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Interesting food for thought here... thanks Marlena's question: Is there any way to organize a symposium without choosing the participants? is an interesting one, because of course the common-sensical answer is No. However in an institutional context (which is where the majority of symposiums take place) 'selection' of speakers is often not authored as such. Sitting in the audience or up on the podium we can ofetn find no easy answer to 'who invited me/him/her?', and therefore 'why are we invited?'. Indeed, on the international symposium circuit the same faces, positions and ideas come up again and again, much like artist's lists at Biennale's. A close look and one starts to suspect a kind of selection by search-by-theme approach, a default line-up... So to change the question to Is it possible to organise a symposium without considering the critical responsibility tied to the choice of participants? my answer is Yes, we see it all the time. Whether substituting 'curate' for 'organise' in this altered question would change the answer remains unclear. But for Dorothee and myself the questions of who and why were very much in our minds as we organised the symposium, and it was these logics of 'who we might be' and 'why we might all be there' that we authored, and consequently termed curating. cheers Barnaby