Fabiola Iza

Iza, Fabiola
Fabiola Iza, Independent Curator and Writer, Mexico City, Mexico.

Conference Report. December 2024

Zitta Cobb’s inspiring presentation “Fogo Island: The Possibility of a Place” delved into her work with the fisher community of the eponymous small island in the easternmost part of what is now called Canada. Following the human and ecological disaster the mechanization of fishing brought about—provoking displacement, resource scarcity, and, overall, poverty—she set out to figure out the actual scale of things and work, along with the community, to find a way of life that is equitable, dignified, sustainable. Her project was driven, to a great extent, by her late father’s words: He did not care what she thought, felt, or believed; he cared about what she did.

Vis-à-vis the ecological disasters we are currently undergoing, what can museums do? Is it possible to achieve sustainable models for exhibition-making? In her keynote address, Cobb mentioned that sustainability is the practice of care, yet such a short word holds an extreme polyvalence. Leading museums, for instance, have gone to extreme lengths to devise models that care for the planet; these were carefully explained throughout the first session of the CIMAM 2024 Annual Conference, which carried a pragmatic, positivistic ring. In it, members from the “green teams” of different museums—an array of specialists in curation, conservation, museography, and handling, among others—shared the results of their research endeavors, offering concrete and well-research tools that can be followed to decrease an institution’s ecological impact. Through such measurable and accountable actions, museums could diminish their carbon footprint even by two-digit percentages. However valuable, their insights—ranging from the practical reuse of materials (a standard in less affluent context) to renovating an entire grid of power supply and regulation—required significant economic investments that are a far cry from a degrowth model.

A brief yet forceful intervention by Chus Martínez provided a meaningful perspective to address how the pathways for creating a sustainable future are twofold: methodological and epistemological. While the former offers a straightforward course of action—subject to planning, execution stages, and accountability reports, much in the vein discussed above—the latter shows that museums and other art institutions stand on shaky grounds. The foundations on which they have been built are becoming increasingly feeble and should be subjected to careful revision. The following days explored various alternative models of being an institution––and, explicitly, not a museum––carried forward by artists, curators, and social entrepreneurs together with their communities at a hyperlocal scale that brought stimulating discussions to the table.

This assemblage of plural perspectives made evident that, depending on its scale, art institutions are on a different page regarding sustainability. If the predominant museum model of today is a replica of the business, corporate one—a situation that was thoroughly present within the context of California, the fifth largest economy in the world—there is little space for recalibrating its values. “Two drops per heartbeat: A free-fall in the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection,” Walid Raad’s lecture-performance, proved in a fascinatingly oblique manner the entanglements, contradictions, and limitations that model brings, carrying forward ways of governance limited to non-systemic change. As conference delegates, we witnessed this riveting presentation on seats named after the host museum’s patrons—the collision between the pragmatic and epistemological approaches was poignantly present: the idea of place upheld by the corporate museum model is predicated upon the concept of ownership. As architect Sara Zwede stated the previous day, most museums think about their land as part of their collections.

Conversely, I would like to follow a different path. Inspired by Candice Hopkins’s engaging Keynote Speech in which she presented the Forge Project, a Native-led organization looking to reshape dialogues on Indigenous culture, I would propose to think of sustainability less as a plan than a social contract. That is, it should be understood as a bond that entails responsibilities among the members of a community; it is reciprocal with its peoples and its land, champions resource-sharing, the distribution of knowledge, and forms of redress. The CIMAM Conference was a nurturing context for reflecting upon such engaging ideas, and I cherish having had the opportunity to discuss with my fellow grantees, panelists, and other attendees what we, as a community, do.


Biography

Fabiola Iza (b. 1986) is an independent curator and writer from Mexico City. Although her academic background is deeply rooted in Art History - a B.A. in Art from the Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana (2009), a specialization in Curating in the Public Sphere (2010), and a M.A. in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, University of London (2015) - her curatorial practice has explored the narratives muffled, neglected or disregarded by the same discipline. Three primary and interrelated areas of interest –feminism, decoloniality, and the categorization of certain material practices as craft rather than art– have guided its course.

After serving as Associate Curator and Exhibitions Coordinator at Casa del Lago, Mexico City (2010-13), Fabiola has collaborated with museums, galleries, artists’ collectives, foundations and universities throughout Mexico as an independent curator for over a decade. She has taught extensively at universities (Centro, Tecnológico de Monterrey, Escuela Superior de Cine), artistic institutions (SOMA, Museo Tamayo, Centro de la Imagen, Patronato de Arte Contemporáneo), and extended this drive to disseminate ideas through the editorial project t-e-eoría (in collaboration with the Taller de Ediciones Económicas imprint). She has also been an invited speaker/lecturer at Casa de Francia, Museo Casa Diego Rivera, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Museo de Arte Moderno, Museo de Arte de Zapopan, Harvard University, Museo Amparo, Centro de la Imagen, among others, and authored numerous essays on Mexican contemporary art and have authored monographic studies, numerous essays and reviews.

Currently, she is developing "Unsettled Echoes," a two-year curatorial program for the Mexico City-based non-profit ESPAC that questions the Modern and Western assumption that the voice is the constitutive element of a subject and what grants them political agency. Given that the voice is a cultural product –the result of instructing the volume, rhythm, pitch, and timbre of a sound produced by the body– what happens to the utterances that fail to comply with these criteria?

Fabiola Iza, Independent Curator and Writer, Mexico City, Mexico, has been awarded by Aimée Labarrere de Servitje, Mexico.