The Consultation Record as Anticipatory Co-production and the Epistemic Labour of Festival Curation

Curatorial studies has produced substantial theorizations of the curator as cultural producer and of the curatorial as knowledge event, but it has not examined the mechanisms through which curatorial knowledge is produced in practice: the consultation, the negotiated agenda, the co-produced material commitment. This article addresses that gap by reading curatorial consultation records - annotated agendas and outcome notes - as primary evidence of a form of knowledge production it terms anticipatory co-production: knowledge that is oriented toward a material outcome that does not yet exist, produced across curatorial and artistic subject positions, prescriptive rather than documentary, and partially externalized through the consultation's own documentary apparatus. The concept is derived from the convergence of five frameworks drawn from scholarship on tacit knowledge, invisible labour, articulation work, situated action, and situated epistemology, none of which has previously been applied to curatorial practice. The empirical base consists of twenty-six consultations conducted across two rounds with thirteen artists for the sixth edition of the Istanbul Digital Art Festival (IDAF'26), read as longitudinal pairs separated by a five-week interval. Three cases - in which co-produced commitments are confirmed, spatially transformed, or structurally stalled - demonstrate that anticipatory co-production operates under variable conditions of constraint and that festival curation's bureaucratic apparatus renders legible a register of curatorial labour that other formats leave tacit. Keywords: anticipatory co-production; curatorial labour; festival curation; consultation records; invisible work; new media art