Unschool of Curating #8

Its 8th edition, led by renowned curator Antonia Alampi, offers emerging curators an international platform for dialogue, knowledge exchange, and learning. Over the course of the program the participants will be immersed in the artistic context that both cities have to offer while exploring concepts and conversations around the theme Repair as Method:

This edition proposes “repair” not as a moral slogan but as a working method for curatorial practice.

In a cultural landscape shaped by acceleration, fragmentation, precarity, and asymmetrical access to resources, curating often risks reproducing the very dynamics it seeks to critique. Extraction of context. Instrumentalization of communities. Reinvention for the sake of visibility. Exhaustion disguised as productivity.

This edition of the Unschool asks: what would it mean to approach curatorial work as an act of repair?

Repair of relations between institutions and communities.
Repair of cultural memory and its silences.
Repair of communal life fractured by individualization.
Repair of methodologies that consume more than they contribute.

Repair does not mean reconciliation without tension. It does not deny difference, historical injustice, or structural power. Instead, it insists on working within these realities consciously — designing processes that are slower, more accountable, less extractive, and rooted in existing ecologies rather than imposed frameworks.

The week will combine keynotes, embodied practices, collective cooking, contextual grounding, visits and conversations, and peer-to-peer organised group exchange. Romania is not treated as a theme but as a situated context: a place whose specific histories, transitions, and cultural infrastructures will inform the discussions without being reduced to case study.

Participants and contributors alike — local and international — will engage in an intensive laboratory exploring how curatorial work can move from spectacle toward maintenance, from authorship toward relation, from novelty toward responsibility.

Programme

The programme of the Unschool of Curating is split between four days in Timișoara (19-23 June, 2026) and four days in Cluj (23-26 June, 2026) and includes lectures and working sessions with the course leader, presentations and workshops with Romanian and international guest speakers, visits to local galleries, art venues and exhibitions, and meetings with curators and artists. Two public events are organized as part of the programme – a public lecture of the course leader in Timișoara and an open conversation with participants in Cluj.

Course leader: Antonia Alampi

Antonia Alampi is a curator and cultural organizer from Southern Italy, based in Berlin. She is the founding Artistic Director of Spore Initiative, a platform exploring cultural practices and knowledge systems rooted in eco-social justice, community collaboration, and intergenerational learning.

Her work moves between exhibitions, public and educational programs, and long-term collaborations with practitioners from different fields. Often working within small-scale, socially engaged institutions, her practice reflects on how cultural work can support shared forms of knowledge, strengthen cultural ecologies, and cultivate relationships between communities and the environments we inhabit.

She previously served as Artistic Co-Director of SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin (2016–2020), was part of the curatorial team of sonsbeek20→24, and held curatorial positions at Extra City Kunsthal in Antwerp (2017–2019) and Beirut in Cairo (2012–2015). She also co-founded collaborative initiatives such as Future Climates and Toxic Commons, bringing together cultural practitioners and scientists to address environmental injustice and the politics of toxicity.

Across these contexts, her work explores how cultural institutions can be shaped as spaces for collective learning, ecological thinking, and the slow work of repairing cultural relations.