Curating the Third World

“Chapter 2: Curating the Third World” assesses the development of a collaborative approach to curation in the early iterations of the Bienal de La Habana. Empirical material for this chapter comes in the form of detailed description of instances of curatorial collaboration such as research trips, collective deliberation, cumulative exhibition production, and strategies to embed the exhibition in the city. Discussing curatorial practice within the Bienal in terms of Marxist approaches to collaborative labor, this chapter shows how the organization of curatorial expertise in the Bienal mirrored the military strategy of foquismo and relied on dynamic alliances between local and transnational constituencies to produce situated transferable knowledge.