Andrea Torreblanca
Conference Report. December 2025
The conference proved to be a valuable and engaging experience, particularly in terms of networking and professional exchange. Being together for several days created a meaningful environment for building relationships, sharing experiences, and learning from the practices of other institutions. One of the main highlights of the conference was precisely the opportunity to understand how different museums and cultural institutions operate within diverse contexts.
The sessions were among the most helpful and thought-provoking. They offered important insights into how culture can be understood within a broader social, political, and economic framework. However, these sessions would benefit from being expanded. While they opened important conversations, the limited time made it difficult to develop concrete or fully realized solutions. Many of the questions addressed require longer and more in-depth engagement, particularly if meaningful outcomes are to be achieved. Time, therefore, emerged as a crucial factor—both for deeper discussion and for fostering greater conviviality and collaboration among participants.
At the same time, several urgent issues that are integral to CIMAM could have also been interesting to consider and discuss during the conference. These include censorship, the restitution of cultural artifacts, museum layoffs and strikes, mental health, and what ethics means in current times for curatorial practice. How are exhibitions and institutions contributing to changing culture’s autonomy and critical processes?
I’m addition, rather than focusing solely on collaboration at a conceptual level, there is a strong need to address practical and structural concerns. Sharing practices and experiences is essential, especially when considering the realities of organizing exhibitions across borders.
In conclusion, the conference was a valuable platform for exchange, reflection, and connection. It highlighted both the potential and the challenges of international collaboration in the cultural sector. Moving forward, there is a clear need for longer working sessions, deeper engagement with urgent global issues, and a stronger focus on developing shared cultural policies that can function across diverse contexts.
Biography
Andrea Torreblanca is the current director of the Tamayo Museum in Mexico City, where she recently curated Archaic Futures and co-chaired the forum Museum as Verb for the 2025 International Museums Day. She completed a Master’s in Curatorial Studies at CCS Bard College in New York from 2008 to 2010.
In 2018, Torreblanca was appointed Director of Curatorial Projects at INSITE. In her roles as director and chief editor curator, she conceived the INSITE Journal and developed INSITE Commonplaces, a curatorial platform operating in diverse regions worldwide, including Lima (Peru), Johannesburg (South Africa), and Baja California (Mexico–San Diego, US). This platform aims to rearticulate the notion of site specificity.
Her project The Sedimentary Effect investigates local microhistories based on erratic phenomena, architecture, and spiritual communities in the border region. Her most recent project and journal, A Timeless Way to Build, explored architect Christopher Alexander’s experimental housing project in Mexicali in 1975 through the perspective of one of its inhabitants: the artist Pastizal Zamudio, who lived in the complex in the 1990s.
In 2021, Torreblanca wrote and conceived Speech Acts, a play based on a 30-year INSITE archive, presented at the Museo Jumex. She has held several curatorial positions at Mexican institutions, including Associate Curator at the Museo Tamayo (2013–2015), Coordinator at the Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros (2010–2011), Deputy Director and Curator for the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art (2008–2010), and Collection Manager at the Museo de las Californias at CECUT (1998–2000).
Torreblanca has taught curatorial studies, museology, art practice, and theory at several Mexican universities. She has authored numerous essays and delivered lectures on the potential of museums and curatorial practice.
Andrea Torreblanca, Director of Tamayo Museum in Mexico City, Mexico, has been awarded by Eloisa Haudenschild.