Carlos Jr. Quijon

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.

Carlos Jr. Quijon's Conference Report

Permeability is a wondrously productive framework with which to think about the role of modern and contemporary art museums in the present time. Writing my application for this travel grant, the tenor of permeability spoke to me, especially as an independent practitioner who works a lot with institutional infrastructures and frameworks. To be permeable is to allow things to pass through–to be accommodating to forms and practices that while not entirely familiar or typical might benefit the museum or might benefit from the museum as an institution. There is a poetic transformation in this traffic.

While I expected most of the CIMAM travel grant cohort, for example, to be institutionally affiliated, it was a welcome and pleasant surprise to have met and exchanged ideas with younger curators who cultivate complex relationships with institutions–neither a total disavowal nor an inalienable embrace. This might be a minor detail in the greater scheme of things, but I think because of this, the anxieties and burden, also the precarity of both the institutional and the independent is shared in a more expansive context of the contemporary crises of culture, climate, and democratic life.

To be permeable is to open oneself to the vulnerabilities of the transformations that are brought about by this traffic. The presentation of Sandra Gamarra Heshiki on the possible ways to navigate the museum’s historico-political procedure of representation largely shaped by what is imaginable only through its collection is one instructive moment in this imagination. By allowing the artist and her poetic activity to permeate the museum, in particular, to mess with the fixations of the collection and to perform an intimate rendering of specific historical junctures of representation, she simultaneously embodies and problematizes mediations of the museological.

Clementine Deliss’s suggestions on animating the life of collections through modes of study is another tenor foregrounding the potency of this permeability. Through study, which for her is an interactive encounter with the objects of the collection, these objects are exposed to the vitality of public intelligence and intuition. By permeating the institution, public becomes students, annotators of these objects and their discursive densities; the museum becomes a university and a space of remediation. Permeability allows the reimagination of the museological procedure and empowers the museum’s constituents to become interventive agents.

What I have learned from this year’s annual conference is that, perhaps, permeability, in its accommodations and transformations, is a potent way to re-envision the currency and potency of modern and contemporary art museums. This way the public or even the independent practitioners that interface with and around the museum are never external to its social life and mandate, but are transformative vectors essential to their continued relevance.