Alejandra Labastida Escalante

Conference Report. December 2024
SUSTAINABLE FUTURES: HOW? WHEN? FOR WHOM?
Mark Bradford talked about the safe spaces that allowed him to become Mark Bradford. I am going to assume this blank space to share my experience of the event you so generously invited me to is a safe space in which brutal honesty, colloquial style, and profound respect for your work can cohabit. First, I would like to enlist some incredibly valuable insights from the speakers that have have followed me to Mexico, and I hope to share with my colleagues:
- In order to protect everybody, everybody needs to be sitting at the table of the power distribution
- Sustainability doesn't need to be a sacrifice, but it needs to be embedded in all decision-making and not be an afterthought
- Sharing rather than storing
- Use local materials = take root again
- Motivations instead of values
- Virtual couriers!
- Moving away from the rigid environmental approach- local risk assessment.
- Rethink the purpose of conservation
- Material change does not equate to loss of value: from loss evasion to value creation
- In the dilemma between conservation and access, prioritize access
- If conservation is deferred access, should we prioritize the access of future privileged communities over present marginalized communities?
- TRUST YOUR COLLEAGUES!
- Stop the growth!
- Discuss deaccession
- Is sustainability a method with accountability or a philosophy? (some things can be methodologically right but philosophically wrong)
- Take time for longer conversations.
- Think of museums as landscapes
- Our idea of the social contract is wrong from the beginning because it is not based on interconnectedness.
- sacred capital, what has real value beyond money?
- development instead of growth.
- It all comes down to scale. The road to hell is paved with the desire of a bigger scale.
- a global network of intensely local places.
- tentacular models of interdependency
- the mission of art museums is to conserve the complexities of the world.
- redistribution of futures
- the right to culture
- the condition of survival is interdependency
- initiate, not react
- avoid making assumptions about your audiences
- work from the gift and not from the commodity
- connect with time instead of freezing objects in time
- REPAIR
- democratize boards, include artists and non-funding members
- shift hierarchy of values
- turn money into fish (art), not fish ( art) into money
- do not inherit structures
- hospitality
- move at the speed of trust!!
- consider the histories of the lands we are on: land acknowledgment as a contract
- solidarity making as a practice
- buildings as kin to the land and the sky
- give back without strings attached
- active listening
I realize many of these quotes taken out of context may seem to have escaped from a self-help book, but we are not in Kansas anymore, and I believe any reflection and experience on how to navigate these critical times in solidarity and interdependency is essential. It is not a matter of producing an inflexible decalogue of good museum practices but a guide to navigating a possible new cultural contract. In your evaluation survey, you asked what I would like to be the theme of the next CIMAM, and I didn't answer honestly. I think at least the five next CIMAMs should continue the subject of sustainability; no need for novelty but for long conversations.
It is not a secret that everybody was upset with the distribution of speakers on the first day, which concentrated on big global north institutions. To the infamous reference of the millions spent on LED bulbs in Guggenheim Bilbao, Edgar Calel commented how the Museum of Modern Art in Guatemala was way ahead in terms of reducing its carbon footprint since it has been closed for lack of budget for years, so no bulbs at all. But with some distance, it was perhaps useful and honest in terms of not performing inclusion but being realistic about the asymmetry of power relations inside our specific cultural realm. Because by the time we got to the conclusions, it was obvious to me that this kind of gathering between big players and smaller communities could open opportunities to push the big players into new solidarity contracts. This did not happen, obviously, but at least the perspective presented itself as a possibility. What would happen if the next time we gather, we meet at round tables with the task of reaching agreements instead of having a museum director who is building a whole new immense museum that will bring down an ecosystem respond with Glissant's quotes to a group of speakers actively defending a respectful and sustainable relationship with the land they have been trusted with?
After the last dinner, many of us went for a drink at Freehand's hotel terrace. It was a beautiful night with a heavy blizzard, and we had good laughs and hoped we had more actual time together instead of running around LA to have 15 minutes to not actually see a show and not actually listen to our colleagues who were waiting for us to share their work. A curator from Uganda and I exchanged emails, sad of not actually having met but with the hopes to try to do it remotely.
As an organization, you are strategically placed to promote real change. Your immense work has taken you there. I congratulate you for enhancing the international landscape in which we can create a community and hope we can rely on it to continue this important conversation.
Biography
Alejandra Labastida Escalante (b. 1979) is currently Associate Curator at MUAC (University Museum of Contemporary Art) in Mexico City, where she has worked in the Curatorial Department since 2008. She holds a master’s degree in art history with a specialization in Curatorial Studies from UNAM and a BA in History from the Universidad Iberoamericana. In 2013 she received the ICI / SAHA Research Award and in 2012 she won the Akbank Sanat International Curatorial Competition. In 2011 she was part of the curatorial team of the Pavilion of Mexico of the 54th Venice Biennial.
She has curated over 50 exhibitions at MUAC and in other national and international museums, including: Mothering Between Stockholm Syndrome and Acts of production, Melanie Smith. Farce and artifice co-curated with Tanya Barson, (MUAC-Amparo), Playing Innocent, (MMAG Foundation, Jordan), Teresa Margolles Sutura, co-curated with Karla Pudar for the French Pavilion of the Zagreb Student Center, Chto delat. When We Thought We had the Answers, Life Changed the Questions co-curated with Cuauhtémoc Medina (MUAC), Jill Magid. A Letter Always Arrives at its Destination. The Barragán Archives co-curated with Cuauhtémoc Medina (MUAC), Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. Pseudomatisms co-curated with José Luis Barrios (MUAC), Mladen Stilinović. 1 + 2 = (MUAC).
Her current projects involve 2 exhibitions of MUAC’s collection and solo shows by Ana Gallardo, Julieta Aranda, Kader Attia and Delcy Morelos.
Alejandra Labastida Escalante, Curator, MUAC-UNAM, Mexico City, Mexico, has been awarded by the Getty Foundation, Los Angeles.