Ana Ruiz Valencia

Conference Report. December 2024
Sustainable Futures. How? When? For Whom? was held in Los Angeles from 6-8 December, 2024. As a grantee, I felt fortunate to take part in this event, meeting colleagues from all around the world and discussing the multiple layers of sustainability, both inside and outside of the conference sessions and speeches. I was happy to find that my fellow grantees were critical, well-informed, and led powerful processes and projects in their contexts. I want to thank The Getty Foundation and the Selection Committee at CIMAM for giving me this opportunity.
I am filled with questions that emerged during the conference. The reflections I share here aim to complement the discussions and intellectual effervescence of those days. I am especially interested in the interconnection between social, economic, cultural, and environmental layers when building sustainable practices within art institutions so we can —as the Brundtland Commission defined sustainability— "meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."
The first day focused on practical actions toward mitigating environmental damage from some museum perspectives, such as reusing materials from previous exhibitions and working with lesser-impact materials. Some of these strategies are widely known by small and medium-sized museums because their limited resources make them a must. I coincided with several colleagues in that the most ground-breaking experiences to share about this subject need to be approached not only from a budget and technological approach but also critically think about institutional priorities and why museums exist in the first place. Paraphrasing Agustín Pérez Rubio's remark, let's be keen on not falling into greenwashing.
Kelsey Shell (MOCA), shared a very important idea: start with values more than with motivations. Are we consistently evaluating the values that define and mobilize us as communities and individuals? Do museum values coincide with the cultural and societal values of their contexts? Shell mentioned: "Get to know yourself first, then bring this to the community you belong to and to the organization you work with." To be loyal to our principles is the main thing we must guarantee without losing the ability to redefine, update, and revitalize them. When a society changes, museums need to respond to this, but museums are also places to mobilize societal change toward more sustainable worlds.
As art institutions committed to social justice, let's, for instance, connect our actions with structural discussions around energy use or climate change: What are the impacts for the Global South on the extraction of materials necessary for the energy transition? We may be aware that fossil energies need to be out of the equation as soon as possible. However, there are big implications to be addressed regarding the large-scale use of these transition materials —copper, lithium, nickel, cobalt, and other rare earth elements— about the loss of biodiversity, the threat to communities and environmental leaders' health and integrity, and competency for resources in low-income countries by companies coming from rich ones.
As art museums, we won't have the final word on this. However, we know how to be centers for intellectual and social exchange through cross-disciplinary thinking led by artists and thinkers. Museums can assume an active role and become fertile soil for new knowledge and collaborations to emerge.
Implementing degrowth strategies alone will not solve any of the planetary crises we are going through. They need to be implemented while facing the fundamental notion of museums as institutions anchored in the capitalist worldview —linked from its origins with extraction, accumulation, and legitimation of power structures— when creating a framework for sustainability in the Art world.
One of the recurrent subjects during the informal exchange was that of the collections and their pertinence to contemporary art museums. In several conversations, some people stressed the argument of collecting as a way of supporting artists by buying their works, while others (I include myself here) insisted on the importance of serving as facilitators for making better conditions for artists to create, that go beyond buying an existing artwork: creating space for commissions, residencies, fair payment when working with institutions, good production support, etc.
This does not mean that museums should stop collecting. As Suhanya Raffel cleverly pointed out during the first-day worktables, museums' collections do not only exist due to colonial looting or commercial lobby but "they also represent histories of resistance, collective memory, and artistic heritage" and are important to preserve precisely because they are not part of hegemonic narratives. This is a very important issue that we cannot lose sight of.
Impressive presentations by Mark Bradford, Mai Abu ElDahab, Walid Raad, Candice Hopkins, and Ibrahim Mahama, as well as inspiring, thought-provoking talks by Edgar Calel and Zita Cobb, are directly concerned with the connections they have with the land and the peoples they are allied with and serve.
How is the funding for climate change or decolonization projects helping the actual work done by those communities and individuals who are putting their bodies, lives, and security to defend their territories and cultures? Is supporting their struggles out of reach from what museums can do about it, even when a lot of artists are activists too or belong to historically oppressed societies? As my colleague Maya Juracan (Curator at Biennial in Resistance in Guatemala) pointed out during our conversations, bigger museums might even give some of their budgets to support environmental activists or indigenous communities who are being chased in their territories. What does a land acknowledgment mean if it does not go hand in hand with the support of the living indigenous communities to have their lands back?
Keeping all this in mind, who are museums giving the power of enunciation and action? Are they ready to give up some of its privileges and let all those who are on the ground fighting for structural change and who have disproportionately faced the current crises share their knowledge and support their ideas with funding, actions, and internal changes? How are our institutions serving as platforms to speak out for those who know how to address the polycrisis the world faces right now? As Mark Bradford sharply mentioned, "everybody has to be at the table," and "you gotta listen to what your partner needs. It is key to give this first for the collaboration to be truly balanced."
I am aware that all these questions can be overwhelming and are indeed challenging to be addressed and solved right away. However, if we as an international organization are not posing and addressing them seriously, who will do it? An organization like CIMAM can lead the connection between museums from around the world and their expertise to promote collective change.
Many art exhibitions hosted by museums deal with social and environmental justice, political vindication, or decolonization. Museums must incorporate these ideas also from within, in the working conditions of artists and staff, equity and accessibility policies, and the real-life impact that our organizations can support at different levels and scales. We need to escape the dissonance between the discourses developed by artists, curators, and cultural spaces, and the actions and strategies that are implemented by institutions. Let's think about curatorial work and museology as situated practices, and art museums as institutions that are inserted in cultural, temporal, and geographical contexts. How to honor, nurture, and be nurtured by our local, regional, and global environments? The possible worlds that many exhibitions and critical texts have been mentioning during the last few years all around the world (especially in the global north) already exist and have existed for a long time. We need a closer listen.
Biography
Ana Ruiz Valencia (b. 1989) is a Curator at the Medellín Museum of Modern Art, MAMM, and 2023-2024 Fellow of the Propel Program for Curators (Association of Art Museum Curators, USA). Her previous experiences include serving as a Curator at the Museum of the University of Antioquia (2020-2022), the Auditum Sound Art Festival in Medellín (2021-2022), and as Assistant Curator at the 45th National Salon of Artists of Colombia (2018-2019).
As a curator, she experiments with unconventional formats to showcase contemporary art, with a focus on Latin American artists and cross-disciplinary/collaborative practices. She is interested in the aural dimension of the arts, aiming for an expanded interpretation of the visual, media and performative arts through sonic thinking. During her tenure at MAMM she has curated and co-curated exhibitions that question colonial metanarratives, opening up the museum to non-conventional artistic practices, such as indigenous, community-based and non-western approaches to art, as well as reinterpreting Colombian (art) history through the most important art collection of the country, held by Colombia’s Central Bank. She is currently curating an exhibition around the environmental, social, and political planetary dimensions of food through the work of artists from Latin America, the Caribbean, Europe and Africa.
Ana’s research has been published in Cimarron: Freedom and Masquerade (Thames & Hudson), and the magazines Border Listening (Germany), Aural (Chile), Revista UNAM (Mexico), and ContemporaryAnd Latin America. She has given lectures at the University of Guadalajara, Radical Sounds Latin America discourse program, and at the University of Murcia as a Guest Scholar. She holds a MA in Museum Studies (Cum Laude), two BAs in Music Performance and Industrial Design from the National University of Colombia, and has received awards, fellowships, scholarships, and grants from the Association of Art Museum Curators, the Colombian Ministry of Culture, and the National University of Colombia.
Ana Ruiz Valencia, Junior Curator, Medellin Museum of Modern Art, Medellin, Colombia, has been awarded by the Getty Foundation, Los Angeles.