Alejandro Alonso Díaz

Conference Report. December 2024
In the following notes, I tackle the framework and predicaments under which CIMAM’s 2024 Annual Conference proposition unfolded the notion of ‘‘Sustainable Futures’’. If there is such a thing as a shared horizon for both ecological and social sustainability in a globalized art field, (for whom?) is this work changing the nature of institutions? (how?).
I attended the conference in the believe that this organizational––institutional work is all the more relevant because since the increased level of exposure and pain after Oct 7th, 2023, traditional (state and corporate) infrastructures need to undertake increasing transformations. Due its inherent contradictions within a globalized sense of visibility (radically rooted in its colonial nature), museums and art institutions face the challenge to firmly commit their tissues in situated contexts, reorienting desire and decolonizing life. And yet all these commitments, desires and responsibilities are intrinsically connected and embedded, with their echoes transversally cutting across race, economy, spirituality, gender, species, social classes, epistemologies and capacities; thus, showing their effects in multiple and interconnected territories: from Palestine to South Africa, from the US to Israel, Rusia, Brazil, or China.
During the first conference day, the highly corporate and neoliberal use of language creates a sense of discontent. In informal conversations with colleagues and friends, we discussed our lack of interest in producing a normative, abstract theory of creative institutionality (creativity as in offering alternatives within the systems’ dysfunctional logics, in opposition to imagination as in moving towards unknown radical possibilities). While I would argue that contributions like the one by the Guggenheim’s Deputy Director for Exhibitions and Conservation, Daniel Vega diminished the vibrancy, richness, and urgency of what we mean when we speak of sustainability, more technical narratives like Cecilia Winter’s (Project Specialist at the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles) were paradoxically more connective. Amid the generalized atmosphere of neoliberal paralysis within a highly colonized language, I believe that the microscopic scale to which Winter attended and its sense of situatedness allowed her approach to offer visions that resonated with complex translocal experiences —both comparative and connective—of organisations and curators from a diverse array of territories.
Similarly, both Zita Cobb and Manuel Segade on the second day, explored different forms and tactics to experiment with alternative forms of belonging. Both of their narratives, contributed to sifting the general ambience of the Conference to swift towards a more helpful climate, allowing the attendees to envision other forms of institutionality that resist colonialism through infrastructural regeneration (in the case of Manuel Segade’s re-conception of the museum’s operative body at MNCARS) and the imaginative recuperation of precolonial cultural forms (in the work that Zita Cobb is doing at Fogo Island). These contributions made visible long-silenced communities, pointing to other potential futures while using and hacking powerful cultural structures to foster the movement of experimental institutionalism (within the conference’s schedule, but also metaphorically), setting the ground for those who spoke on the third and last day. This sort of increasing climax, (one in which different identities and ontologies are organized in a self–contained way), made me wonder what would it mean to procure a more diverse approach in the organization of the panels. What type of space and conversation does this similarity of voices produce? Would it have brought more interaction, exchange and friction to scale things differently? Would these types of engagement have contributed to enrich the Conference’s purposes?
Finally, the third day brought a group of practitioners who make tangible and work with long-silenced, censored histories of marginalized communities, pointing to potential futures that are already here. In all of their presentations, I felt like they all responded to a basic lack of the Western system, or to its failure to establish just and inclusive institutions (racialized, classed, and gendered). In that sense, in their contributions, the mechanisms of oppression were hacked as forms from where to resist neoliberal processes of politico-institutional transformation. The actors in this third day were a diverse group of people who resonated into a kind of heterogeneous imaginational body (resisting and germinating) that is fighting against multiple intersectional forms of violence committed by states and capital. After two days of speculating on possible strategies to create institutions that are just and caring (while in some cases reproducing the politics we want to step back from), the visions that were shared on the last day (Edgar Calel’s and Candice Hopkins’ were particularly remarkable for me) proofed the potential of radical imagination as a site for an emerging political takeover that goes beyond institutional boundaries and language. The institution procuring the role of art in life and not within the institution, as the ultimate responsibility of such institution.
Transforming and re–instituting this kind of process holds many promises, but also faces certain predicaments that were exposed throughout the Conference. As efforts at moving towards sustainability have been shown, alliances and the pooling of resources are bulwarks against unpredictability, especially for vulnerable populations. As both Calel and Hopkins pointed out, situatedness and presence unconsciously play a part in the larger global context, while in nurturing interdependent communities. This type of strategy creates spaces “where small-scale solidarity economies scale up into larger ones,” while maintaining a kind of “real intelligence and ethics” that enables different communities to understand, respond and care for this changing environment that we inhabit, procuring closeness and familiarity. Frameworks such as the CIMAM Annual Conference tend to be professionally–mediated environments in which discussions need to touch ground However, when small, informal infrastructures unfold their authenticity, I believe that the potential of scaling-up ethics and commitment may lead to sustainable togetherness. This is what I hope for future Conferences: contribute to elude ossifying bureaucracies, reorient desire and produce a sense of joy that could lead to tangible transformations.
Biography
Alejandro Alonso Díaz (b. 1990) is the director of fluent, a non-profit arts organization that research, commissions and exhibits exhibition cycles, public and educational devices and publications in the fields of contemporary art, the humanities and social sciences. Rehearsing radical experimentation, working together with artists and practicing somatic writing, his work explores the metabolic encounters between the political, environmental and poetic structures of knowledge, with a specific focus on the immaterial, relational, and spiritual dimensions of ecology.
Besides the program he runs at fluent, his curatorial work has been recently presented at the Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon (2022), MNCARS Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2022) and Documenta fifteen, Kassel (2022).
Alejandro is also the editor of several publications with publishers including Mousse Publishing, Koenig Books or Sternberg Press, the most recent being the book Microbiology of Milk (Sternberg Press, 2023), co-edited with INLAND.
Alejandro Alonso Díaz, Director, fuelnt, Santander, Spain, has been awarded by a Spanish Cultural Institution.