Curating time

Many of the chapters in this book engage with issues of time and temporality, either explicitly or indirectly. The linear or progressive time implied by the neologism ‘curatopia’ can and should be productively critiqued, not least in terms that recognise the infolded and paradoxical nature of the present—or ‘presence’—in everyday life. What we understand phenomenologically, through immediate perception, may return later to haunt us and the objects around us as a folding-over of time. The curator deciding what to collect for the future, how to interpret it in the present, and what it meant in its originary past, is also curating time—an intractable but dynamic project.