To Fail Better: Curating as a Resilience Practice

Abstract

The text addresses the position of the curator within the contemporary system of cultural production, where “failure” becomes not an avoidable error but a method of work and political articulation. Drawing on the concept of queerness and “fail”, as explained by Pablo Martínez and José Esteban Muñoz, the text analyzes curatorial practice as a form of resilience developed through the limitations imposed by financial, ideological, and institutional frameworks. The text critically examines how curatorial practices are increasingly unfolding at the intersection of the market, state, and activism, and how this intermediate space leads to the instrumentalization of politics through aesthetics, the fragmentation of identity-based struggles, and the exploitation of precarious artistic and intellectual labor. In contrast, “failure” is proposed as a strategy of resistance, not as defeat, but as a means to evade cooptation and create space for new political subjectivity, collective knowledge, and engagement beyond the logic of success and visibility. The text advocates curatorial positions that embrace vulnerability and unproductivity as conditions for opening spaces of genuine solidarity, mutual care, and transformative action. It emphasizes the need to conceive curatorial practice not as a tool of representation but as a practice of acting, listening, and learning from failure.