What does a curator actually do — not in principle, but in practice? This keynote by Jay Pather takes the "how" of curating as its central question, tracing his work across Afrovibes Festival, Documenta, and the Live Art Network Africa. At the heart of Afrovibes 2026 lies the theme Soil | Soul — an understanding of land not as territory or commodity, but as a source of memory, ancestry, ritual, and identity. That understanding begins with a more fundamental reckoning: for centuries, the Mercator projection has rendered Africa smaller than it is, a cartographic distortion that mirrors broader patterns of diminishment. As the United Nations moves to correct this misrepresentation, the question of how Africa is seen, and by whom, becomes newly urgent. Pather reflects on how this moment shapes curatorial practice, how the Soil | Soul theme emerged from listening to the artists themselves, and how curation becomes an act of custodianship: holding, shaping, and transmitting what the work carries, while navigating the institutional and geopolitical forces that continue to push against it.