As CASA’s Lines of Flight continues throughout 2026 at Brixton House, curator Gabriela Román González proposes something increasingly rare in contemporary cultural discourse, a programme that explicitly rejects “fixed truths” and definitive answers. In a cultural moment where institutions are often pressured to provide clarity, or moral positioning, what does it mean to curate from such a position? Spanning exhibitions, live art, residencies and public interventions the programme asks how art might help us inhabit contradiction rather than resolve it.
Román González starts from the premise that contradiction is inherent to lived experience, and that curatorial practice should resist the pressure to resolve it too quickly. The conversation that follows expands on many of the ideas underpinning the programme, beginning with the approach of rejecting “fixed truths” in Román González’s curatorial method, the politics of collective making, and why unfinishedness may be one of the most urgent artistic conditions of our time.
About her approach of rejecting “fixed truths”, the curator comments:
I would say curating from this approach is a process of checking our own biases, and becoming a little less categorical about what we think we already know about art, artists, the world, and each other. The programme is an invitation to open up to a multiplicity of experiences, some we may find ourselves disagreeing with, others we may align with, and many that may simply ask us to pay attention differently.
At an institutional level, for me this has meant an exercise in asking, what truths are we validating? And then think of an art programme more as a forum for different approaches. In practice, this is an almost impossible exercise, but a productive one. As I am selecting artists, shaping contexts and deciding what is shown. But the intention of rejecting fixed truths, makes the curation more open, less judgemental, less moralising, I would like to think.
I like that you mention this cultural moment, because for me it is very much about that, something I feel we may need at a time when polarisation is consuming us and dividing us into groups that often end up cancelling one another out. And that’s why I feel a genuine attitude of curiosity is so important, towards other people, cultures, other forms of knowledge, and sensibilities that do not immediately fit within our own frameworks.
This is not always easy, but it keeps you open to surprise and, that’s what I hope to create with the programme, that audiences, artists and myself can sit with the hybridity that already exists around us, resisting simplifying things too quickly, and remaining open to perspectives that might otherwise be overlooked.
Arrivals/Departures event, November 2025
The programme is inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “lines of flight” – ruptures that open new possibilities. In this spirit, exhibitions do not conclude ideas but open questions that continue through residencies, performances, editorial commissions and public conversations. Research, partnerships and publishing follow the same logic. Rather than operating as parallel activities, they become interconnected parts of a single curatorial process, allowing ideas to circulate across formats and accumulate over time in a distinctly rhizomatic way. How have you found translating what is quite a dense philosophical framework into something materially and emotionally legible for audiences entering Brixton House?
To be honest, it has become less intellectualised than it sounds. I started from that concept, but I realised I needed to move away from theory and get closer to intuition and focus on how to generate the conditions where “lines of flight” could actually happen and be lived. A few decisions followed, like the idea of designing a year-long programme or framing the four main themes as open questions rather than fixed statements.
The year-long temporality allows us to sustain conversations over a longer period of time. It really gives space for a network of relationships to take shape, and gain in depth. It also allows us to reflect on what we are doing and iterate, for ideas or complex questions to mature. In that sense, residencies have been especially important within the programme, because they create spaces for trial and error and allow “lines of flight” to be put into practice. So yes, the concept served as a point of inspiration, but then we had to move away from it and live it.
Exhibition What do we risk by coming closer?, November 2025
By this point, it becomes clear that mobility, friction, institutional critique, and interdisciplinarity are not simply the programme’s recurring subjects. Taken together, they reveal a coherent curatorial methodology. Roman returns to this set of questions through different artistic forms, allowing each iteration to complicate and expand the last, and that consistency of inquiry gives Lines of Flight its distinctive curatorial voice. For example, across both Transnational Encounters and Systems in Question, there’s a recurring concern with movement (bodies, identities, permissions, borders, ideas). Which leads me to ask if you see mobility today as primarily a condition of freedom, or increasingly one of control?
I think mobility carries the promise of freedom, the possibility of moving, changing direction, crossing borders, narrating yourself differently. But mobility is also one of the clearest places where power becomes visible. And questioning that promise has been present from the beginning of the programme.
Movement is never abstract. I say this from London, and also from my own experience as someone coming from Cuba. It is shaped by passports, visas, money, race, language, class, and by the stories that institutions, systems etc, are prepared to recognise. Some people move through the world with permission already granted and others have to prove or justify themselves at every step.That is also true in the arts. It shapes which art circulates, who receives visibility, how some histories are treated as universal, and which forms of ‘cultural difference’ are welcomed into institutions.
The Hollow Men’ performance, July 2026
If these structures also shape artistic production and circulation, they inevitably leave traces that extend beyond institutions themselves. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the title of the exhibition I’ve grown tired / I’ve grown hopeful , which captures a tension many people recognise politically and emotionally right now. Was that duality intended as a reflection of contemporary exhaustion, or as a refusal to surrender optimism entirely?
In many ways, it emerged as both. It was about recognising that exhaustion and hope can coexist in our journeys, and that perhaps they need each other more than we imagine.With this exhibition, I wanted to reflect on how transnational experience shapes artistic practice, but without approaching it through literal representation. After spending time connecting with Tatiana, the co-curator, and with the artists, and getting closer to their personal histories, it became more interesting to look at the emotions those life experiences had left in them, and how those emotions translated into their work.The title came from that process, and ended up resonating with a more collective feeling, very close to this moment, where many of us are feeling tired, not fully hopeful, but not giving up either.
Exhibition I’ve grown tired / I’ve grown hopeful, May 2026
What is perhaps most revealing is that this openness to discovery is not limited to the exhibition itself. The Diasporas Now Formula residency extends that same methodology. Why was it important to foreground experimentation, negotiation and even incompleteness, rather than presenting finished outcomes alone?
I feel we need more space for exploration without knowing where it will lead because we spend too much time thinking about outcomes. Experimenting is incredibly powerful and necessary, because it is where unexpected connections and different ways of thinking happen. That is one of the reasons why residencies are so important within the programme, as a moment where artists can follow an intuition, try something out, change direction, ‘fail’, begin again, and see what happens.
With Formula, for example, artists improvised with voice, movement, writing, storytelling. We did a workshop about these topics. There was something almost childlike about it in the best sense. People stopped trying to get things right and simply allowed themselves to play. And I think a lot of great ideas begin there.
Formula Workshop, May 2026
Another focus of the programme is on collective practice, which can often be romanticised within arts programming. What interested you about the more difficult dimensions of collaboration (disagreement, uneven labour, conflicting cultural perspectives) and how do those frictions become productive within the programme?
One of the first questions I wanted to open through the programme took the form of an exhibition with artist Emilia González Salgado: What do we risk by coming closer? Looking back, I can see that question has followed me throughout Lines of Flight.
Collaboration is, in many ways, an exercise in proximity. To work with someone, especially across disciplines, geographies or different cultural backgrounds, requires a willingness to encounter ways of understanding the world that are not your own. And that is not always comfortable. In my experience, it is much messier than we often admit, and I became interested in exploring through art where those challenges come from and what it takes to work through them.
I also think the most meaningful moments in collaborative work do not emerge when everyone agrees, but when people find ways to continue working together despite disagreement. Not every difference needs to be resolved. There is value in learning how to stay in relation to one another when differences remain. Because that process encourages us to articulate what we mean, but also to listen, adapt, and remain engaged with perspectives that challenge our own assumptions. Often, those moments reveal things that would otherwise remain hidden.
Exhibition What do we risk by coming closer?, November 2025
That shift, from relationships between people to the conditions that shape those relationships, also seems to mark a broader turn within the programme. This becomes particularly evident in Systems in Question, which examines how power operates through “rules, permissions and structures shaping how bodies move, gather and become visible.” To what extent is the programme also interrogating the arts institution itself as one of those systems?
This interrogation feels also especially present to me, because I have spent much of my career working independently, and my role at CASA has made me think more deeply about the relationship between independent practice and institutional work.
INDEPENDENCE, the exhibition that closed the Systems in Question chapter, felt important in this context. It reflected on the illusion of independence, the idea that agency, freedom or self-determination can exist as pure individual states. It also brought back the question of mobility, but from another angle, not to ask only who moves, but under what legal, economic and institutional conditions movement becomes possible. In reality, we are all working within systems of interdependence, with contracts, obligations, labour, resources, institutions, etc. Cultural work is never produced in isolation, it depends on many visible and invisible structures.
Exhibition INDEPENDENCE, June – July 2026
Through Lines of Flight, CASA itself seems to become part of that enquiry, testing what an organisation can realistically do from within the systems it inhabits. That raises a broader question about the organisation’s role today. CASA was founded in response to the underrepresentation of Latin American arts in the UK. Nearly two decades later, do you think the conversation has fundamentally shifted, or do diasporic artists still face pressures around legibility, representation, or cultural translation within British institutions?
I think the conversation has definitely shifted, and it would be unfair to suggest otherwise. There is greater visibility, more artists working internationally, more institutions engaging with Latin American, Caribbean and diasporic practices, and organisations like CASA have contributed to that change.
At the same time, I do not think the questions around legibility, representation and cultural translation have disappeared. I say this as someone who has also navigated those dynamics personally, living and working between different contexts. There are expectations for diasporas to explain themselves, behave or become legible through the preconceived imaginaries that exist about them. There are a lot of pressures implicit in that. Sometimes the challenge is no longer whether something is included, but under what terms it is included.
That is one of the reasons why, with Lines of Flight, I was interested in shifting the focus away from identity as the primary point of entry. I wanted to show our hybridity, and to give artists space to be political, poetic, contradictory, speculative, funny, difficult or deeply personal, without always
having to justify their presence through where they come from, or through what others expect them to represent.
Formula Performance, May 2026
This refusal to reduce artists to fixed identities is reflected not only in the selection of artists, but in the structure of the programme itself. Lines of Flight moves fluidly across exhibition-making, live art, editorial practice, workshops and performance. Are you intentionally resisting disciplinary boundaries as part of the curatorial politics of Lines of Flight?
I think I have always been naturally drawn to multidisciplinary and cross-disciplinary practices, and to the kinds of connections that emerge when different fields and ways of working come into contact with one another.Part of that probably comes from my own trajectory. I have moved through the arts in different ways over the years, developing my own creative projects, curating exhibitions, building platforms and working across cultural programming. Because of that, I rarely experience art through a single disciplinary lens, and I am often more interested in the questions a project is asking than in the category it belongs to.
Lines of Flight grew quite organically from that inclination. Once you start thinking about movement, relation and experimentation, it becomes difficult to contain those conversations within a single format. So if there is a politics behind it, perhaps it is about allowing artists and audiences to find the formats that best support the conversations they are trying to have.
Exhibition What do we risk by coming closer?, November 2025 and, ‘The Hollow Men’ performance, July 2026
Ultimately, Lines of Flight has never been organised around particular artistic forms so much as around the kinds of conversations that art can make possible. That seems an appropriate place to end. You’ve spoken about “staying with complexity” through artistic practice. In a time shaped by climate crisis, migration, technological acceleration and widening inequality, what do you think art can offer that policy, journalism or academia cannot?
I think the difference is that art stays close to what is alive and, as we have been discussing, what is alive is also vulnerable, ambiguous, contradictory and surprising. That is where I think its force lies, and what marks its difference from the languages of other disciplines. Art creates an experience. Sometimes it moves us before we have fully understood or intellectualised what has happened.
You are placed in a space, in front of an image, listening to a sound, or close to another body, and something in your attention changes. And that is different and refreshing because many topics, when they come from policy, journalism or academia, become exhausting very quickly. They often arrive already loaded with positions, or with a language that can be very difficult, sometimes even alienating. Art, at its best, tends to enter through another door. It reaches your senses first, before your rational mind has fully caught up.
Seen within the broader trajectory of Román González’s practice, Lines of Flight appears as the continuation of a long-standing curatorial position. From Outdoor Swimming Exercise to Bad Walking and Footnotes, her projects have repeatedly questioned linear narratives, foregrounded process over resolution and treated exhibitions as sites for producing, rather than illustrating, knowledge.
About
Ricardo Reverón Blanco is an award-winning writer, curator and mentor. He has curated exhibitions and artistic programmes for organisations including Aspex Portsmouth, Photoworks and Peckham24. He is a co-founder of UnderExposed, and his practice is informed by collectivity and collaborative approaches to artistic production.
Gabriela Román González is a curator, creative and cultural strategist working across exhibitions, live programmes, and interdisciplinary art formats. Her practice centres on contemporary and process-led art, exploring more porous models of exhibition-making across disciplines. Head of Exhibitions and Programmes at CASA, founder of Not The Owners and trustee of LADA.
Words: Ricardo Reverón Blanco
30 July 2026