For the Lopud Seminar 2011, we have appropriated the metaphor of the black swan, one which has been used in recent years to describe events of great improbability and high impact, to think collectively of sites of radical contingency in the arts and curatorial practice, and to discuss fields of production, exhibition and performances as places where the highly improbable, or singularities and the unforeseen, can be fostered, nurtured and where they can have an effect on contemporary life.

Black swans are an extremely rare species. They remained undocumented in the West until the eighteenth century and were considered an anomaly. Recently the black swan has been used as a metaphor to describe events of great improbability and high impact. It is, at the same time, a haunted figure in the canonical dance repertoire, resonating with notions of the unchangeable and cultural traditionalism.

In the context of the Lopud Seminar 2011, we appropriated the metaphor of the black swan to think collectively about sites of radical contingency in the arts and curatorial practice. We proposed to discuss fields of production, exhibition, and performance as places where the highly improbable, or singularities and the unforeseen, can be fostered and nurtured and where they can have an effect on contemporary life. The examples that we chose for such a debate were closely derived from T-B A21’s ongoing curatorial and spatial explorations and the inroads that the foundation has made into various disciplines and practices. Rather than embarking on the known and repeating the approved, we think of these institutions, experiments, and practices as agents of change and innovation. Perhaps our disciplines need to be reinvigorated by conditions of risk, uncertainty, and impermanence and the challenges fundamental to artistic practice.> >