Bayardo Blandino

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Bayardo Blandino, Artistic Director and Curator, Women in the Arts (MUA), Centro de Artes Visuales Contemporáneo (CAVC), Tegucigalpa, Honduras

A total of 24 modern and contemporary art museum professionals residing in 19 different cities have been awarded support to attend the CIMAM 2019 Annual Conference The 21st Century Art Museum: Is Context Everything? that will be held in Sydney, Australia 15–17 November 2019 hosted jointly by the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia.

Launched in 2005, CIMAM’s Travel Grant Program is designed to foster cooperation and cultural exchange between contemporary art curators and museums directors in emerging and developing economies and their counterparts in other regions of the world.

Bayardo Blandino's Conference Report

As a beneficiary of the CIMAM 2019 Travel Grant Program for the Annual Conference, I want to highlight the relevance of this experience for my current professional performance. In this sense, I consider it essential to mention that, although it is true, the main terrain of the issues revolved around the roles of the current socio-historical development of museums in the 21st century, it has been thanks to the diversity of discussions generated from of the presentations and the case studies, which gave me a perspective of greater openness towards themes that were little explored within the curatorial field of my current environment. In this regard, I give you an approximate reading of the route and my journey through the conference.

Given the expectation of the opening of the conference, I consider that it was one of the points that most caught my attention and interest, concerning the “Change of Narratives”, these keys could be binding with the thought of how to position within the structures local museums, a space for disruptive artistic practices, which break the neutrality standard that often deafens the independent that claims to place art from historically relegated communities and how to resize its current evolution and importance within historical narratives. This has been the case with the perspectives of indigenous art, cited in the papers by Wesley Enoch and the case studies by curators Wanda Nanibush and Ngahiraka Mason.

About the topics discussed in the panel The Future of Collections despite being a non-existent discussion in my particular context, I consider it relevant to raise the diversity of approaches towards which the curatorial function of the collections should be directed. How to articulate from new strategies, experiences of proximity, geolocation, segmentation of representations, among other aspects that can finally contribute to strengthening the dissemination and knowledge of collecting, whether public, private or institutional, in regions of low impact and where they have been historically silenced and made invisible. Another of the great issues Beyond the Walls without a doubt one of the most emotional, it should be noted the role of the generating question of the conference Is Context Everything? taken up by Sally Tallant in her paper Outside in : Inside out and to which she replied that it does not necessarily respond to all international and capital contexts, due to the global crisis of uncertainty that we are going through. Although her presentation referred strictly to exemplify his experiences, it is not far from being a trigger to generate possibilities and access to new actions and operations, within the field of art and public space.

I thank the Getty Foundation for giving me this opportunity to be part of CIMAM. Like all the organizing committee of the annual conference for all their support for making possible my participation in this occasion, which undoubtedly gives my professional experience invaluable support.