Advice to a Young Creator: A List in Progress

• 1

  “Do it”. The work can start anywhere (my first exhibition took place in my kitchen). Don’t wait for permission to do something.

• 2

  To be curious and learn constantly. The root of the word curare in Latin is not just “taking care” but also “being curious.” The motor, the engine, is curiosity.

• 3

  To build long-term relationships with artists. To develop lasting, evolving dialogues with artists. One of the curator’s roles is to listen to artists, to follow their ideas and support their visions.

• 4

  A protest against forgetting. To record conversations, and to preserve traces of the work of others. The archive as dynamic memory. The future can be invented with fragments of the past.

• 5

  To embrace collaboration. To facilitate and foster new alliances between disciplines to go beyond the fear of pooling knowledge.

• 6

  To be global and local (both-and instead of either/or instead of nor...nor). Building upon the work of my late friend Édouard Glissant, whom I read everyday, we must resist the homogenization of globalization and invest in a worldview that he called mondialité, or “globality”: a global dialogue that, as opposed to globalization, is the creative, relational side of the world, where culture thrives through interaction—not erasure or assimilation. It encourages vibrant exchange that preserves diversity and enables cultural transformation.

• 7

  To think about time, not just space. An exhibition is not only spatial—it unfolds in time. My exhibition do it, which came into being in 1993, the result of a simple question: What form can an instruction for an artwork take? The outcome has now taken on a life of its own and involves many people reacting to both the question (what constitutes an artwork?; what changes can someone make to another's idea?) and the instructions it has produced. Different versions of the exhibition have unfolded over time and been shown all over the world since 1993 with more than 400 artists participating and do it has never stopped since.

• 8

  Follow what excites you and meet it with enthusiasm.

• 9

  Generosity is at the core of everything. Generosity as a medium…

If there was ever a time that the world needed artists, it is now. We need their radical ideas, visions, and perspectives in society. This belief in artists underpins each of the points above, which form part of an ever-evolving list, one that is to be continued…