Micol Curatolo

Micol Curatolo (she/they) is an art worker, curator and producer based in Finland. Her practice explores the politics of space, labour, and learning, with a focus on feminist and antiracist work.

Micol is the Chair of SKY The Finnish Curators Association and the Vice Chair of Arte ry the artists organisation running Titanik, a contemporary art gallery in Turku, Finland. Micol holds a masters in Visual Cultures, Curating and Contemporary Art at Aalto University (Espoo, Finland, 2024). In 2025, she developed a practice-based research supported by Kone Foundation on ‘Border politics in contemporary curatorial practice’ and initiated the project SLOW – Seasonal Laboratories for Other Worlds in collaboration with the Museum of Impossible Forms, Helsinki. Previously, she self-published the edited book “Here, Not. Dialogues on art and the making of here”.  Between 2022-2025, Micol worked as the project coordinator of the educational program of PUBLICS, Helsinki.

Seasonal Laboratories and the labour of learning: Curating exhibitionary spaces for civic work

SLOW — Seasonal Laboratories for Other Worlds is an independent curatorial project that explores artistic research as a place for trans-local learning by hosting collaborative work in the exhibitions’ design and activation. The project was initiated in 2025 with the collaboration of the Museum of Impossible Forms, Helsinki. The programme draws connections between bodies, geographies, and economies by bringing international artistic practices, local actors and grass-root projects together at work, responding to struggles that might appear across places. The project stems from the belief that art can help us navigate the (global) politics of space, and learn to imagine, relate, and organise otherwise. To do so, curators need questioning what is expected of different audiences when we ask them to participate in these processes. How would the recognition of audience engagement as a form of organised (emotional, relational and intellectual) labour impact the way we curate and mediate art as a site of collaborative and situated learning? Could the category of labour help a more ethical positionality between independent cultural workers and their communities? In the face of financial austerity and conservative migration policies, this inquiry attempts to formulate the civic relevance of independent curatorial practices to support the capacity of a community to access artistic work, learn from artistic work, gather and organise around it.