The Opening Response titles a special series of interviews with artists, curators, writers, composers, mediators, and space-makers around the world. Dialoguing within and around the thematics which have rapidly emerged as a consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic, we offer within this frame a differentiated, honest, and beautiful bid at understanding. Weekly, distinct doors are opened into the lives of the contributors; into their experiences dawning on pleasure, productivity, metaphysics, and paradigmatic shifts. Hopefully, these conversations can act as way-posts and lead to furthered empathy, unison, and co-creation. The Opening Response meets the need for weaving the autonomy of a web of conscious communications in times of extreme perplexity.

Yates Norton is a curator and researcher currently working at Rupert, Vilnius, where he is the curator for the public programmes and has worked closely with the residency and alternative education programmes.   His exhibitions curated or co-curated at Rupert or elsewhere include Undersong: Lina Lapelytė and Indrė Šerpytytė, (2018) the first presentation of the artists in Latvia (in partnership with Kim?, Riga); a group exhibition, Entangled Tales (2018); Jonas Mekas: Let me dream Utopias (2019); Prospect Revenge (2019), the first UK solo show of Robertas Narkus at David Dale Gallery, Glasgow and Living Ornament (2020). He has also sung for Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė and Lina Lapelytė’s Sun and Sea (2019).  Most recently he has been working with issues of care and interdependence, particularly as they have been informed from the perspectives of disability rights, which he has explored through different formats, including a talk with David Ruebain at the Serpentine Gallery, London  (2019) and at the ICA, London (2018) as part of their In Formation III programme.

Josseline Black – What is your utopia now? 

Yates Norton – I am reminded of something that Jonas Mekas thought about utopias, namely that real utopias are grounded in the fine and delicate details of our lives, like a blade of grass or a piece of rabbit shit (to use one of his details), and that utopia is about being able to dream with these details and to have the attention to notice them.  I like the idea of dreaming and hoping for things that are otherwise, worlds where what we already have is reconfigured again and again into situations and scenarios where there can be mutual flourishing.   I think it is this constant process of reconfiguration that is important rather than trying to reinstate something new or innovative. There is already so much already around us, we just need to cultivate the attention and care to notice and live with them.

JB – What is your position on the relationship between catastrophe and solidarity? 

YN – I think we must always be vigilant about reactive forms of solidarity, where we only decide that we can support someone in a crisis.   If we think of solidarity as sudden and periodic, we are unlikely to be fully committed in the long term to those people or environments that are in crisis or difficulty. And real solidarity, allyship and support demands commitment.  Sometimes, catastrophe can shock us into acting or being aware and attentive, but solidarity must be sustained.

JB – What is your approach to collaboration at the moment?

YN – Perhaps I am drawn to this question most because it relates to what I have been thinking about a lot recently and trying to explore in the programmes I am curating that are guided by questions and practices of care and interdependence.  I think, fundamentally, work and life are collaborative. They always involve forms of mutual support and assistance and so I don’t think one can ever say one works independently in any radical sense; we always exist in relations of interdependence.  For this reason, I would think about collaboration first and foremost in terms of such interdependencies.   I think this is helpful because it allows us to consider collaboration in an expanded sense, rather than as an isolated activity or periodic project. It also allows us to think about all those people and things that allow us to make work in the first place, the infrastructures of support and maintenance that allow us to keep going. The question is how we put attention on these relations of interdependencies and address the potential power imbalances there. This virus has brought into relief these various interdependencies and has shown us how logics of competition and individualism are powerful myths that have denied the basic fact that we are inextricably vulnerable to and affected by one another.  As my friend David Ruebain has pointed out, we can never be isolated individuals and if my success is only based on someone else’s failure then we can never have the mutual flourishing I mentioned in the answer above. This period and the perspectives, acts and work of disability activists and the BLM movement, in particular, have shown how amazingly wrong this ideology of individualism and competition is.

JB – How is your utilization of technology and virtuality evolving the paradigm within which you produce work?

YN – Many sick and disabled people have been making use of technology in ways which several cultural institutions only recently turned to.  In some ways, it is a shame that it took a pandemic to realise how technology and virtuality can be used as forms of widening participation and inclusion, although, of course, technology is itself riddled with exclusions.  In my own work, we’ve been trying to make use of technology in a way that allowed us to work remotely while caring for others during the pandemic and also bringing people into our programmes in ways in which we may not have been able to.