A Cultural Poultice
The Pulse night club tragedy resulted in the loss of 49 individuals, wounded dozens physically, and scarred countless thousands of others. The Wikipedia entry below suggests a single person was responsible for this tragedy — but is there no shared responsibility in participating in a culture that generated an ignorance of social policy and firearm regulations, and rhetorics of hate that inspired and allowed the Pulse nightclub tragedy, and similar events to occur in the future?
Our group of curators are all citizens of Central Florida, and members of the University of Central Florida academic community. As an attempt to understand our relationship to this event as a collective our group employed Gregory Ulmer’s concept of the popcycle as a curatorial aid and heuristic, each of us gathering images that represent our relationship to one of the dominant discourses of our lives: Family, Education, Career or Discipline, and Entertainment. In addition to using Ulmer’s work, our group considered the metaphor of the Wunderkammer as a means of representing our collective perspectives.