Ana Ara

In 2022, 41 contemporary art curators, researchers, and museum directors from 24 different countries were awarded to attend the CIMAM 2022 Annual Conference. The CIMAM 2022 Annual Conference, titled "The Attentive Museum. Permeable Practices for a Common Ground", was held in Mallorca (Balearic Islands), Spain on 11–13 November, hosted by Es Baluard Museu d'Art Contemporani de Palma.

Ana Ara's Conference Report

The Attentive Museum. Permeable Practices for a Common Ground was held in Mallorca from 11 to 13 November 2022. As part of the grantees' group, this report aims to highlight the specific session(s) that I consider most relevant for my present and future career.

Especially inspiring during the first conference day was the discussion around the concept of “governance” and understanding that the museum institution reflects the problems that other institutions and systems have (Educational system, economy, health…). In particular, I want to highlight the talk by Meskerem Assegued Bantiwur, and its definition of the museum as a holistic museum, where the question “What it means to be human?” articulates its existence. A situated museum that pays only attention to the context where it exists.

On the second day, the talks and presentations were more specific, and I found that two of them opened up the discourses from the preview day to new ideas and theoretical concepts. The first conference, The Museum of Remediation by Clémentine Deliss, questioned the sustainability of the temporary exhibitions defending the need to perform the decolonial, to work from a decolonial approach. A museum is a civic institution in which concepts such as “trauma” and “recovery” need to be discussed. Also, extremely inspiring for me was The Seed is a Memory of the Fruit by visual artist Sethembile Msezane. A performative talk around the idea of memory (as a weapon) and the reflection that it is mandatory to reflect on our disconnection as humans from nature, inviting us to pay attention to unheard voices and to think about the concept of “animism” within the institutions and the collections that are stored in them.

On the third day, I really enjoyed the conference by Emily Jacir, Founder/Director, Dar Jacir for Art and Research, Bethlehem, Palestinian Territories. It was focused on the ideas of “hospitality”, “memorial”, “restitution” and “reparation”, while in the talk by the filmmaker and artist Philip Rizk, Mosireen video collective, Cairo, Egypt, Our street in the middle of our house was focused on the ethics of care and the injustice that all kind of wars

As a CIMAM Travel Grant to attend this year's conference helped me to have an intense and interesting discussion with the rest of the grantees and some of the international speakers forcing me to be more aware of the problems and challenges that contemporary institutions might face nowadays. How is it possible to think about an attentive museum not as a utopia, but as a possibility?