Ilaria Conti

Ilaria Conti (b. 1985) is a curator/nonprofit professional, who focuses on epistemic justice and decoloniality. Her work addresses institutional infrastructures, communal care, curatorial ethics, civic agency.

Ilaria studied in Italy and the USA, where she advanced a curatorial practice on sociopolitical issues. Her training at US institutions helped her reshape museological/art historical narratives through decolonial methodologies. She further developed this approach at the Marrakech Biennale, working on cross-Atlantic narratives and methodological connections across Africa and the Americas.

Ilaria expanded this cross-regional approach to sociopolitical urgencies at the Pompidou through exhibitions/ residencies/programs gathering multidisciplinary artists/academics/activists and addressing epistemic diversity, ecology, and forms of knowledge under-recognized by institutions. There, she reshaped institutional processes to meet the needs of practitioners from diverse epistemic contexts, foster accessibility/engagement for diverse communities, and provide fair compensation and long-term support to research-based practices.

As Director and Chief Curator of La Nueva Fábrica (LNF), a nonprofit exhibition and residency space in Antigua, Guatemala, Ilaria continues to expand this dual approach: curatorially, by cultivating epistemic/social/cultural justice and Indigenous knowledge, and infrastructurally, by reshaping institutional processes. LNF is a young nonprofit advancing the arts in Guatemala and becoming a crossroad for local and international practitioners. Being the organization at a pivotal point of growth, she works to consolidate its infrastructure, processes, financial sustainability.

Conti structures LNF’s work around four core themes: gender, environment, migration, epistemic diversity. She is curating its first year-long program, responding to 500 years since the colonizers’ arrival in Guatemala not just through exhibitions addressing coloniality as content but seeking to transform LNF into a space for societal healing. As she states: We don’t invite publics to just “resist” coloniality, but to imagine ways to “re-exist” beyond it. The first project of this cycle, Ru Raxal qa Rayb’äl, by artist Edgar Calel, invites publics to engage with communal care based on reciprocity with nature.

Ilaria Conti, Executive Director, La Nueva Fábrica, Antigua, Guatemala, has been awarded by Eloisa Haudenschild, United States.