apostrophhheee.xyz is a potentially always mutable web interface, a vehicle for informal research on absence and touch at a distance; an excuse for conspiracy, an accumulation of vestiges, rehearsals of closeness, a collective co-curation project.

(' ) is a protected conversational space for the reflection on touch. the lack, impossibility, and necessity of it, and how we can address it through small virtual simulacra of closeness and resistance, which aim to rethink our layered, porous, and embodied curatorial practice as the action of caring for a social network and a process. We intend to insist on the importance of presence, the haptic (hapticality), affects, bonds, and commitments within and around MSD.

As a web interface, (' ) also aims to offer a space to think about what it implies to work from a hybrid curatorial practice that is also concerned with the web as a medium and to apprehend that this implies that the curatorial authority shares control and power with the platform, with the users, and with the collaborators. Working on the construction of a web platform as a research vehicle and as an ecosystem (not a self-contained object) has given me (us) a second layer of understanding of the curatorial function in collaborative processes. In this kind of process, the curator becomes (even more clearly) a node that accepts the particularities of curating as a process, in execution, a networked co-curation.

(' ): apostrophhheee is a project that I develop with others who are not in body here, but who write with me and hold me at a distance. It is a container of contact(s); the will to affect and be affected; it is to pretend and embrace closeness, recognising that we are multiple bodies, simultaneous and distant.