Grégory Castéra (he/him) works in the field of contemporary art at the intersection of curating, learning, and institution development. Born in Fréjus, France, in 1981, into a French-Italian family, he lives between Brussels-Les Marolles and Paris-Goutte d’Or.
As curator-at-large and chief of “Learning from the Commons” at KANAL-Centre Pompidou (Brussels), he develops structural projects inspired by the Commons for a new 47,000m2 museum of modern and contemporary art. His programme is currently unfolding in the website World Histories of the Commons.
A founding member of Afield (since 2014), a translocal network of artist-led social initiatives, and Celador (since 2023), a Brussels-based space for doing things with words, he currently serves as an advisor to the Jan van Eyck Academie (since 2021) and Kerenidis Pepe (since 2015).
His last essays include “Of Attentional Environments (The Pearl Necklace),” published in 2023 by Valiz in the anthology Sensing Earth (.pdf in Creative Commons), and “Where Are You Now? On Manon de Boer’s Stops (2025),” published in January 2025 in the Newspaper Jan Mot No. 145.
2023 was the 10th anniversary and the closing of Council, a curatorial office for art and society that he founded together with Sandra Terdjman. The essay “Transforming, composing, instituting, disappearing. Four Mouvements of the Curatorial Inquiry”, published in 2017 by art and Theory Publishing in the anthology Curating Context, describe their methodology.
Before this, Castéra initiated and ran “Collective Practices” at the Royal Institute of Art Stockholm (2019-2022), a post-master research course that critically reflects on the transformations of collective practices at the crossing of political ecology, emancipation movements, and digitalization.
From 2010 to 2012, he served as co-director of Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, a center for artistic research situated in the outskirts of Paris, together with Alice Chauchat and Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez.
From 2007 to 2009, he was a coordinator and educator at Bétonsalon, a center for art and research located in the new 13th’s ‘city university’ in Paris. From 2007 to 2014, with the collective L'Encyclopédie de la parole, he created an online encyclopedia and several productions exploring the spoken word in all its forms.
Grégory Castéra has worked with artists such as Agency, Tarek Atoui, Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz, Eglė Budvytytė, Jennifer Lacey, Franck Leibovici, Mobile Akademie Berlin, Carlos Motta, Rosalind Nashashibi & Lucy Skaer, Marjetica Potrč, Zhou Tao, and Akram Zaatari.
Among the projects that he has curated and co-curated are Shoreline Movements at Taipei Biennial (2020); Collectively at Iaspis (2019); Infinite Ear at Sharjah Biennial (2013), Bergen Assembly (2016), Garage Museum (2018), and CentroCentro (2019-2020); Foreign Places at Wiels (2016); The Manufacturing of Rights at Ashkal Alwan (2015); On Ordinary Narratives at Villa Arson (2014); and Playtime at Betonsalon (2008, 2009).
He co-edited a number of publications including The Against Nature Journal (2020-2022) and Le journal des Laboratoires (2010-2012).
@gregorycastera
Selection of essays on Academia
linkedin.com/in/gregorycastera
