++++ Once upon a time, not so long ago, we were appointed to curate together the next Manifesta. We didn't know each other, but we had to start immediately. The date on which we met for the first time in Frankfurt was strangely significant, it was the 8th of March.
We decided to start with the search for similarities and differences between us, and we are working on the development of a project based on the similarities, while integrating contradictions, and paying regard to subjectivities. We are traveling, looking around, meeting people, visiting venues, talking, reading, learning together in order to produce an event that is in consonance with variable current reality. We are trying to follow processes that are going on around us as they are, not to be framed in the artistic domain alone, but to search out how the transfer of a current problematic into the cultural field occurs. We are attracted by the heterogeneity of practices and intend to avoid easy and stereotyped crossovers. We are interested in collaborating with individual as well as collective contexts, and also with pre-existing links to reveal a dense fabric of interwoven issues, materials and references.
We don't see Europe as a limit, but as a condition of the projecting process, we count on the reality of people living in and with Europe, where the location which it is in turn welcomes other cultural proposals that stem from other places. We see the controversies in the city of Frankfurt as challenging for Manifesta 4. For us Manifesta as a moving event doesn't seek a missing centre, but is rather a particular site, a proving ground for contemporary art practices and discourses. It introduces its own always-already developed network but it is ready to be upgraded with local clusters. As an accumulator of different experiences it also offers us the opportunity of contributing to the dynamism of the present-day situation in diverse ways, which is not only interesting to observe, but also to orchestrate and interface:
- the new types of interrelation (interaction) between art and the public sphere. How for instance, what was formerly known as "high art", and mass culture, while coexisting and juxtaposing each other are in the process of mutual conjugation. How electronic media facilitate this process;
- the rethinking of the dichotomy public space/private-domestic space, the variation in family relationships and new developments in the public sphere, possibilities of personal communication and social hybridization in a hyper-technological society; landscape issues; travel and its multiple derivations; the urban issue and its relationship with physical habitats (dwellings). The subject of memory, archives and collections as a mode of constructing stories and their connection with the concepts of site and non-site redefined by younger artists from very different points of view, as well as themes related to the construction of non-conventional subjectivities;
- the issue of machines: subjectivity's and production's machines, the political and the economic machine. How art may be defined in relation to standard machines. The issue of the artist's role: to work against current notions such as novelty or breaks, but also to bring to light the permanent and obsessive aspects of artistic process. To investigate the ways in which the inner tensions developing within the process of exhibition-making could be visualized. And the result - open to the viewer, inter-communicative, provoking reactions. How to create a true production and diffusion interface for artists engaged in a process questioning art's limits and art definitions.
We are at the beginning of our work and we are going on, trying to keep our minds and the project's framework open for as long as possible.

by Iara Boubnova, Nuria Enguita Mayo, Stéphanie Moison Trembley
published in Manifesta 4 Newsletter 1 / June 2001