Laura del Barco

Conference Report. November 2023

My dear museum colleagues, it has been so important and motivating to have met you all and participated in the meeting “The Co-Creative Museum: Social Agency, Ethics, and Heritage”, the central theme of which was of particular interest for the Museo de las Mujeres, where I work with Cecilia Salomón in curating and programming exhibitions. We have been moved by the questions and reflections presented in each project and experience that was shared over these past few days. Rethinking What do we do and why?; thinking about how to change the role of the museum by thinking about diversity and the sum of all particularities; thinking about the “heterologies” proposed by Simón Njami: the hetero in relation to times and places, in dialogue with the contradictions from a disarming heterodoxy. As Marie Héléne Pereyra and teresa cisneros say, art institutions that have an inability to understand diversity and where there is built-in racism must work on: dismantling policies and sharing power within institutions, seeing through different lenses, learning from others, creating access and reflecting on one’s own practices.

In this paradigm shift, there are many institutions, like my own, that are working with different communities, generating space for the appropriation and construction of meaning from the outside, from collective experiences, social struggles and activism. As Coco Fusco says, “Social responsibility as a reflection of who we are and who we want to be”. Communities are no longer “objects of study”, we must move away from “egocentrism” and towards mutual respect, as Elvira Espejo Ayca argues in her proposal for mutual nurture. Deconstruct. Contaminate. Change the role of the museum. Sharpening criticism and critical imagination is the responsibility of institutions and individuals.

Marian Pastor Roces speaks of building chemical communication networks, like the mycelia structures of mushrooms; of thinking about the actions of objects, and the connections between objects; creating systems, living networks, and forms of actions in cyberspace as well. What do we do in this complex world? What do we do with the fury and mishandling of information by companies and apps that manage information? Actions and microactions, networks, cyberactivism, laws.

Luma Hamdan, from Jordan, shows art that has to do with “that which no longer exists; that which exists and is not seen; and that which exists and is repressed”, and believes “a different world is possible”. Yto Barrada proposes to work from a perspective of ecofeminism, recovering indigenous ways of being and living with memory. Luis Camnitzer argues that art is a root activity (thinking – imagination – expression), that respecting the uselessness of art generates bewilderment and new experiences that help as a contrast to the ideas of efficiency, ingenuity, and entertainment that trivialize the world and education. Ana Gallardo works with those who do not fit into the art system, who are invisible and ill-treated for “that violent act of ageing”. She proposes the role of art and making be rethought from the point of view of the loving encounter of care and enjoyment of individual and collective artistic actions that change the world.

Daina Leyton’s presentation on cultural accessibility was essential. “It is not an option, it is an absolute necessity for cross-cutting accessibility to be generated in spaces, for the biases of the standardized body to be dismantled, and for it to be carried out together with persons with disabilities”.

Sidhi Vhisatya, of the Queer Indonesia Archive, argues that queer visibility is "to be visible, to be invisible, to challenge cis-hetero perceptions". María Belén Correa, of the Archivo de la Memoria Trans (Trans Memory Archive), calls for funding to sustain the memory and archives that collectively build the memories of minorities. And the words of Feda Baeza, speaking as a member of the audience about “invisibility”, saying, “it isn’t invisible … it’s unseen”; they continue to resonate with me, that exclamation of hers, “why is it that I feel so alone?”

Here we are, trying to make our approach and generate, as the institutional mission of our museum states, “… a space that acquires meaning only if it questions itself. [A space where] the exhibitions and activities encourage a critical view that destabilizes the narrow view of identity and opens it up to its mutable and multiple powers. That remembers the segregation practiced on women and feminized bodies. That denounces the abuses of power over these bodies. And that, at the same time, offers discourses, aesthetics, and poetics that make the hybrid possible, over and above the pure and absolute. This space has been opened so that new subjectivities, capable of living together in an increasingly plural, diverse and accessible community can circulate.”

Thank you very much for the opportunity to spend these days with you; the organization of the entire meeting and the proposed visits was impeccable. Many thanks to the whole team at CIMAM and the Museo Moderno, to the artists and gallerists who received us, and to all who sponsored the event and made these encounters possible. We are here, close at hand, ready to join the projects and networks that may arise from it.

Bio

Laura del Barco was born in 1976 in Mexico City, she has lived in Córdoba, Argentina since 1983. She studied at the School of Arts of the National University of Córdoba where she obtained a degree in Sculpture (2001). Since 2017 together with Cecilia Salomón they integrate the curatorial team of the Museo de las Mujeres de la Provincia de Córdoba, where they carry out the curatorship, programming and production of visual arts exhibitions and coordinate the Library room 0 , simultaneous feminisms.

She oriented her training especially towards curatorship and cultural management, she completed the postgraduate course in Cultural Management at the Faculty of Economic Sciences, UNC (2009); the postgraduate course Communication and Museums dictated by the F.C.C of the U.N.C. (2019); the workshop Museums and Participative Culture organized by Fundación Typa and Fundación Telefónica (2011). She attended the III Meeting of Cultural Goods in Temporary Exhibitions organized by IIC in Sao Paulo, Brazil (2008); the monthly meetings 9 curators discuss their work at CCEBA (2008). She also attended the Public Cultural Management program, National Direction of Cultural Training, National Ministry of Culture (2021, among other courses and workshops.