Ileana Ramirez
Conference Report. December 2025
I participated in CIMAM 2025 in Torino, which brought together over 300 international professionals from the contemporary art field, including museum directors, curators, researchers, and independent practitioners. The program created an intensive environment for professional exchange, critical discussion, and institutional reflection through lectures, performances, site visits, and informal dialogue.
Titled Enduring Game: Expanding New Models of Museum Making and guided by the principle “Of Necessity Virtue”, CIMAM 2025 examined the evolving role of contemporary art institutions within complex global, social, and economic contexts. Key discussions focused on sustainability, access, community engagement, and museums’ responsibility to remain responsive to diverse audiences.
The program’s structure encouraged both intensive engagement and peer-to-peer learning. Daily activities included keynote lectures, performances, moderated discussions, and visits to key cultural venues in Torino. Informal moments—during meals, transportation, and breaks, were equally valuable for building connections and fostering collaborative dialogue. OGR Torino. Lunch break CIMAM205.
As an independent curator, CIMAM provided a space to reflect on the tensions between institutional affiliation and independent practice, exploring precarity, autonomy, and the value of non-institutional perspectives in shaping flexible and responsive cultural models.
My participation as a travel grantee was made possible by the generous support of Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros. This support expanded my international network, strengthened my capacity for critical listening, and reinforced the importance of sustained human exchange within the cultural field.
The choice of venues—OGR Torino, Carignano Theatre, and Centrale Nuvola Lavazza—enhanced the program conceptually and experientially. Each day began with a performance, such as Alessandro Sciarroni’s opening piece at OGR Torino, which employed spiral movements and shifting rhythms to create an immersive environment, prompting reflection on embodiment, temporality, and shared attention.
A distinctive feature of CIMAM 2025 was the presence of visual artist Norma Nardi, who produced live graphic recordings of keynote sessions. Her visual interpretations, drawings, words, and diagrammatic structures, translated complex discussions into accessible visual forms, highlighting listening, synthesis, and visual thinking as tools for collective understanding.
Highlights
- Elizabeth Povinelli reflected on museological desires through the Karrabing Film Collective’s The Family & the Zombie and The Museum of Tardigrade Prehistory, exploring artistic gestures, subtle misdirection’s, and the persistence of the present.
- Mariana Mazzucato argued for a new economic approach based on collaboration and long-term value creation. Cutting public spending weakens economies, she explained, while investing in health, education, youth, and culture generates lasting societal benefits.
- Onome Ekeh introduced the concept of a “network museum,” emphasizing narrative connectivity, integration of diverse voices, and digital tools such as augmented reality to create immersive, collaborative experiences.
CIMAM 2025 was transformative. Breakout sessions and keynotes alike offered new ways to rethink and improve museum practice. Museums are fragile yet vital spaces, and as I heard from former MoMA director Glenn Lowry, we have a profound responsibility to engage communities and act meaningfully within art.
I returned to Caracas with renewed clarity and commitment. CIMAM 2025 was not only a space for learning but also a space of affirmation, stating the power of art to imagine otherwise and the importance of curatorial work rooted in care, dialogue, and transformation.
I am deeply grateful to CIMAM and its Travel Grant Committee for making this participation possible. The experience will continue to influence my practice and collaborations in the years ahead.
Biography
Ileana Ramírez Romero is an independent researcher and curator based in Caracas, Venezuela. She is the founder and director of Tráfico Visual, a cultural platform dedicated to contemporary artistic discourse. With a background in law, she brings a multidisciplinary perspective to her work, focusing on the social, critical, and aesthetic dimensions of memory, history, gender, and diaspora. Her research primarily explores collaborative art practices and experimental forms within Latin America.
Most recently, she organized the international group exhibition Supuestos y presupuestos at Ausstellungsraum Klingental in Basel, Switzerland. She contributed as an advisory member and writer for Latin American Artists: From 1785 to Now (2023), published by Phaidon Press, and also served as an advisory member for Vitamin V: Video and the Moving Image in Contemporary Art.
In 2022, Ramírez participated in the Goethe-Institut’s program in Rio de Janeiro, where she developed Morar la frontera, a local initiative fostering collaboration between the arts and the community. That same year, she completed a two-month research residency at Kunstinstituut Melly in Rotterdam, Netherlands.
Previously, she served as Program Director at the Cisneros Foundation in Caracas until June 2019, leading educational initiatives such as Art in Context and supporting the foundation’s artistic residency program. In 2018, she conceptualized and coordinated the 7th edition of the Fundación Cisneros International Seminar. In 2019, she was invited to the 45th National Salon of Artists of Colombia with her project Crossing the Line.
Ramírez was selected for the 2025 Residency Program in Geneva, Switzerland, supported by Pro Helvetia South America, which will further advance her work in collaborative and interdisciplinary artistic practices. Additionally, she is currently developing Unbound Realms, an upcoming group exhibition at FABRIKculture in Hégenheim, France.
Ileana Ramirez, Independent Curator at Tráfico Visual in Caracas, Venezuela, has been awarded by Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC).