‘Challenging Smoothness: How Physical Resistance Reshapes Sensory Experience in Non-traditional Spatial Curating’

Extended Essay, The Glasgow School of Art, 2025–2026

My extended essay examined how curators have used physical friction to redirect audience behaviour. Drawing on curatorial forensics and sensory ethnography, I analysed three case studies: Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth (Tate Modern, 2007), Mike Nelson’s The Coral Reef (2000), and Christoph Büchel’s Training Ground for Democracy (MASS MoCA, 2007) and Monte di Pietà (Fondazione Prada, 2024).

My central argument was that spatial resistance transforms audiences from passive consumers into active investigators. Each case demonstrated a different mechanism: Salcedo’s crack forced a recalibration of gait; Nelson’s material density produced sensory exhaustion; Büchel’s compressed passages mandated a complete reorganisation of bodily posture.

Throughout this research, I relied entirely on secondary material — documentary footage, exhibition photography, architectural drawings. A question emerged that I could not resolve within the essay’s own terms: if a body brushing against a surface constitutes forensic evidence of an encounter, what is the epistemic status of a compressed recording of that same encounter? I had reconstructed bodily experience from records that had already been edited, uploaded, and circulated. The essay did not address the gap between those records and the experiences they claimed to document.

Glasgow Hybrid Intervention began where the essay stopped.