Federica Baeza
Conference Report. November 2023.
The conference in this edition of CIMAM in Buenos Aires was especially relevant for me because the interventions of the speakers, as well as the program of visits and spaces for exchange between colleagues, focused on reflection on the place of museums as spaces for community reflection. I have to say that this occurred in a context marked by the advance of the extreme-right in the Argentine cultural scene. This cultural formation incites the emergence of hate speech against the most marginalized communities in our society.
Although there have been many problems about which I have learned and exchanged with other agents in the artistic and cultural field, I choose to focus especially on certain ideas around queer and trans archives. This interest corresponds to my life path and my professional place as the first director of a public museum to assume its trans identity in Argentina. In this sense, I have been working from the direction of the Palais de Glace to establish effective policies that restore to my community the right to self-representation in the public collections of my country.
From this perspective, I want to highlight the presentations of María Belén Correa (Argentina) and Sidhi Vhisatya (Indonesia). The presentation by Correa, director, and founder of the Archivo de la Memoria Trans (Trans Memory Archive), was a model for thinking about the management of projects that start from the voices of the trans community. In addition to establishing a fundamental archive that replaces the absence of public collections, this management model also establishes channels of cooperation, training and employment in our community. The formation of a work team made up of people from our group allows, in turn, the contextualization of the images, managing to re-establish spatial and temporal coordinates of the documentation. On the other hand, a first-person narrative of the documents is also restored, making it possible to establish an interrelated documentary corpus. Sidhi Vhisatya's intervention in the Queer Indonesia Archive project has presented several common points. The project is developed in a region of the planet with a rich history of sex-gender dissidence coinciding with strong cultural repression of these life trajectories. In his presentation, Vhisatya also elaborated on strategies to make visible these archives that often run the risk of physically disappearing. Here, the participation of the community itself is also essential to re-establish the word in the first person and draw relationships between the documents.
The relationship between these two projects that respond to the systematic destruction of our cultural memory in two such distant parts of the planet has allowed me to obtain tools that will guide my next curatorial projects and lines of research. These initiatives investigate the relationships of knowledge, affection, and power that establish gender systems in the artistic and cultural field.
Bio
Federica Baeza is a researcher and curator specialising in contemporary art. She currently directs the Palais de Glace - Palacio Nacional de las Artes, and previously worked as director of the BA in Curatorship in the Arts and in the area of University Extension in the Area of Arts Criticism at the Universidad Nacional de las Artes (UNA), where she is Associate Professor of the subjects Curatorial Studies III and Semiotics and Curatorial Projects. She holds a BA in Arts and a PhD in History and Theory of the Arts from the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA). She has obtained grants from the UBA, CONICET and the FNA. She works in the curatorial field developing exhibitions and activities in the country and the region.
Some of her recent curatorial projects include Klemm: Enchanter of the Night (Klemm Foundation, Buenos Aires, 2022), The Body of a Collection (Klemm Foundation, Buenos Aires, 2018-2021), Oral Archive of Latin American Art (MNBA, MALBA, MACBA, La Ene, 2021-2015), Serena School (Centro de Arte Universitario de La Plata, 2019), Latin America: Back to the Future (MACBA, Buenos Aires, 2019), Oasis (arteBA, Buenos Aires, 2016), Doing with what has been done (MAMM, Cuenca, 2015), Sovereignty of Use (OSDE Foundation, Buenos Aires, 2014), Building a Museum (MACRO, Rosario, 2014), The End of Art (arteBA, Buenos Aires, 2014). She won the Critical Essay Prize arteBA and Adriana Hidalgo 2017, the First Prize in the Young Curators Programme in the 2014 edition of arteBA and the First Prize in the Curators Competition 10th Anniversary Macro 2014. She is the author of books on the visual arts, publishes articles on contemporary art in specialised magazines, writes in artists' catalogues and has participated in congresses and other national and international meetings on a regular basis for over a decade. Her publications include the book Proximidad y distancia. Arte y vida cotidiana en al escena argentina de los 2000 (Biblos, 2017) and Arcadia litoraleña. O el malestar de lo contemporáneo (Adriana Hidalgo, 2020).
From his current management of the Palais de Glace he focused on thinking curatorship and cultural management as the construction of a space that can produce an approach to experiences that have been marginalised in the cultural archives. From this perspective, his direction promoted projects such as Rodolfo Bulacio. Fantasía marica del pueblo (curated by Guadalupe Creche and Geli González, Centro Cultural Borges, 2022) ¡Buen día, te amo! (curated by Claudia del Río, Museo de La Cárcova, 2021), the programme Bitácora Travesti-Trans Latinoamericana (coordinated by Marlene Wayar, Palais de Glace, 2022) and the itinerant programme Mirada Federal: la colección del Palais recorre Córdoba (curated by Agustina Triquell, Luis García and Indira Montoya, 2021-2022).
Within this perspective, his administration promoted the democratisation, federalisation and assumption of a gender perspective in the National Visual Arts Salon. In this public policy, reforms were introduced to a national competition with more than 100 years of history, bringing into play the problem of access to citizenship. Representation in the National Salon validates ways of life at the state level and legitimises the participation of diverse communities. One of the instruments that makes this objective possible is the establishment of quotas. In all instances of participation, whether in the selection and awarding of prizes to artists or in the composition of the jury, a percentage of no less than 50% female participation was instituted, a quota of 5% for people from the non-binary and transvestite-trans communities came into effect, and a floor of 50% was established for the participation of people who live outside the city of Buenos Aires.