André Luiz Mesquita

Conference Report. December 2024
Perhaps this report, written from insights gained during some of the symposium’s presentations, carries a somewhat personal tone, rather than being a very formal or strictly academic text. After all, we spent three days together in Los Angeles, surrounded by a hundred people, from 8 AM to 8 PM. Over this time, we developed a certain intimacy in our conversations, didn’t we? We talked about work, but we also shared life stories, journeys, dreams, and aspirations. For me, a symposium should be a collective practice, a micro-political space that, as the Brazilian psychoanalyst Suely Rolnik often says, manages to “give voice to the movements of desire.” Often, discussions spilled over onto the hotel rooftop. More than just an intellectual presence at the symposium, each of us brought our body into every conversation — sometimes sitting in an auditorium, other times crossing the city’s freeways on a bus, heading to museums and alternative spaces. That’s why it might make sense to view this account not only as something intended for CIMAM but also for the community of people with whom I shared these intense days.
First of all, I would like to express my deep gratitude once again for being a CIMAM 2024 grantee. It is an immense honor, and I can already say that it was a rich learning experience.
I’m writing this report on a scorching afternoon in São Paulo. As we all know, the world is facing a growing climate crisis. Here, rain falls during unexpected months, and the sun burns on days when it shouldn’t. We live under the weight of these unforeseen effects in our daily lives. Today, a friend shared news that, in a way, connects to our CIMAM symposium in California. The British trip-hop band Massive Attack canceled their performance at the 2025 Coachella Festival. More than just a musical issue, the band has always remained committed to its activism for sustainability. According to the band members, Coachella fails to meet its ecological commitments, being an unsustainable event that uses vast amounts of water for irrigation in a private area where the festival takes place.[i] An important detail: the event happens in Palm Springs, the same desert region where part of the symposium group visited the day after our gathering in Los Angeles. I couldn’t join that trip, but inspired by the investigative approach of Walid Raad, which we saw in his presentation at the symposium, I began reflecting on the possible connections between Massive Attack, Coachella, Los Angeles, Palm Springs, and CIMAM. At first, the common thread seems to be the tension between resource extraction and the demand for a sustainable future. Art, music, and culture, as vibrant and urgent fields, are territories of battle, discussion, and engagement on these issues. After days reading about wars, environmental racism, listening to Massive Attack, and reading about desert music festivals, I still wonder: what agreements and commitments truly emerge from the symposium in Los Angeles? And for whom, in the end, is living and working truly sustainable?
The word “sustainability” echoed throughout CIMAM 2024. Economic sustainability, resource sustainability, sustainable practices, sustainable networks — all of this while we work and live in a world that is already nearing the unsustainable. We know that this word was long ago hijacked by corporate discourse aimed at selling a company’s “best practices.” In Brazil, for example, it’s common to see companies promoting their “green capitalism” in advertisements and on the stock exchange, presenting themselves as ethically sustainable, yet perversely exploiting resources in the Amazon rainforest – a program of mass destruction with colonial roots. On our side, as art workers, we understand that we need to increasingly create agreements and protocols for more responsible practices toward the environment. We know the way is so long, and much still needs to be done. But do words like “sustainability” still make sense for what we wish to claim and transform? If we are going to continue talking about sustainability, perhaps it is urgent to renew an ethical-political commitment focused on social justice.
As the indigenous philosopher Ailton Krenak once said, the discourse on sustainability is often nothing more than “personal vanity” – you recycle waste, ride a bike, consume less plastic, eat organic food, but all of this is done as an individual act in a world that already carries centuries of violence, ecocide, environmental disasters, and collapses.[ii] I thought a lot about Krenak during the symposium, especially when I saw the presentation by Daniel Vega, Deputy Director for Exhibitions and Conservation at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. The creation of a “green team” at the museum, addressing logistical and economic issues like measuring the carbon footprint, reusing wood and exhibition showcases, or using virtual couriers for artwork loans, is commendable. However, the “Bilbao effect” that spread across the art world a few years ago—the idea of a museum regenerating a degraded area—always needs to be analyzed with caution, as it is often linked to real estate speculation and tourism. In some way, that presentation reminded me of the work of another investigative artist, Allan Sekula, who spent years photographing and highlighting the global economy that circulates across the oceans, transported by cargo ships. Sekula and Raad seem so close in their methods, both trying to bring us connections that, for a moment, might seem unusual or even impossible.
Sekula photographed the devastating effects on the village of Popotla in Baja California when 20th Century Studios built a set for the filming of Titanic (1997), with a huge freshwater tank and a ship. The tank was installed near a fishing village where people lived without access to running water. The construction of the tank altered the salinity of the natural pools and completely harmed the region's economic activity, which depended on shellfish fishing. For Sekula, the arrogance of the entertainment industry exploiting that location is part of a (nearly) secret history of how the seas connect exploitation and neoliberal extractivism in vulnerable areas. Following this trajectory of navigation, Sekula arrived in Bilbao, where he photographed the Guggenheim, whose architecture (created by Frank Gehry) he describes as “the Los Angeles export product, a leviathan of California postmodernity beached on the derelict riverfront of the economically-depressed maritime-industrial capital of the Basques.”[iii] For Sekula, Guggenheim Bilbao is much closer to the fantasies and lights of Los Angeles than we imagined.
[i] See https://pitchfork.com/news/massive-attack-say-they-turned-down-coachella-due-to-festivals-environmental-impact/.
[ii] Ailton Krenak, Ideias para adiar o fim do mundo. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2020.
[iii] See https://cdn.dal.ca/content/dam/dalhousie/images/faculty/arts/centre-european-studies/Forgotten-Space.pdf.


This reflection on the Guggenheim Bilbao, in light of Sekula’s images and insights, brings us face to face with a central institutional issue that still needs to be discussed. Creating “green teams” or protocols for resource use in a museum only makes sense if it’s not motivated by institutional vanity (yes, museums are also extremely vain). I mean that many museums still have not adopted systematic strategies and plans in the face of the climate crisis because they lack genuine social responsibility policies, often treated merely as voluntary measures rather than policies that are effectively implemented. There is no sustainable change if these projects do not include and understand the effects of museums on communities and their surroundings, as well as policies for valuing and caring for their workers.
Manuel Segade's participation in the symposium was particularly relevant. Segade, Reina Sofía Museum director, highlighted the work developed within the framework of the "Museo Situado" project. This project is characterized by a network of collaboration between collectives, activists, and local associations in the Lavapiés neighborhood, where the museum is located, promoting gatherings such as assemblies, workshops, community events, music, and film screenings. Segade reminded us that the creation of this network between local communities and the museum began in March 2018, after protests in Lavapiés following the death of Senegalese immigrant Mame Mbaye. Mbaye died of a heart attack after being chased for hours by the police. Perhaps, more than questioning whether the “Museo Situado” evokes a “sustainable practice,” the most relevant issue is understanding that true ecological awareness only arises when we recognize that environmental change must also be social—a principle we can find outside the museum world in various discussions promoted by anarchists, theorists of social ecology, and communalism. Inside the museum, as Segade pointed out, such discussions further amplify and challenge class conflicts, the visibility of different subjectivities, resource distribution, and the public nature of an institution. Discussions that reorganized, recombined, and remade an institutional ecosystem and its field of forces and disputes.
With all its paradoxes, difficulties, and contradictions, a museum is undoubtedly a space where neoliberal projects, precariousness, conservatism, and still unsustainable practices intersect. However, creating protocols, openings, and careful agreements with the surrounding communities so that they become part of this institutional space seems to be an opportunity to establish alliances. The reuse of materials and the adoption of sustainable strategies, in themselves, are not enough to repair the effects of neoliberalism in a museum in a city like Bilbao. Likewise, the community attitude of a museum towards the migrant diversity of an increasingly gentrified neighborhood, like Lavapiés, cannot correct the state's violence against migrant lives. More than talking about mandatory reparations, it is necessary to openly discuss (with both consensuses and dissensions) the social responsibility of museums as spaces for formation, education, care, and the collective construction of resources and knowledge. These reparations are manifold and involve decades—in fact, centuries—of racial and epistemic violence, issues that go beyond the field of art because living under capitalism is, yes, unsustainable. Here, one word that appeared in some of the discussions at the symposium now seems to make sense: interstice. In my view, we should think of museums and cities not only as physical spaces but as social spaces of relationships and struggles that act in the interstices of everyday life. Interstices represent what remains of resistance in large cities, fighting against normativity, regulation, and homogenization. The interstice is political in itself and seeks to break with the classic and normative organization of a city or institutional space. The provisional and often uncertain status of an interstice allows for glimpsing and experimenting with other forms of creating a space open to collaboration and cooperation.
During the discussions at CIMAM, which focused on the relationship between museums and the climate crisis, with an emphasis on Cecilia Winter's excellent presentation from the Getty Institute on the international challenges of conservation policies, and also in the panel discussing sustainability economies, my perception was that the symposium did not treat the environment or ecology merely as a curatorial theme or something related to the collections, as if a museum’s art collections or exhibitions could solve or illustrate these issues. In reality, what we have been discussing since the symposium in Los Angeles are much more concrete issues: ensuring basic essential rights when talking, at the very least, about sustainability within museums. We are talking about guaranteeing dignified working hours, adequate working conditions, fair wages, career development, investments in training and research processes, and policies for diversity and inclusion related to gender, race, and disability. Thus, implementing practices aligned with human rights principles should not be a mere game of appearances or a superficial response to social pressures, which often result in marketing strategies such as pinkwashing, artwashing, and greenwashing, as if these were enough to meet social demands and absolve institutional culture of its civic duties. True change must be a collective and continuous commitment.
Still on interstices, it was truly uplifting to start CIMAM with the keynote speech by Mark Bradford and to hear Candice Hopkins' presentation on the final day of the meeting. It was uplifting because I felt the symposium did not take the route of discussions that assert "there is no alternative!" nor was it seduced by the simplistic and normative idea that sustainable policies would merely be a capitalist strategy for "progress." On the contrary, the meeting proposed constructive and thought-provoking reflections.
Bradford, in particular, addressed at least two essential points that highlight the potential of collaboration in these interstices. First, he repeatedly emphasized the importance of creating a safe space for collaboration and work, stressing the value of community and the need for an active process of listening. Second, Bradford argued that the artist must take a leadership position in negotiations between work and institutions—in other words, he spoke about a more equitable relationship between artists and the structures that engage with them.
For me, it was especially enriching to expand Bradford’s presentation by visiting the exhibition KAOS Theory: The Afrokosmic Media Arts of Ben Caldwell, a collaboration between the California African American Museum and the Art + Practice foundation, driven by Bradford. The exhibition was dedicated to presenting and exploring, through images, films, and initiatives, the work and influence of filmmaker and cultural activist Ben Caldwell, with a focus on his work at the KAOS Network, a media arts hub. This visit was significant because it allowed direct contact with the community context and artistic production of South Los Angeles, offering a practical understanding of how Bradford’s initiatives manifest in these spaces, which are occupied and shaped by community histories. This is an aspect I felt was missing during the Los Angeles symposium—it would have been extremely enriching if we had visited more spaces and projects like the one we saw in that exhibition. The practical experience of these initiatives offers a deeper understanding of the impact and relevance of artistic practices in the social and community context, something that deserves more exploration in meetings like CIMAM.
Candice Hopkins delivered one of the most memorable presentations of the symposium. She discussed a project she is working on as its director, a project that refuses to be labeled as a museum, proposing a distinct form of organization. The Forge Project, initiated in 2021, is situated in the ancestral homeland of the Moh-He-Con-Nuck. Hopkins advocates for temporality over permanence, and instead of creating a fixed museum, she proposes a fluid and dynamic space. This model allows for a flexible relationship between the organization of collections, artist residencies, research, and activities involving food, care for the land, seeds, plants, and agriculture—everything immersed in a deeper curatorial practice. Hopkins’ presentation led me to reflect on the concept of time, or rather, on another kind of time. In traditional museums, time runs against us: everything is urgent, everything must be immediate, almost decisive. The Forge Project invites us to think about another ecology—an ecology of time and of care. A time that, for me, evokes the concept of "ancestral time" proposed by Brazilian writer Leda Maria Martins, which, according to African cosmoperception, is a time that does not follow progressive linearity. On the contrary, this ancestral time is spiral: everything goes and everything returns, in a continuous movement of knowledge that reshapes and accumulates.[i] The attention to community and the transmission of knowledge, as reported by Hopkins, made me reflect on the need to inhabit this other time in the face of the crises we are going through.
Perhaps you have noticed, dear CIMAM, throughout this report, my intention to draw attention to the fact that we held a symposium on museums in a city like Los Angeles. At every moment of this meeting, whether during museum visits or while walking through the city, I found myself reflecting on the countless stories I’ve heard, read, or still need to learn about the social, racial, and political struggles in LA—stories of insurrections, uprisings, riots, battles, and clashes in a deeply segregated territory. In some way, it was shocking but not surprising to hear Andrea Fraser talk about the governance structures of museums, displaying a chart that correlated the explosion of the incarcerated population in the United States with the growth of museum income. At that moment, I paid attention to the hundreds of people in the audience, carefully recording the chart with their cell phones. Fraser's investigations have always been an invitation to expose the hypocrisy of the art system. Listening to Fraser, it was impossible not to think, once again, about the social and geographical context of the symposium—yes, we are in Los Angeles. This thought immediately led me to the research of geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who revealed that the prison population in California grew by about 500% between 1982 and 2000. African Americans and Latinos make up two-thirds of the 160,000 prisoners in the state, most of whom come from Los Angeles.[ii]
[i] Leda Maria Martins, Performances do tempo espiralar: Poéticas do corpo-tela. Rio de Janeiro: Cobogó, 2011, p. 206.
[ii] Ruth Wilson Gilmore, California Gulag. São Paulo: IGRAKNIGA, pp. 51-52.

These numbers stayed with me during the symposium, and I couldn’t help but think that, while we were discussing ecologies, it was also necessary to evoke the perverse ecologies of fossil capitalism—one of which is undoubtedly the so-called "carceral ecology." According to T. J. Demos, prison ecology is shaped by police violence, racial capitalism, lawfare, social media algorithms, and states of exception in finance. One example of this can be seen in Atlanta, Georgia, where the state is investing millions in building a police training facility for counterinsurgency tactics. This facility is being built in an ecological reserve, on Indigenous land, and protests from climate activists against the project are violently repressed by the police.[i] Another moment during the symposium where this theme resonated in me was during the visit to the Free the Land! Free the People! exhibition at the Crenshaw Dairy Mart. There, I spoke with the curator about the construction of a geodesic dome as part of a project that connects discussions on food insecurity, homelessness, and the prison-industrial complex. We talked about the need to create spaces for discussing social justice, environmental crisis, and penal abolitionism.
Can social justice be thought of without thinking about climate justice? No, it cannot. Whether through community projects, activist denunciations, museums open to the community, or institutional commitments in the face of the climate crisis, the art field needs to dedicate more time and energy to these intersections. In this sense, I believe that an essential strategy for dealing with the crisis is also to bring to the forefront and connect scattered episodes, hidden stories, and investigate the intricacies of fossil capitalism. Walid Raad, in his performative presentation at CIMAM, brought these insights while investigating the art collection of Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza. Like Fraser, Sekula, and Raad, we need artists willing to create narratives that connect like diagrammatic stories. This is crucial work, and we also need to do this as curators, researchers, and writers. The connection between various actors, institutions, groups, governments, and episodes seems to always be a necessary action, one that inspires us to continue diagramming our own research and knowledge. So, dear CIMAM, perhaps the time has come, after this symposium, for us to start building our solidarity networks, so that discussions can translate internationally into concrete actions—profoundly spiral actions and, we hope, more transformative. Shall we take this step together?
[i] T. J. Demos, “Counterinsurgent: Cop City, Abolition Ecology, and the Aesthetics of Counterreform”. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/143/590415/counterinsurgent-cop-city-abolition-ecology-and-the-aesthetics-of-counterreform.
Biography
André Luiz Mesquita (b. 1977) is Curator and Head of Mediation and Public programs at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand – MASP, Brazil. He holds a PhD in Social History from the University of São Paulo (2014) and currently is a postdoctoral fellow at the same institution. He is a member of Red Conceptualismos del Sur (Southern Conceptualisms Network).
Mesquita is a researcher on the relationships between art, politics and activism, working on topics such as public secrecy, state violence, social movements, counter-cartography, ecology, art and decolonization. His projects propose carrying out actions of reflection, critical and curatorial investigation, collective practices, diagrammatic thinking and knowledge production.
Mesquita is the author of the books “Insurgências poéticas: arte ativista e ação coletiva” (2011), “Esperar não é saber: arte entre o silêncio e a evidência” (2015), “Mapas dissidentes: contracartografia, poder e resistência” (2019), and co-author of “Desinventario: esquirlas de Tucumán Arde em el archivo de Graciela Carnevale” (2015). At the MASP, he organized the anthologies of “Histories of sexuality” (2017), “Afro-Atlantic Histories” (2018), “Women's Histories, feminist Histories” (2019), “Art and activism” (2021), “Brazilian Histories” (2023), Indigenous Histories” (2023) and is currently working on the “Queer histories” anthology for 2024. He curated at MASP exhibitions of several artists, such as Trisha Brown (2020), Erika Verzutti (2021), Madalena Santos Reinbolt (2022), Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe (2023) and Gran Fury (2024). With the Red Conceptualismos del Sur, Mesquita curated the exhibitions “Graphic Turn. Like the Ivy on the Wall” (Museo Reina Sofia, 2022) and “Losing the Human Form. A Seismic Image of the 1980s in Latin America” (Museo Reina Sofia, 2012).
Mesquita is currently working on two exhibitions for the year of Histories of Ecology at MASP and preparing a new book on contemporary art and public secrecy, to be released in 2025.
André Luiz Mesquita, Curator, Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand - MASP, São Paulo, Brazil, has been awarded by the Consulate General of Brazil in Los Angeles.