Ilaria Conti

Conti, Ilaria
Ilaria Conti, Executive Director, La Nueva Fábrica, Antigua, Guatemala.

Conference Report. December 2024

As a grant recipient of CIMAM, I am pleased to share this report outlining suggestions for future CIMAM conferences based on my experience and reflections after attending the 2024 CIMAM Annual Conference in Los Angeles. These suggestions aim to further enhance the critical value and inclusive perspectives of this significant event.

Suggestions for Future Conferences:

Encouraging Non-Mainstream Approaches: Foster discussions and platforms that encourage participants to move beyond mainstream institutions. As a field we can significantly challenge established systems of institutional value.

Deconstructing the Aura of Large-Scale Institutions: Create space for critical dialogue about the dominance of large-scale institutions. This includes questioning their influence and exploring ways to amplify smaller initiatives that often remain overshadowed.

Amplifying Smaller Institutions: Ensure that smaller institutions have a voice in the conversation. While many artists from non-Western regions were represented at the 2024 conference, most institutional speakers were from Western institutions. Including smaller and non-Western institutions would create a diverse and more savvy dialogue.

Reimagining Conference Formats: Allocate more time for interactive sessions such as workshops and peer exchanges. These formats can provide practical tools, foster collaboration, and support skill-building among participants, making the experience more impactful.

Reducing Presentation-Heavy Formats: Reduce the emphasis on traditional presentations. Instead, integrate more dynamic formats, such hands-on activities, institution “matching”/”speed-dating”, breakout groups based on themes, etc. to enhance engagement and knowledge-sharing.

Providing Actionable Tools and Resources: Focus sessions on delivering practical takeaways, exercises, etc. Attendees would benefit from additional resource-sharing and methodologies that they can implement directly in their institutions or practices.

The CIMAM Annual Conference is a vital platform for shaping the discourse around contemporary art institutions. By implementing these suggestions, future conferences could become even more inclusive, engaging, and impactful. I am grateful for the opportunity to attend and contribute to this important dialogue, and I look forward to continuing to be involved in CIMAM and its activities.


Biography

Ilaria Conti (b. 1985) is a curator/nonprofit professional, who focuses on epistemic justice and decoloniality. Her work addresses institutional infrastructures, communal care, curatorial ethics, civic agency.

Ilaria studied in Italy and the USA, where she advanced a curatorial practice on sociopolitical issues. Her training at US institutions helped her reshape museological/art historical narratives through decolonial methodologies. She further developed this approach at the Marrakech Biennale, working on cross-Atlantic narratives and methodological connections across Africa and the Americas.

Ilaria expanded this cross-regional approach to sociopolitical urgencies at the Pompidou through exhibitions/ residencies/programs gathering multidisciplinary artists/academics/activists and addressing epistemic diversity, ecology, and forms of knowledge under-recognized by institutions. There, she reshaped institutional processes to meet the needs of practitioners from diverse epistemic contexts, foster accessibility/engagement for diverse communities, and provide fair compensation and long-term support to research-based practices.

As Director and Chief Curator of La Nueva Fábrica (LNF), a nonprofit exhibition and residency space in Antigua, Guatemala, Ilaria continues to expand this dual approach: curatorially, by cultivating epistemic/social/cultural justice and Indigenous knowledge, and infrastructurally, by reshaping institutional processes. LNF is a young nonprofit advancing the arts in Guatemala and becoming a crossroad for local and international practitioners. Being the organization at a pivotal point of growth, she works to consolidate its infrastructure, processes, financial sustainability.

Conti structures LNF’s work around four core themes: gender, environment, migration, epistemic diversity. She is curating its first year-long program, responding to 500 years since the colonizers’ arrival in Guatemala not just through exhibitions addressing coloniality as content but seeking to transform LNF into a space for societal healing. As she states: We don’t invite publics to just “resist” coloniality, but to imagine ways to “re-exist” beyond it. The first project of this cycle, Ru Raxal qa Rayb’äl, by artist Edgar Calel, invites publics to engage with communal care based on reciprocity with nature.

Ilaria Conti, Executive Director, La Nueva Fábrica, Antigua, Guatemala, has been awarded by Eloisa Haudenschild, United States.