The simposio is Centotto's indirect, language-based curatorial approach by which featured artists are asked to select and submit works according to varying textual and titular parameters. Specifically, their pieces respond to the discursive framework formed by a given exhibition's bivalent title and its required reading assignment. Within this triangle of potential discourse, therefore, is where exhibited works reside, and artists-cum-interlocutors are asked to provide brief statements to place their works semantically therein. Each simposio show is thus born of a text and, through the compilation of individual statements, engenders a new one.

Interstizio

An interstizio, or interstice, is a space that intervenes, an aperture that comes or resides between. Centotto's thusly named exhibitions and gatherings, therefore, are intended to expand the dialogue or thematic framework of a current exhibition, or to bridge the underlying discourses of one simposio or portfolio show with those of a preceding or subsequent one. An interdisciplinary extension of a given intertext is what each interstizio aims to yield, and since the spatial parameters of Centotto's salotto generally situate these meetings between a wall of books and a wall of artwork, the stage for permutations of textual interplay is appropriately set.

Portfolio x Appunti

Occupying a programmatic middleground between simposio and interstizio shows through a streamlining of conceptual and lexical components and an attenuation of the artist roster—while maintaining, nonetheless, a semantic buttress of obligatory written elements—portfolio x appunti exhibits focus on one artist whose exhibited portfolio, as here intended, is variably mediated by a 5-tiered framework of specific visual and written appunti, or 'notes,' as follows:

Appunti primari: exhibit

Appunti secondari: 5-line statement #1 — concepts, contexts

Appunti terziari: 5-line statement #2 — materials, process

Appunti ulteriori: 5 lists
5 visual artists, 5 visual artworks, 5 artworks heard, 5 artworks read, 5 places or spaces

Appunti fotografati: 5 studio shots

Several of the requisite appunti are left somewhat vague to encourage individual interpretation. As such, each participating artist will also lead, upon the opening of the exhibit, an informal gallery talk to detail and discuss various aspects of the responses provided.

For portfolio exhibits with multiple artists, each participant will provide individualized appunti.

Studio Visits (Ex Situ)

These interstizio gatherings are opportunities for artists to bring a piece or two they've recently finished or something they're currently working on. Something that particularly enthuses or even confuses them. Something not too cumbersome, also, and quick and easy to hang.

Something, in other words, to display in some way, and to discuss to some extent while everyone else in the room joins in the looking and observing, and perhaps in the teasing out of things.

Each artist gets ten or fifteen minutes, or thereabouts, to present and field questions. Then someone else follows suit. And someone else thereafter. And so on.

Studio Visits (Ex Situ) are occasions for all of us to learn a thing or two about others' work and practices—and to perhaps learn something about ours, too, in the process.

These are also great gatherings for making announcements about forthcoming shows and curatorial projects, not to mention all sorts of other things—studios spaces available, studio spaces sought, apartment information, artist's assistant positions, etc. Postcards, flyers and the like can be distributed and/or kept out for display at Centotto.