRATO, a two-year project (2013-2015) developed by Bulegoa z/b (an office for art and knowledge with base in Bilbao that I run together with Beatriz Cavia, Miren Jaio and Isabel de Naverán) in collaboration with Azkuna Zentroa, have been possible thanks to all the challenging conceptual support received by the programme of Advanced Practices (Curatorial/Knowledge).