Tammy Langtry

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.

Tammy Langtry's Conference Report

With a wide set of case studies and organizational models, the conference set the key issues of governance, access, scale, translation, and modes of living with (and remixing) the definition of the museum. To be based in an archipelago of the Balearic Islands was a geographic novelty and displaced ‘big’ ideas of how museums function and allowed a breathability to the programme.

On Day 1, with a focus on governance, and the expectations for museum to change ‘from the inside’, the conference highlighted a community of practitioners who listened and considered each other’s terrain and the complexity of the decisions within these contexts. It distilled the position of an attentive museum to its attentive practitioners who are available and concerned with the wider wellbeing of the museum ecosystem.

In the afternoon programmes, as we meandered through the island, we wondered what the Global South, and Africa might offer in hosting a conference like CIMAM. To talk to the museum is to talk to histories of erasure, exclusion, and othering but to talk with the museum builds a feedback loop in which one can hear oneself anew and find the paths of permeability and restoration. As a curator working independently, it is crucial that nodes of critical relationship building are set within the museum structure, as we redefine and reorganize museums relationship to the people who comprise the stories it holds in its archives. In her keynote, Denise Ferreira da Silva, articulated the role of refusal and its relationship to literality, she shared “the I is in the archive” and pushed us to look again at objectivity and ‘where the I is placed’.

The conference was a moment of polyvocality with overlapping voices from Indonesia, Brazil, Angola, Mali, Japan, and so many other players who exchanged their tools and strategies for how the museum may flip itself out and find a synergy with the many communities and worlds it invites and inhabits. As an independent curator who has worked in museums and project spaces, our work is to retain a critical relationship to the institution and its models while wielding and sharing in what it may produce through wider communities.

We wrapped up the conference with gratitude to the 2020 - 2022 CIMAM board and an announcement of the new board, a huge thank you to the team who developed and delivered the programme and hosted these incredible practitioners. To network and share with fellow curators, directors and artists allowed a flow and counter-flow of crucial connections and nodes of thinking. We hope to host this considered community of CIMAM in Africa, soon.