Aria Spinelli

This article analyses the relation between curatorial practice and political theory, through a recuperation and proposal of the philosophical work of Greek-French philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis. In it, I will isolated the terms the radical imaginary and the radical imagination, and argue that their relation to curatorial practice is exemplified in the politics of cultural spaces that use autonomous social organisation as their means for artistic production. In his writings, specifically in his manuscript The Imaginary Institution of Society, Castoriadis uses the terms to describe the capacity of socialized human beings to rethink and criticize social structures, and sees the radical imaginary and the radical imagination as means of a radical social transformation towards autonomy, or rather towards autonomous social organisation. Within this framework, this article proposes a historical parallelism between three self-organised platforms for art and activism from Milan, such as Laboratorio di Comunicazione Militante, Isola Art Centre, and MACAO, arguing that they are three cases in which autonomous social organisation is a means for artistic and curatorial production. This historical parallelism, constructed around the concepts of the radical imaginary and the radical imagination, demonstrates how the work of Castoriadis is a valuable resource for contextualising and analysing processes politicization of artistic, curatorial and cultural practices. Based on his writings, this article wants to also highlight the importance of autonomous social organisation as a functional framework capable unpacking the complexity of the relation between artistic, curatorial and cultural practices and political and social activism.