Marcela Sastre
In 2021, 50 contemporary art curators, researchers, and museum professionals from 32 different countries were awarded support to attend the CIMAM 2021 Annual Conference, in-person and online.
For the first time, and thanks to the generous support of The Getty Foundation who sponsored the virtual platform, 27 grantees attended the conference online, while 23 attended onsite.
Launched in 2005, CIMAM’s Travel Grant Program is designed to foster cooperation and cultural exchange between contemporary art curators and museum directors in emerging and developing economies and their counterparts in other regions of the world.
Marcela Sastre's Conference Report
Dipesh Chakrabarty led me to a community example, microhistory and pre-Hispanic belief systems, which could facilitate dialogue with Chakrabarty ideas.
He defines Global-human-made human-centric as a category where planetary is a human construct defined by but decentered by humans. Global is only a 500-year-old concept, but the geobiological history of the earth system is many thousands yeas-old. Therefore, global is a human uniquely idea immerse into planetary, a comparativist system.
The Pachamama is a ritual we celebrate every 1st of august in the north of Argentina close to Los Andes. Carlos Luis Garcia Bes found with Elsa Salfity the School of Arts in Salta with an original idea that revalued handcrafts as Textiles and the Pre Incas-Pottery, which dated more than 1000 years old in the valley. The global concept of Arts categories devalued local production to souvenirs. Garcia Bes y Salfity in the 70 ́s traced a line to the textile practices and the ceramics also revisiting pre-Columbian believing systems as Pachamama, which goddess where the Sun and the Moon, who were contemplated and venerated; the Andean cultures had advanced knowledge of the planetary system that involved us and gave us life.
La Sol y Luna- Sun and the moon – Textile from Garcia Bes. 1973
Sustainability belongs to human-centric, but the planetary is about habitability. Global is about humans dominating order of life, but the planetary reminds us we are a minority form of life. The globe, the earth, and the world are about mutuality between humans and earth. Pachamama cultures considered nature as part of it, taking from her “Madre tierra” and giving and thanking her abundance. There is no human concept here as a unity because we belong to Pachamama. She is above us: were spiritual-living creatures into her spiritual-living system. The ritual is about smoking every corner and cleaning deeply into the invisible bond we have with nature.