Spike Island Engagement Fellowship for SW-based Curators, Fiona Irene Graf

Concerned with alternative economies and notions of reciprocity, Exercises in Exchange was an engagement programme that explored the possibilities of inter-mutual relationships and transboundary networks, asking how we can establish more nurturing, sustainable ways of being and interrelating within both human and non-human communities. In the face of ongoing economic and climate crises, the programme stressed the urgency to generate more equal economic structures based on kinship, collaboration, co-governance and circularity. Public events included discussions with artists and writers including Shama Khanna, Rehana Zaman, Lucy Lopez, Dot Zhihan Jia and Nina Mingya Powles.

Fiona Irene Graf is a cultural worker living in the UK and Germany. Her practice focuses on participatory and collaborative modes of working, alternative economic systems, notions of reciprocity and entanglements between human and more-than-human ecologies. Graf holds an MFA in Curating from Goldsmiths, University of London, and has co-curated a variety of projects including In the Open, an exhibition negotiating the boundaries of public space at Kunsthalle Exnergasse in Vienna (2023), LVAN: Relay!, a series of walking tours in collaboration with Lewisham Visual Art Network, part of Lewisham Borough of Culture (2022), and Regroundings, a film programme and online artist conversation, Goldsmiths CCA (2021). As a member of the curatorial collective and research group Mapping Local Ecologies, she co-organised a programme of public events whilst in residency at Goldsmith CCA (2021-22).

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