Cura

This chapter outlines an idea of the curation of the city, which, eschewing both the

concepts of the virtual and the material, and the opposition between them, considers

instead the interplay between inhabitation and the spatial realm. This resonance gives

inhabitation its possibility. In (re)turn, those who inhabit give both their everyday and

their curatorial attention to that spatial realm which, in this very movement, becomes

something other. I will posit that Deleuze’s early idea of an ‘irreducible’ life, before and

beyond conceptual oppositions, is the locus of a rich curatorship. This idea of curator-

ship can be ascertained in the strategy used at Matt’s Gallery, a publicly-funded arts

venue in East London. This strategy sets up a series of situations: first, the

artist/curator operates within and with the space of the gallery to create the show;

second, potentially, this curatorial and creative event is projected into the time of the

‘viewer’/’inhabitant’, the time beyond the opening, the time of the show itself. The

same strategy, I will argue, should be at work in the city, in the activity of architects

and urban planners; and I will conclude with the claim that it is only by the projection of

an essentially open, ‘liturgical’ future that the full import of this strategy can be experi-

enced.