Soukaina Aboulaoula
Conference Report. December 2025
“Just keep swimming”
I am writing this report two weeks after the 57th CIMAM conference, which took place in Turin from November 28 to 30, 2025.
This gathering marked a symbolic return for CIMAM to Italy, forty-nine years after the first conference organized in the country, held in Bologna in 1976. This return forms part of a historical continuity while also affirming CIMAM’s ambition to engage with the evolving concerns of museum and cultural practice. While the 1976 conference already addressed the issue of museum decentralization (Centralization / Decentralization / Noncentralization), the 2025 edition proposed as its main theme Enduring Game: Expanding New Models of Museum Making. This theme suggested a broadening of forms, practices, and ways of thinking about museums today, articulated through three main axes: Doing Less vs. Doing Differently; Mapping Desires; and Transactions and Transmission: Tactics of Togetherness.
This year’s conference stood out for its particularly active and stimulating structure. Not only did it offer a series of thought-provoking keynotes, but it also sought to engage participants’ collective emotional and sensorial intelligence through a series of artistic interventions and performances with which each day began. These were not conceived as simple artistic introductions to the program, but rather as intentional strategies inviting us to attune ourselves and, as asserted by Chus Martínez, chair of the 2025 content committee, to “start with the senses.”
The inaugural performance, conceived by Alessandro Sciarroni and performed by Marco Bertani, focused on the concept of turning (in its most literal sense). The performer executed a continuous rotational movement on the same axis, turning over and over for a period of time. During the performance, the audience seemed captivated by the repetition. At the same time, it did not lull us into a state of hypnosis; on the contrary, it kept us in a state of heightened alertness, to the point that even the smallest details of the turning were noticed, including the drops of sweat falling to the floor at the end. Although the performer constantly returned to the same axis, each rotation involved a minor variation. This gave the performance a temporal and evolutionary dimension: it was never exactly the same movement, but rather a transformed and enriched return. The performance also reminded me of Sufi dance practices, also known as Sama or the dance of the whirling dervishes, in which each circular movement gradually brings the dancer closer to their inner center/awareness. I am still sitting with this performance today, as I believe it not only set the tone for the conference but also bodily illustrated movement as a central concept. It articulated ideas of rotation, circulation, and passage from one point to another that echoed the metaphor of bird flocking, also mentioned by Martínez in her introduction, highlighting collective dynamics in which individual trajectories are part of a shared movement.
Throughout the conference, the interplay between collective and individual thought was particularly strong. On the one hand, we collectively engaged in discussions around contemporary museum models, including ways of inhabiting the museum as a civil project and the importance of encouraging local imaginaries and pedagogies rather than relying on standardized, international, or neutral formats. On the other hand, the conference also created space for individual reflection on how we navigate and situate ourselves in the world. How we ‘turn’ within our own practices, institutions, and contexts.
The breakout sessions further enriched the participatory dimension of the conference. I took part in a group moderated by María Inés Rodríguez, focused on the topic The Civic Museum: Museums as Micropolitics for Democracies. Alongside Juliana Mendonça do Vale, I served as a note-taker, a role I particularly enjoyed as it offered an opportunity for active listening and synthesis. Coming together with fellow practitioners around a table to engage in focused conversation created a parallel space for reflection while remaining deeply connected to the broader conference. This experience resonated strongly with Rustom Bharucha’s urge, during the Mapping Desires presentation on day two, not to sentimentalize the possibility of relationality, but rather to learn from the differences it produces.
I also immensely enjoyed Onome Ekeh’s keynote, The Networked Museum: Lessons from Finding Nemo. To me, the presentation served as a reminder that even within a serious institutional context, it is possible—and perhaps necessary—to be imaginative in one’s language and references. Ekeh’s approach encouraged playfulness while emphasizing the importance of diversifying methods and borrowing elements from everyday life in order to develop more accessible and inclusive formats. I particularly treasure the quote with which she concluded her presentation: “just keep swimming, dude, and let the currents carry you”, a phrase that resonated deeply with my own experience of accepting the currents as teachers.
As a travel grantee supported by the Getty Foundation, I also had the opportunity to attend a tour organized and led by Michele Bertolino prior to the conference. We met with local artists and collectives and visited artist-run spaces, where we were introduced more deeply to the cultural dynamics of Turin. This experience was later extended through CIMAM-organized visits to the city’s foundations and museums.
Lastly, I wish to express my sincere gratitude to the Getty Foundation for their generous support, and for allowing me to be part of a diverse and committed community such as CIMAM. As it was expressed in Day 3 “you can’t be what you can’t see”, having previously attended the conference in Sydney in 2019, I have carried the conversations, learnings and sense of inspiration from that experience with me throughout my subsequent reflections and projects. Returning in 2025 allowed me to witness CIMAM’s ‘turnings’ and to reflect on my own. I leave this conference with a renewed sense of inspiration and with a sense of hope that is nourished by, and in turn feeds, the collective.
Biography
Soukaina Aboulaoula is a Moroccan independent curator and researcher. She completed a Master of Research in Advanced Practices/Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths University of London. Beyond her curatorial practice, she is the co-founder and creative director of Untitled, a Morocco-based agency working across design strategies and visual communications for cultural and artistic projects.
Over the past seven years, she has worked at the intersection of research and curation, collaborating with institutions such as Sheffield Doc/Fest, New Art Exchange (NAE), Archive Sites Berlin, Atelier de l’Observatoire in Casablanca, The Casablanca International Biennale, and The Museum of African Contemporary Art (MACAAL). Her work delves into topics of memory, fictionality, time, perception and representation, knowledge production, movement, and transmission.
Recent curatorial projects include exhibitions and public programs such as the collective photography exhibition If a Tree Falls in a Forest at Les Rencontres d’Arles (2022); a curatorial initiative around artistic pedagogies titled Our Teaching Takes Shape As We Go (2021); the exhibition In the Inner Bark of Trees (2023), curated with the curatorial ensemble of Archive, where she notably worked on a new commission with artist Amina Agueznay around ancestral jewelry making in Morocco; and May Our Song Be Worthy of Those Who Listen (2024), an exhibition at La Casa Encendida, Madrid, about Raw Material Company, notably its Academie program.
She is currently developing an upcoming exhibition with and from the ARAK collection, an independent Qatari initiative collecting contemporary African art. The exhibition, studying African abstraction, will take place in February 2026 at FADA Gallery in Johannesburg.
Soukaina Aboulaoula, Independent Curator in Marrakesh, Morocco, has been awarded by the Getty Foundation.