#curation

[myfandomrealitea]

I really feel like people forget that fandom is a fun hobby and not some sort of like, activist group.

Like, one of my hobbies is wildlife photography. If I follow a bunch of wildlife photography accounts and it's the only thing I see on my dash, am I in an echo chamber? No, I'm just engaging with my hobby.

It's really not that deep lmao is that person okay

Honestly the growing trend of forcing accountability, activism, virtue signalling and moral hunting in every single space is exhausting and crippling and it will eventually succeed in a massive cull of fandom spaces and creators. It already has, even, we've seen 'purges' of creators and content in certain fandoms and from a majority of websites and in revised policies.

That said, per your example, your internet space is allowed to be curated any way that you want it to. This blog, for example, is vastly different to my other account, where you will not find even a speck of political content. Not even a whiff of discourse. Its all cat pictures and the occasional shameless thirst over a man's thighs and probably an unhealthy amount of astronomy. They are both my spaces, they have just simply been curated very, very differently, and with two different intents.

"Isolated" (by content) spaces are not bad. Even in regards to some "negative" aspects. Some people are very, very set in their ways, and cannot or will not change. In such cases, its simply best to allow them to box themselves into their hate and not have a wider outreach.

[longreads]

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

In this week's Top 5:

* Wildfire: too close and personal (Alta Journal) * Running from demons (The Economist) * Experiments in microdosing (5280 Magazine) * Reading is hard (Vox) * Jackass as a love language (Bright Wall/Dark Room)

Learn why our editors are recommending these stories.

[worldnnatureexplorer]

Green Forest in Valley in Mountains, Italy

Cc:AXP Photography

[fansplaining]

🎉 Our May piece is live! 🎉 And it's an exciting one:

"I Came to Ruin You: The Collecting Practices of K-Pop Fandoms"

From photo cards to video art installations, a tour through a recent exhibition showcasing K-pop fans’ communal creativity and cross-cultural exchanges.

by Rea McNamara and Bo Shin

This piece is a bit of a departure for us—rather than our standard fandom reporting or analysis, this is an expanded version of a fannish art exhibition, complete with images, videos, and excerpts from the K-pop fans and artists whose work was featured in the show. The co-curators, Rea and Bo, are both BTS fans, so they write about that position as both fans and curators as well.

By highlighting the creativity, passion, and collaborative spirit of K-pop fans, I came to ruin you recognized fans’ roles as cultural producers. Their collecting practices intersect with and challenge traditional art forms, transforming what might otherwise be considered ephemeral or niche into meaningful cultural expressions.

[manufactoriel]

Young Nigerian woman in the late 1950's, photographer unknown

[robertmatejcek]

After Nature: Untitled Data Model No. Two (Pecan Tree, English Ivy, Northern Cardinal, White-Eyed Vireo, Carolina Wren) - mixed media frame animation - robert matejcek - 2025

“Deep in their roots, all flowers keep the light.” - Theodore Roethke

tags:

[ohmygodiscreamed]

Unique handmade plates, bowls and cups.

[myfandomrealitea]

Actually we do need to push websites to offer better options for content control, muting, tag blocking, ect. Curating your own space online is next to impossible when you have literally no options for content control. Facebook is a prime example of how companies force you to be exposed to anything and everything in the name of profit and exposure.

People individually need to take more accountability and be more active in curating their own spaces, but likewise, companies and websites need to actually fucking offer the option to, and effectively.

Every website should have some sort of tag or word filter so if a post contains said tag or word, I don't have to fucking see it. I shouldn't be seeing sex toy adverts and hate campaigns and endless sponsored posts I physically can't get rid of when I'm just trying to see what Auntie Jane got up to on the weekend.

Profit driving has killed online spaces and social media. Every other post is a sponsored piece of shit or an advert. I can't curate anything because companies are paying out the ass to force me to see their products. Bigotry is fine as long as you're willing to pay to get it seen.

Start. Pushing. Back.

Fill in those feedback forms. Leave low star reviews about the lack of ability to have any control over what you see. People yap about Tumblr but Tumblr actually has some of the most effective and extensive curation tools on the whole fucking internet. We can block, report, mute, mute tags, mute words, mute multiple tags and words, there's no block limit or mute limit.

I can't go onto Instagram to watch cute dog videos without being exposed to Indian pedophile accounts and animal gore videos. I've blocked the Taylor Swift tag 393583 times and Instagram resets it every update because hey, maybe I changed my mind! (I haven't.)

[longreads]

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

In this week's Top 5:

* Ta-Nehisi Coates on necessary truths (New York Magazine) * The rise of Russian poker bots (Bloomberg Businessweek) * Searching for interplanetary life (The Washington Post) * The real predator in the woods (The Bitter Southerner) * Letting horror movies be horror movies (The Baffler)

Learn why our editors are recommending these stories.

[vispoarchive]

From Anja Siger's 14 Virtuous Undesirables.

[bspoquemagazine]

🎨 The Hidden Archive – eine Ausstellung über Erinnerung, Kunst & Widerstandskraft. Ab 20. Juni in der @ifagalleryberlin: Entdecke die Geschichte der zeitgenössischen senegalesischen Malerei von 1960–1990 – kuratiert von @akyasy. Basierend auf einem familiären Archiv und dem kollektiven Gedächtnis zeigt Survival Kit Werke aus deutschen Museumssammlungen – viele erstmals öffentlich. 🗓️ Eröffnung: 19. Juni 2025, 19 Uhr 📍 Linienstraße 139/140, Berlin 📅 Ausstellung bis 24. August #TheHiddenArchive #SurvivalKit #KenAïchaSy #ifaGalleryBerlin #ifaGalerien #ContemporaryAfricanArt #SenegaleseArt #ArchiveAsResistance #RestitutionNow #KunstInBerlin #ifaExhibition #AfricanArchives #ElHadjiSy #ArtAsHeritage

[dannyfariiia]

Photography Luca Khouri Viggo Mortensen and Ron Howard see storytelling as an act of collaboration 🔗

[piizunn]

ᓄᐦᑕᐃᐧᕀ ᐊᐢᑯᑖᐢᑯᐱᓱᐣ nohtawiy askotâskopison, My Father’s Cradleboard by Morgan Possberg Denne

The New Gallery, November 18 - December 22, 2023

“Cradleboards have been used for thousands of years by our ancestors to carry and love for our future generations. They have protected us, acted as an external womb, and given us a place as children to watch our parents' culture and learn from a safe distance. I’ve always wondered if the fact that neither my father, his father, or myself was ever put in a cradleboard may have had a long term impact on our development, personhood, and our coping mechanisms to the ways that colonialism, residential schools and the foster care system has affected my family.

Now as an adult I deeply wish I could rewind the clock and put myself, and my father before me, and his father before him in a cradleboard as a child. To softly sing songs to us, give us safety, and to give us a connection to our culture in a safe environment. Maybe this would fix things. As kids when we were supposed to be kept safe and playing in the woods we were instead being prepped for the meat factory - the eternal meat grinder of colonialism.

The western world teaches us to push aside this childhood imagining and innocence - “These things can’t be undone!”, but what if they could? In another world somebody took better care of us, in another time we learned to drum and sing and dance, in another place we were listened to by adults who had the capacity to love and care for us.

These hot chest and aching throat feelings, the times of biting back angry tears and saying “It’s fine” have to count for something….right?”

“Morgan Possberg Denne is Two-Spirit millennial scoop and foster care survivor; with settler, Cree, Metis, and Chippewa blood connections. They have grown up in treaty 7 territory, and have relatives in southern and northern Ontario. Morgan creates imaginative, illustrative objects which could be seen as pieces of possible narratives, different ways to connect with the past and potential futures through layers of abstraction with no right or wrong answer. What matters to them is not accurately recreating the past or to predict the future, but rather to capture an inner truth and a possible alternative reality of colonial experiences. In a sense, creating new culture from a series of “what-ifs” and new stories / lore. Their work has been recently shown at the Confederation Centre for the Arts and Gallery Gachet.”

(Photos belong to me and the description and artist bio are courtesy of The New Gallery’s website)

[IDs:

1. a large wall hanging made from fish leather,

2. a close up of the same piece. the artwork has faint text cut out of the green tea tanned fish that reads “hey it’s not your fault, you know that right?”

3. a photo of the space showing a video projected onto several fish skins, a table with a vest and a hat made of fish leather, and on the table are cartons made from rawhide.

4. a coatrack on which are a rawhide hunting ruffle and rawhide fishing net resembling a badminton racket

5. a shelf seen in the background of image 3 containing a astro-turf shirt, a hand gun and pocket knife made from rawhide and a fish leather circular clip with a piece of dark hair hanging off the shelf.]

[fansplaining]

It was crucial to situate these materials within an exhibition-making display strategy that resonated with their visual culture and aesthetics. The K-pop shelf and desk are common ways fans display their collectibles at home and in the office; online, Pinterest boards are also plentiful.  The shelf—often a white Ikea shelving unit—is a display with art historical precedent, reminiscent of bookshelves reverently captured in chaekgeori. The late 18th-century Korean still-life paintings featured “books and things”—the literal translation of chaekgeori—alongside other symbolic homewares and objects. These paintings showed a reverence for scholarly objects, a then-ascendant Korean cultural value, and became our own Kunsthalle for these fan objects.

In our latest piece, we go on a tour through the recent exhibition I came to ruin you: The Collecting Practices of K-pop Fandoms, co-curated by Rea McNamara and Bo Shin. In the passage above, Rea and Bo draw a throughline from 18th-century Korean art to today's fans displaying their collections!

Check out the whole article, including images, videos, and audio of the main text: https://www.fansplaining.com/articles/i-came-to-ruin-you-the-collecting-practices-of-k-pop-fandoms

[manufactoriel]

Série, autoportrait d'un confiné, 2020, by Didier Viodé