To Mônica Hoff

Mônica Hoff
Porto Allegre, Brazil

San Francisco, USA
2 November 2014

Hi Mônica

You were in Liverpool recently? I’m sorry to have missed you. I was there the week before for The Resident — probably Sally and others told you about it. It seemed to go well. It’s hard to bring people together in that way, people with very different perspectives too. It’s my job now — as a Curatorial Correspondent — to find a way to write up the record of what was discussed. That record will be published as an edition of the Biennial’s online journal Stages. Doubtless, this edition is going to be a ‘journal’ more in the personal chronicle sense than the academic sense.

So you quit the Mercosul Biennial. No one is surprised. What more was there for you to do there? It was wonderful to have the chance to work with you on the ninth edition last year. It gave me a lot to think about in terms of what it means to be an ‘education biennial’ — you know that your mediators program from Porto Allegre has become a model for the biennial in Liverpool; small-scale at first, necessarily. It’s good that you had the chance to talk to Polly about that. We discussed it a bit during The Resident — about the ways in which your programme, over years, over successive biennial editions, became something like a ‘periodic college of continuing education’, allowing artists and others to gain skills and knowledge that empowered them to participate in the cultural life of the city in deeper or more extensive ways — as artists, teachers, writers, in terms of running art spaces etc.

The Mercosul Biennial will miss your work.

D.