Soledad Garcia Saavedra
Conference Report. November 2023
I would like to express my gratitude for the honesty of the speakers who participated in the Social Agency, Ethics, and Heritage Conference. While some of their reflections and praxis are crossing boundaries and getting out of their comfort zone, others are embodying the brave commitment to insist on small and collective actions to make changes in the status quo, immersed in their localities and beyond.
Instead of indulging the fashionable language of Western terms such as “decolonization,” curator and writer, Simon Njami asked on the first day of the Conference “how could our own story be constructed” in the peripheries in order to create what’s missing?
The storytelling presentation of Ferrowhite Museum’s Director, Nicolás Testoni was an indirect response to Simon’s question, not only in the ability of how a short narrative could thrill but also how a museum functions more in a plot of conviviality and stories among different beings, rather than the focus on heritage assets. Nicolás addressed and named the people who work and live in Bahía Blanca, Argentina. He used several portraits of individuals and groups to distinguish their particularities and differences, as well as the common ground that unifies them: the need to share a space or the consciousness that life depends on themselves to survive. He acknowledged the catastrophic discourse of disasters, opposed as to something new or that lies ahead, but something that already happened years and centuries ago in Bahía Blanca. Somehow, the vision that natural and human catastrophes are from the past involved into the present, is to recognize the insubordination to those nasty thoughts and apocalyptic information that don’t leave space to be, to be happy, to act urgently, or to concede the fragile place that art has to create with uncertainty.
In the call to transform the Eurocentric and monocultural paradigm of knowledge and education, artist and Director of Museo Nacional de Etnografía y Folklore, la Paz, Bolivia, Elvira Espejo Ayca, posed critical questions and reflections on how to conceive the museum from a shared creation when it comes from indigenous people. Defending linguistic rights, Elvira presented the work from the Aymara and Quechua terms Yanak Uyawaña or “Mutual Nurture” for the arts, referring to the maximum care for animals and plants in an interconnection with humans, i.e., threads for a textile. Both materials are understood as bodily subjects or persons, rather than objects or heritage assets.
The separation that exists between Quechua speaking and the structures of Western formations was addressed from the connection of bridges that could allow writing collective scripts among researchers and indigenous authors, in plural voices. In a similar way to linguistic rights, and yet from the scope of deaf people, an educator in accessibility, Daina Leyton, emphasized the principle of justice to overcome the tyranny of eye centrism and normative judgments applied to disabled people. She shared different theoretical terms and group experiences from deaf educators, sign language interpreters, and curators working towards the occupation and creation of disabled people in artistic institutions in São Paulo, Brazil.
Marie Hélène Pereira presented Raw Material in Dakar, Senegal, as an initiative involved with curatorial practices and artistic education through a Pan-African vocation, transdisciplinary program, and the emphasis on building up communities and institutions. She highlighted the paradigmatic shift to create new urgent narratives based on “the need to write our own stories” reflected in the books of the Condition Report Symposiums. As Marie Hélène said, revisiting the past, making space for more complex histories and unseen memories, can challenge the misrepresentation of personal stories and heal current wounds.
From the perspective of Trans activism, María Belén Correa, Founder-Director of the Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentina, the configuration of the archive enables a form of life survival for Trans people, after more than a century of persecution, criminalization, and exile. For her, the political ground of the archive is not merely an account of knowledge and personal memories, but a collective method of defense from the abandonment of the State, the family nuclei, and the historical classification under the archives of police, psychiatric, and morgue classifications. She reinforced, along with other speakers, the resistance to being considered a case study by researchers rather than showing and telling their own stories.
In the Conference, social agency was less a subject than the achievement to gather speakers with different voices and backgrounds dealing with social struggles. Heritage, out of the artistic Museums, felt like the stumbling block of patriarchal legacies and traditional conventions that some directors openly criticized and moved forward. The arts field seems more caught and cautious, trying to provide coexistence between the legacy of caring objects and the opening of new experiences to the publics and communities. The word ethics, graphically printed in the front of the auditorium stage of the Conference, accompanied every speaker. However, it was a mysterious shade that appeared elusively around the presentations and discussions. Perhaps, museum ethics could be a topic to tackle with more prominence at the next Conference.
Bio
Soledad García Saavedra is an art historian (Universidad de Chile) and curator (MFA in Curating, Goldsmiths College, University of London). Her current research focuses on topics of social museology, past and present revolutions, and the intersections of Pop art and popular culture during the 60’s. With an experience of 10 years working for non-profit institutions, she was curator of Public Programs at the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende, MSSA (2017-2020) and Director of the Centro de Documentación de las Artes Visuales del Centro Cultural La Moneda (2010-2016) in Santiago.
At MSSA she led, along the public program team, the research-action project Mirada de Barrio - Neighbourhood gaze -, an immersion in the "República Barrio", to build an unprecedented community between the residents of the neighbourhood and the museum, looking for other forms of social engagement. From that experience, highlights the collective exhibition Haciendo barrio - Making neighbourhood, 2018; the organisation of different public encounters based on artistic and social actions in education and curating in the Latin American context, and the edition of the practical and reflexive book Mirada de Barrio. Arte y participación colectiva para imaginar territorios y comunidades - Neighbourhood gaze. Art and collective participation to imagine territories and communities, MSSA, 2022. Due to her initiates in the local territory, she received the recognition of Leading Woman by the Neighbourhood Association in 2019.
Since 2020, she started to work independently as she decided to be a “mother with time”. She kept the relation with the neighbours and MSSA, where she participates of The Research Network and activities that tackle the criticality and memory of the museum, from its conception until now. Her last exhibition at MSSA was Lunes es Revolución - Monday is Revolution, 2021-2022, where she explored the subjective positions of artists in the beginning of the 70’s and the counterpoint of young artists and collectives dealing with powerless, vulnerability and violence. Stemming from that show is the forthcoming book Lunes es Revolución. Arte y agitación colectiva en tiempos de revueltas - Monday is Revolution. Art and collective agitation in troubled times, MSSA 2023.
On the field of research, she is preparing along art historian Carla Macchiavello, the edition of the book Political Pop and Popular Culture in the large sixties in Chile (1959-1973); a publication that comes from a large and collective investigation, involving interdisciplinary approaches of artists, educators and poets that worked during the 60’s. The research has been supported by different grants, such as The Clark Art Institute (2018), Fondart (2020) and now by FfAI Arts (2023), allowing to publish the book next year (2024), and to disseminate its content in different peripheral locations of Chile through a pedagogical program.
She is curator in residency at the Centro Cultural de España in Santiago, where is developing with artist Fernanda Aranguiz and playwriter Ana Corbalán, the working in progress of the exhibition LUNA – Moon: a theatrical design and performance based on the thirty numbers of the magazine LUNA, created by political intellectuals and refugees in the Chilean Embassy in Madrid, Spain, during the first years of the Franco Regime, 1939-1940.
At the core of Soledad’s practices is the work with documents, carrying suspended or lost histories and the capabilities to reenact bodily into the present.
Teaching in alternative art spaces as well in academic rooms, is indispensable for her practice; learning with students and building bridges between Western codes and local realities. She has done workshops about curating, museum studies and communities. She is Lecturer at the Master program of History of Art at the Universidad de Chile and Universidad Ibáñez in Santiago.