Paola Santos Coy

Conference Report. November 2023

Understanding the institution as an organism, as Chus Martínez opened the first day of the conference, functioned as a fertile idea throughout the three-day programming and visits to try to understand how institutions can mutate and adapt to different political, economic, and social circumstances, keeping focus on its reason to exist within a society. The notion of activating trust (inside and outside) in museums is something that appeared in different forms and strategies in the presentations. The program was very well curated to touch on the topics that were the center of this year’s reunion – social agency, ethics, and heritage –, and the format left enough time for discussion between the speakers and the audience. This year, CIMAM was committed to creating an experience of togetherness for everyone attending as a way of being together that produces forms of imaginative collective intelligence.

According to different surveys that were mentioned, museums are one of the only institutions that the citizenship still trust nowadays. In this respect, the ideas that Elvira Espejo Ayca brought to the table about “mutual breeding” and mutual responsibility really resonated. Also, Pablo Lafuente’s reference to “allowing for citizenship” made me think about the need for museums to earn the right to exist in a changing world, full of conflicts and complexities. Luis Camnitzer’s ideas about “true art as something that explores what it doesn’t know,” and art as a “root activity” in which imagination is utilized, are also something that stayed with me in thinking about museums as institutions from which we can imagine new forms of relating to the world in which we live. Listening to such an amazing list of speakers was really inspiring with regards to the idea that “we need a pragmatism that believes itself enabled for action.” The diversity of projects and provenance of the speakers is something to highlight.

This is the first CIMAM conference that I have attended. As a grantee, this was no doubt a unique opportunity to meet colleagues (curators, artists, and museum professionals) from around the world and engage in meaningful conversations about the issues that move us and the challenges we are facing. Gaining insight into other projects of the same scale as El Eco or with similar interests helped me envision other routes of tackling context-specific problematics. As an immediate outcome of the conference, I made new contacts that I plan to follow up on, projects, and institutions with whom I want to continue in conversation. Also, as a short- and long-term outcome, there are several immediate shared interests that may result in future collaborations or exchanges, and others that could represent new fields of interest.

Orlando Meneschy, a colleague from Brazil, is working to build a collection of Amazonian artists that for now has no actual space and exists online and through several exhibitions, texts, and video programs, but knowing that the need and reason to exist for an actual space is something that makes more and more sense in today’s world. This is something I feel we are behind and Mexico and should work more towards that, so making possible exchanges and opening conversations is crucial. Fleur Watson, a colleague from Australia, works on a project with art and architecture that has a lot of similarities with the Pabellón Eco, an architecture contest that El Eco has produced every two years since 2010. One question that is sounding ever louder in recent editions is whether this format of competition has a future or not. Being able to encounter other projects with the same interests in a different context is very valuable in order to better understand the way some formats can mutate or transition into different ways of engaging with spatial practices. In this sense, the way Luma Hamdan spoke about “adaptability” opens new horizons in terms of the need for co-creating.

The showcase of the Buenos Aires art scene, starting from its online directory and wayfinding to its exhibitions in museums, art spaces, galleries, and alternative spaces gave us a rich understanding of its vibrant scene, and the way a group of professionals are bravely and intelligently facing the challenges of a political and economic crisis. The way the exhibitions that we saw were focused on the Argentinian art history of different decades and regions was an exceptional opportunity to get to know artists and artistic movements from the region.

Bio

I hold a BA in Art History from Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City (2000), and an MA in Visual and Critical Studies from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco (2009). My master thesis was titled being-with-one-another and it reflected on the notion of community, using this word-phrase developed by French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy. This theme later developed as the topic for an International Contemporary Symposium (SITAC XI) that took place in Mexico City (2013), that I co-directed with Brazilian curator Marcio Harum, and it functioned as a trigger to approach different relations and associations between social and cultural phenomena, and artistic practices.
As a curator, my career started working at the independent space La Panadería in Mexico City (2001-2002), and I later worked in several contemporary art spaces in Mexico City as well: Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, where I was assistant curator (2002-2004), and Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, where I was associate curator (2004-2007). Since 2012 I’ve been director of Museo Experimental el Eco, which is a university museum part of Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). As director, I oversee the program and work closely with the museum’s curator in developing different lines of research. We invite artists to develop new projects, and also curators to respond to the space’s history and architecture.
Two of the most important professional experiences in my career, aside from working in institutions, are my participation in the First Biennial of the Americas in Denver, Colorado, where I curated the main exhibition and public program titled The Nature of Things (2010). And the second one was my participation as adjunct curator in the team of Artistic director José Roca in the 8th Merocul Biennial titled Essays in Geopoetics, that took place in Porto Alegre, Brazil (2011).
One of my main research topics is linked to the notion of site-specificity and public space. In 2022 I was invited to curate the Public Art Program of Las Artes Monterrey, in Mexico. The project involved 9 new commissions to artists and a public program under the title Horizontes. In 2023 I co-curated with Tatiana Cuevas the exhibition Jesús Rafael Soto. La inestabilidad de lo real for RGR gallery in Mexico City, celebrating the centennial of this Venezuelan artist. In 2020 an interview I did with artist Héctor Zamora was published in the catalog of his exhibition Lattice Detour: The Roof Garden at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Also in 2020, the book Ecos de un lugar was published by Buró-buró, with support from the Graham Foundation and Fundación BBVA, where I published a text about El Eco titled: We have a problem.