CURATORIAL MANIFESTO: You are already between.

You just don’t know it yet.

The art world has not fractured. It has fragmented.

Every fracture implies an intact before, followed by a moment of rupture, and the promise of an impossible repair. Fragmentation, by contrast, is a diffuse, structural condition, with no identifiable point of origin. Fragmentation does not suddenly happen one morning. It grows in blind spots, in the silent shifts of institutions, in the splintering of the market, spreading through the proliferation of communities and bubbles that coexist without ever truly seeing one another.

Thirty years ago, the art world still functioned as an oligopoly of attention. Only a handful of fairs truly mattered. A handful of publications carried real authority. A handful of critics could legitimise an entire practice for a decade with a single sentence. The system was closed, often unfair. But it possessed one strange quality: legibility. An artist more or less knew what they were trying to reach. They knew who was looking, who was deciding, who was writing. They knew the order in which things were supposed to happen. Experts still existed as stable figures of authority.

In recent years, we have witnessed the splintering of the art market’s circuits. There is no longer a centre, or rather, there are too many centres, each convinced that it is the only one. This is the great paradox of the contemporary art world: more connected than ever, and yet more fragmented than ever. Fairs have multiplied, several hundred today, compared with only a handful in the 1980s, alongside an explosion of biennials, residencies, prizes and programmes. Social media has created an exhibition space theoretically accessible to everyone, while making the hierarchy of attention almost impossible to read. Meanwhile, the globalisation of the market has introduced systems of value that the traditional centres were never equipped to absorb.

In other words: everything is moving in every direction at once.

Today, experts no longer exist in the old sense of the word. There are influencers, algorithms, parallel markets with hierarchies of their own, often bearing little connection to institutions that continue to operate as though nothing had changed. The result is not some joyful diversification, but an atomisation that has rendered the compass useless. We are no longer entirely sure what it means to succeed. We no longer know who is looking, or even whether it matters that they are looking at all.

This is the landscape you inhabit.

A world in which the in-between is no longer merely a position, but a condition shared by the vast majority of those attempting to make work that is sincere and unformatted. The difference is that some experience this condition as a catastrophe.

And others are beginning to understand that this is precisely the terrain on which we must learn to keep our balance.

What it took me nine years to understand

For years, I practised something that had no name of its own — or rather, something with too many names. I moved restlessly from curator to gallerist, from critic to agent; each title describing one part of my reality, yet each eventually dissolving into the same chronic dissatisfaction. I moved from one territory to another, from institutions to the market, from reading to negotiation, always somewhere between museums and the street. For a long time, I believed this was a weakness. I thought that never being quite enough to fit into any of the existing moulds was a form of failure.

I was wrong. Because that feeling of inadequacy was, in fact, the early outline of a position. Uncomfortable. Unstable. Illegible to some. But that no longer matters, because it is my position.

I am not between two territories for lack of somewhere better to stand.

I am between because that is precisely where things circulate.

Betweenness, and what mathematics knows that we have forgotten

Nine years of wandering, and to my great surprise, it was a mathematical theory that first reached out a hand to me. In network theory, betweenness describes the position of an element situated along the paths that connect other elements to one another.

What matters here is not centrality, that dominant, visible, radiating position, but the ability to enable circulation, to connect, to become a point of passage. In other words, a node that does not exist for itself, but for what it allows to pass through it. Applied to curatorial practice in a fragmented art world, this idea changes everything. The curator is no longer the person who selects works from some imaginary centre. The curator becomes the person who keeps lines of circulation open precisely where they are beginning to close. The curator, in turn, becomes a bridge node, their presence essential, because removing that node would sever the dialogue and relationships between certain parts of the network.

You are already there. You have been for a long time.

I want to tell you that you are already practising betweenness. Every time your work refuses to fit neatly into a category; every time it is not commercial enough for the fairs, not experimental enough for institutions, not identity-driven enough for certain communities, not universal enough for others… Each time, you are in-between.

You have probably experienced this as a kind of inadequacy. I know that feeling well: that slight discomfort when someone asks you to introduce yourself and you hesitate. Because, deep down, none of the available words ever quite fit. Because every label you force yourself to wear sits slightly crooked. You say contemporary artist, and it is not wrong, but it is not quite right either. You say visual artist, and something is still missing. You name your medium, and suddenly you find yourself placed inside the very category you have spent your entire practice trying to escape. But look at what you have built inside that uncomfortable space. Look at how your inability to remain fixed has produced works that no one else could have made in exactly the way you made them. The in-between is not a manufacturing defect. It is precisely where thought enjoys its greatest freedom of movement. There is no inadequacy here. There is a position. A position chosen, or imposed, or perhaps both at once. Ultimately, it does not matter. What matters is what this position makes possible. And in a fragmented world, a world in which every camp searches for flawless allies, where the coherence of an identity has itself become a form of symbolic capital, inhabiting the in-between may be the truest and most difficult position of all.

The truest, because it offers neither the warmth of a clearly bounded community nor the safety of an established territory. It demands a form of courage that nobody calls courage, because from the outside it can sometimes look like indecision. Except it is not indecision. It is a way of remaining faithful to the complexity of reality when everything around you is asking you to betray it.

What this means for you, now

To internalise betweenness within your practice is not to find a compromise between competing positions, still less to smooth away your contradictions. It is to recognise that your value does not lie in your ability to belong to a centre, but in your ability to move between worlds that ignore one another and, through that movement, create the conditions for an encounter. I will admit that accepting you may never be entirely in your proper place requires learning to live with discomfort. Yes, some people will find you suspicious or illegible. Yes, it means operating within zones of friction without attempting to resolve them too quickly. Yes, you will have to learn to inhabit fragmentation rather than flee from it towards a centre that no longer exists. You are already between. All that remains is to name it. And, above all, to claim it.

Annelise Stern founded the artist agency NANA. She developed the concept of curatorial betweenness in response to the growing polarisation of contemporary society and of the art and cultural sectors.