Radical Power Sharing: Navigating Facilitatory Power in Museum and Gallery Engagement

This article explores facilitatory authority in museum and gallery engagement and the role that an orientation to values can play in creating conditions for radical power sharing with visitor communities. The text is rooted in a reflective analysis of facilitating Journeys with “The Waste Land,” a three-year major exhibition project at Turner Contemporary in the UK, co-curated with audiences. The article examines exhibition-making as a space for community occupancy, particularly how co-creation, as a values-oriented conceptual framework, can be translated into practice and what this means in terms of facilitatory thinking and decision making at different stages of the curatorial process. The text situates the practice of co-creation in relation to personal and organizational values as well as to bigger debates around cultural value. Particular attention is given to strategies for mitigating privileged authority inherent in the facilitatory role in order to realize conditions for democracy and distributed (or polyvocal) authorship when working with community partners.