Marcela Lopez Sastre

Conference Report. November 2023

Making visible the invisible

Museums have a historical tradition that builds some narratives about themselves; as we are actually reviewing art, social, and political history we also may think about our own history.

In the present, this perspective is situated and located on boundaries and trust between our proposals and our communities. How we recover good practices to become trustful institutions where we can think from different perspectives, without feeling judged or observed? Using different tools and going through diverse experiences to think about new fascism all around the world, for example. And how many local projects resist as unique archives in war territories, how transgender communities become their living archive, and how becoming old is part of artistic practice in a world where old is the worst adjective ever.

The global viral space has become a territory after the pandemic so may search deeply there. To get to communicate different micro political projects to give them voice and strength, making visible the invisible. This invisible net around the world is ruled by artists, curators, gallerists, writers, activists in political and artistic matters, archivists, directors, and many other communities resisting for affective reasons to an ascendant violent world.

Real accessibility to culture among experiences that go beyond esthetics. Museums may adapt their public programs looking forward to total access for every different public with many abilities’. We may let the museum be trespassed by communities: native, transgender, blind, deaf, autist, etc. to really get to learn their perspectives and become a little bit closer to an inclusive project. Also, we may go into territories if we are working on co-creative, collective, and community projects, we may not expect the others to trust us if we are not capable of experiencing their realities. Dialogue is between the institutional practices and their communities.

Collective projects as micro-political actions all around the world may seem a possible parallel net that communicates alternative community systems against the ascendant violent practices, we evidence all around the globe. Heritage as memories may be the way to get into particular stories and understand affective practices are part of the experience and we may go through it. Accessibility first is to assume our practices are mostly based on images and sounds, we assume we can walk through the space and that we can read the text: we are not enabled to think about other abilities beyond ours. To think about accessibilities, we may assume first our own disabilities to experience other ways to go through the space for example, and how we translate our curatorial projects to other diverse languages.

Personally, this experience was very intense, I could learn from other similar projects to the program I had directed at the Fine Arts Museum in Salta, north of Argentina. I evidence we are many working in the same way and that was very encouraging.

Also, I could share the post-trip and hosted a guide at the Museum I work actually so was the most I could expect. We travelled to Cafayate and experienced a performance by the artist Javier Soria Vazquez who also performed at the museum the day before. All his works are about working with others; he as an artist is an orchestra director of musicians and of a group of artists, he paid to perform his pieces. He has curatorial studies, so his position is in between artistic and curatorial practices and on that edge we are walking through.

Also, we visited a Wichi art exhibition by Tewok which is a community that inhabited the region of Chaco at the north of Salta in the border with Bolivia and Paraguay. This is the third project we worked on with our native communities, August is the month of Pachamama or Mother Earth which is a common popular goodness, and we invite different native communities to the museum. We try to adapt to their timing and their costumes; in these projects, the community worked for a year curated by Veronica Ardanaz and created 150 ceramics that were separated into 10 spiritual affinities groups. Earth, Fire, Chaman, Cacique, Water, New Dialogue, Lies, Mother Earth, ancestors, and wind were the spirits that came through their dreams and materialized through earth, water, and fire into ceramics. There is a clear message from Mother Earth which is dry and praised for potable water this only may be possible by living in harmony with nature, being respectful to their force, and assuming we are part of it. This was Tewok's message through many open dialogues they gave to different groups during the project.

Also, we visit the Permanent Collection curated by the Museum following a line history of the museum itself. We exhibited the foundational collections from the National Art Museum and the Barroco Americano from the Lujan Museum. But mostly we show our foundational artists who worked on our local scene and history: Carlos “Pajita” Garcia Bes, Elsa Salfity, Maria Martorell, and the group Tartagal among many others.

Bio

At the age of 16 she travelled from Salta to NY and finished high school, where she specialized in visual arts and contemporary dance. She returned to Argentina and after a brief stay in Bs. As. she settled in Córdoba where she studied arts at the Figueroa Alcorta School (current UPC) and Social Communication at the National University of Córdoba, finishing the second career with a degree thesis about Córdoba photography from the 90s: from analogic to digital images. There she carries out multiple independent management activities in relation to photography and publishes a magazine dedicated to visual arts and poetry called PH. In 2000 she travelled to Barcelona, where she studies photography graduated from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, she also worked as an assistant in a commercial art gallery.

From 2008 to 2015 she was curator of the MAC- Museum of Contemporary Art of Salta. In parallel she carried out independent curatorships and investigated the work of artists linked to the NOA region and neighboring countries: Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil who work on current art from the perspective of cultural studies. She accompanied the management of several independent spaces in relation to her curatorial proposal.

She is currently Director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Salta. She is writing her PHD Arts National Córdoba University thesis, where she is investigating on Artistic and Curatorial Practice in self-management projects. She is a member of the AACA- Argentine Association of Art Critics and member of CIMAM.

At the Museum the Permanent Collection centered on referential artists Carlos L. Garcia Bes and Elsa Salfity who following the Tartagal´s Group of Painters from 1940 : Carybé, Luis Preti, Raul Brie and Gertrudis Chale returned on our pre-colombian art history: tapestry and pottery, languages and techniques still alive in our native communities’.