Conference Abstract

Enduring Game: Expanding New Models of Museum Making
Of Necessity Virtue

Museums are active agents of social values. Understanding museums and their teams within a social and economic context goes far beyond any standardized political framework or performance checklist.

Rather than interpreting the real negatively, we must aim to invent the future museum from the new orders emerging. The aim of the CIMAM Annual Conference is therefore to analyze the current state, while predicting the future trajectories in contemporary art institutions. This year’s Annual Conference is all about combining the act of listening to voices that inspire and ignite our minds with the exercise of finding a language to describe emerging paradigms, emerging ways of organizing our teams, programs, contents. The museum’s tongue in times of a deep disregard of culture is fundamental to motivate the citizenship, to educate, to guard not only works and practices but freedom and the right to hope for an equal world.

This year the conference is designed as three collective working sessions around the paradox of having to face important and hard systematic changes – cuts and a growing climate of political and social antagonism – while inventing and revitalizing the social, pedagogical, and cultural mission of the multiple institutions dedicated to contemporary art.

Conference Program Overview

The Content Committee proposes a carefully choreographed three-day program to foster deep engagement and shared reflection. Each day will open with a welcome address and by an artist's intervention, followed by a 40-minute keynote address and by complementary performative acts, setting a tone of embodied and intellectual attentiveness.

Participants will then engage in working sessions in small groups, designed not as conventional discussions but as laboratories of thought, to create a climate in which more general, complex, and abstract reflections coexist with an active conversation about the problems and strategies that each of us considers relevant in the current situation. Listening to and contributing one's own opinions in equal measure is one of the goals of this year's conference.

To ensure that the wealth of these exchanges contributes to an architecture of shared knowledge, each day will conclude with a brief reporting session, synthesizing key ideas and outlining common and divergent perspectives.

Day 1: Doing Less vs. Doing Differently

The first day will open with a thought aimed at situating and better understanding the paradigm shift we are facing, so motivating participants to actively participate in the conference by breaking into groups with guest moderators. These initial sessions are intended to challenge ingrained assumptions and create a shared vocabulary for thinking about institutional transformation. By focusing on “doing less” not as withdrawal but as recalibration, we invite a reconsideration of the qualitative over the quantitative in cultural work.

Day 2: Mapping Desires

On this day, after the performance and keynote, a series of short presentations will invite delegates to articulate their pragmatic aspirations and to imagine institutional models that respond critically and constructively to the changing realities of the cultural sector, avoiding utopian idealism in favor of a grounded and resilient imagination.

Day 3: Transactions and Transmission. Tactics of Togetherness

On day three, we propose breaking into groups again to examine how museum communication as a transmission is perceived by audiences, interrogating the frameworks through which messages are transmitted—what is being communicated, how it is conveyed, and to what extent publics are meaningfully informed and engaged. At the same time, the sessions will explore the notion of 'transaction' not merely as an exchange of information, but as a model for expanded relationality—opening new potentialities for co-production and collaborative models of working within and beyond institutional boundaries.

This year’s conference positions itself as a forum for dialogue and imagination of the museum of the future, where theoretical and abstract thinking intersects with practical, grounded strategies. It is a gathering shaped by the belief that through collective, participatory engagement, museums can regain their balance and reaffirm their relevance in a fractured world.