Ana Roman

Biography

I am Artistic Superintendent at Instituto Tomie Ohtake, as well as a curator, researcher, educator, and PhD candidate in Architecture and Urbanism at FAU-USP. My practice approaches the museum as a structure shaped by extraction, colonial violence, and unequal systems of knowledge production, developing curatorial methodologies grounded in reparation.

My research on reparation emerges from a trajectory connecting education, geography, and curatorial practice. My background in Geography at the University of São Paulo, combined with my experience in public education and mediation, led me to investigate how institutions produce, organise, and regulate knowledge. This inquiry brought me to archives and collections, where I encountered the conditions through which histories are fragmented, displaced, and silenced.

I understand reparation as an ongoing practice that engages with these conditions rather than resolving them. It operates through incomplete archives, dispersed objects, and contested narratives, requiring a rethinking of ownership, authorship, access, restitution, and shared custodianship. My work with digital collections and Afro-diasporic archives forms part of this process, exploring how cultural memory is structured and how it can be reorganised.

In my PhD research, I developed the concept of the museu-mangue as an alternative to the museum as a closed system. This model proposes an institution based on relations, circulation, and interdependence, where curatorial practice enables coexistence among different temporalities and forms of knowledge. Recent projects, including A Terra, o Fogo, a Água e os Ventos: Por um Museu da Errância com Édouard Glissant and Águas Subterrâneas: Narrativas de Confluência, operate within this framework, positioning the museum as a space where historical asymmetries are revealed, negotiated, and transformed through practices of accountability, conflict, and the redistribution of narratives.

Ana Roman, Artistic Superintendent at The Instituto Tomie Ohtake, Sao Paulo, Brazil, has been awarded by the Guimarães Rosa Institute - IGR (Brazil).