Paul B Preciado's Empty House: Curators, Vampires and Other Exemplary Lives

Abstract

Within Paul B. Preciado's abundant and influential oeuvre, his curatorial work occupies an essential place, extraordinarily prominent in artistic circles but perhaps less analyzed than other aspects of his production. These pages situate that work in the context of Preciado's spatial thinking initiated in his work on Hugh Hefner, the creator of Playboy, and developed in much of his later writings. The systematic exploration of the relationships between space and the production and dissemination of information that is developed in them and its implementation in the  curatorial field has made Preciado a privileged agent of an art system that has left behind the contemplative space of the museum. This has been replaced by a hybrid scenario of incessant exhibition events conceived as focal points of informative production within a logic in which the limits between museum space and media organism disappear. In Preciado, the dialogue between a radical questioning of subjective structures, charismatic circulation and the configuration of artistic habitats intertwines in complex and sometimes contradictory ways, offering a useful perspective for the analysis of the contemporary functioning of the curatorial role. An analysis of Preciado's theoretical ideas on the relationship between space and subjective formation serves as a preamble to a review and contextualisation of his curatorial trajectory as a paradigm of key transformations in the art system of recent decades. A detailed analysis of  some of his curatorial projects allows us to situate the figure of Preciado in a complex and contradictory crossroads between the will to create spaces of social transformation and new strategies of collection and commodification.