Authorship and Curatorship: The Active Face of the World Music's Passive Work

This is a research about Putumayo, a NY based label of World Music collections. On its own words, the label’s work consists in organizing collection that gather music from “exotic places where the music originated” so the rest of the world could know about that culture “as it is”. But what we observed in the research activity is that the curatorship work of the label brings a strong authorship signature: the label isn’t only (passively) exposing the cultures in their own native terms, but (actively) substantially constituting them based in its New Yorker grammar. In light of this, the article aims to show how passive and disinterested curatorship gests are also active and interested acts of authorship: world cultures are not merely being organized, but formed too. The one who selects, believing that can do it, is also the one that creates. In this way, the article lays on the mediation issue, aiming to analyze how intermediary instances, precisely because they see themselves as capable to live in this between poles, start escaping to this poles, constituting them more than making they dialogue. In general terms, this is a work about exotization practices of construction of the other that intends to show how this exercise of coming out of itself searching the other, when based in its own believes, it’s always a jump into itself. We want to discuss these issues inside the modernity debate, showing how the problem of “other voices” is a central analytical topic.