Bettina Muruzabal

Conference Report. November 2023

Bettina Muruzábal, Director of the Museo Eduardo Minnicelli. Río Gallegos, Patagonia, Argentina. Recipient of a CIMAM and Arthaus travel grant.

Attending the CIMAM 2023 Annual Conference is an opportunity to learn and exchange with fellow directors and curators of museums. It is an international encounter that expands and consolidates networks and collaborative partnerships with the aim of fostering knowledge exchange and production.

All of the conference presentations were brave, and honest, and delved into current world issues and the urgency of policies of care and social justice, of making museums spaces of solidarity that are inclusive, loving, and committed to their communities, making them participants and co-authors of museum agendas. There were many ends of the world. The world is a daily creation, asserts Nicolás Testoni, Director of the Museo-taller Ferrowhite. Say no to the submission of museums, conceive of art as a root activity, says Luis Camnitzer, who calls for an urgent return to the work of making an “artistic shift” and a radical reform of education that prepares us for knowledge.

Camnitzer clearly states the danger inherent in the advancement of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education, which tends to eradicate the arts and the humanities. Today, museums have the opportunity to redefine themselves, to champion both this cognitive role and an art that is linked to ideas, imagination, and poetry. “They can help to change curriculums so that education integrates the imagination and generates knowledge in all learners and all disciplines”, says Camnitzer.

And, as Marian Pastor Roces, Curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Manila, Philippines, argues, it is indeed urgent to “defend the critical attitude of artists”. Coco Fusco denounces the fact 136 artists have been jailed due to their creative productions.

I hear echoes of “… the first grain of wheat is in danger" from the work of artist Rana Beirut, presented by Luma Hamdan, Director of Darat al Funun.

And it is not about collections, it is our cultural heritage that is in danger. Listen to the wind, to the stone, says Elvira Espejo Ayca, artist and director of the National Museum of Ethnography and Folklore (MUSEF), La Paz, Bolivia.

Indigenous traditions and ancestry provide options and possible answers for a planet in crisis.

“Art, That Endless River” is a quote from the final verse of Jorge Luis Borges’s poem Ars poetica, and Victoria Noorthoorn, in the different shows on display at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, brings us Nicolás García Uriburu’s Manifiesto verde [Green Manifesto] in images with shared dialogues that are unusually valid. Putting us on alert, reminding us of being, and of being in a community, integrating ourselves into this home planet we inhabit.

Bio

Since October 2018 she is the Director of the Eduardo Minnicelli Art Museum. Professor and Bachelor in Visual Arts and Higher Diploma in numerous artistic and Pedagogical Areas.

Based in Rio Gallegos since 2009, she develops her artistic activity in an integral way from artistic production, teaching and cultural management. She was Director of the University Extension Program: Art, Cultures and Identities in Southern Patagonia, at the National University of Southern Patagonia.