Interviews with the Swamp Thing, the Poacher and the Healer

Abstract

Interactions with and within institutions have characteristic qualities, styles, personalities, and tone. These aspects of institutional life are difficult to capture through formal description or professional obligation. Institutions comprise performed characters, each activating infrastructural scenography in their way, infusing physical, procedural architectures with particular tonalities. How might we trace these performers? What are these performances, and for whom are they enacted? Transcribed here are conversations with essential practitioners. These are the characters of art institutions, tracing outlines of who they are and what they do, and how they perform it. Necessarily veiled and anonymized, these personnel profiles have monikers following their ways of life within the institution: Swamp Thing, Poacher, and Healer. They recount and refract dimensions of the critically indivisible person-professional-practitioner entities that people in arts and cultural institutions find themselves impelled or compelled to become. Such exchanges about practices in institutions reveal how these contexts demand that we enact reactionary and curative roles, composed within the constraints and affordances of the scenographic infrastructure of buildings and publications, policies and procedures, presumption, and tradition.