Current and recent curatorial initiatives
MULTIPLE MATERIAL METONYMIES
2024-2025
Ongoing. Mexico, Colombia, and the UK.
This project studies, analyzes, and experiments with the exhibition strategies commonly used for presenting cultural heritage and “borrowed” cultural objects. In particular, it considers exhibition design, wall/intro texts, didactics, and curatorial concepts. Then, it formulates collaborations with artists, researchers, performers, and designers for experimenting with non-traditional narrative and didactic devices: graphic and digital design, designed objects, experimental writing, augmented reality, oral narration, performance, etc.
Multiple Material Metonymies is a framework for thinking about new critical tools and their application from the perspective of the audience, by offering frameworks of analysis that enable us to unravel the visual and ideological systems of the museum display through exercises of attentive observation. These observations reveal that, although the restitution discourse is widely installed in the public debate, it does not operate equally in different geographies or cultural frameworks within those geographies.
Multiple Material Metonymies was initiated with the support of the National Museology Research Grant from the Ministry of Cultures of Colombia and is currently available in Spanish at:
NEVER SPOKEN AGAIN: ROGUE STORIES OF SCIENCE AND COLLECTIONS
2020-2026
Multiple Venues, USA.
Never Spoken Again: Rogue Histories of Science and Collections is a project that seeks to untangle the contested histories that sustain modern artistic, anthropological, and scientific collections. It focuses on projects that perform critiques on the museum display as a narrative device, on the histories of acquisition of cultural artifacts, the processes of biological intervention of colonial extractivism, and the monolithic forms of knowledge that enable these material, ecological, and cultural reconfigurations.
This traveling exhibition is a platform for post-disciplinary engagements and creating new dialogues with existing collections and proto-collections. At each new venue, the host institutions are invited to propose artifacts from their home collections to dialogue with the rest of the exhibition, modifying the exhibition in every iteration and exposing historical materials to new readings through the lens of noncanonical epistemic traditions.
Never Spoken Again is produced by Independent Curators International and is touring different museums in the United States, between 2020 and 2026.
Participating artists include: Morehshin Allahyari, Carlos Motta, Michael Rakowitz, Maria Theresa Alves, Alia Farid, Sofia de Grenade.
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COSMOFAGIA
2024-2027
fundación/op. cit. and partner institutions. Mexico City.
Cosmofagia is a research, creation and dissemination initiative organized around hospitality as departing principle and work ethic. Fracturing the conventions of curatorial work, where artistic processes are articulated to narratives, groupings or trajectories, Cosmofagia promotes a hybrid structure, where participants can transform the way in which different subjectivities are articulated. The project seeks to foster the formation of a community of collective work and exchange of artistic, scientific and cultural knowledge, based in Mexico City, and nourished by local and international actors.
Organized in collaboration with fundación/op. cit., Cosmofagia proposes a program oriented to multiple communities, where exhibition, publication, education and public events are mixed as an integrated work front. These resources are offered to the participating artists so that they are the ones who define the direction of the project, with the permanent accompaniment and support from the curator. These resources are offered to the participating artists so that they are the ones who define the direction of the project, with the permanent accompaniment and support from the curator.
Participating artists include: Miriam Simun, Alison Nguyen, Juan Covelli, Sofia de Grenade.
WHERE YOU LEFT OFF
2021-2026
Multiple Venues
Mexico City and Philadelphia, PA
This is a multi-year collaboration between communities in Mexico and the United States. Pairing artists from each side of the border, the project follows, facilitates and displays the experience of exchange and creation between the artists, highlighting the process and softening the hard edges of authorship. Where You Left Off is structured as two collaboration cycles, where the artists engage in a months-long conversation, and the entire process of collaboration is open to the public via a series of digital events, screenings and presentations, leading to a physical exhibition at the end of each cycle.
This project is produced in collaboration with the Tiger Strikes Asteroid network and co-curated with Tally de Orellana
Participating artists include: Sisi Chen, Ulrik Lopez, Yael Eban, Chantal Peñalosa, Lorena Mal, Alex Paik, Aurora Noreña, Aura Arreola.
NUEVOS NOMBRES
2017-2019
Multiple Venues
Museums managed by the National Bank of Colombia in Bogota.
Nuevos Nombres is a national survey of emerging art that takes place every five years in the museums of the Colombian National Bank. In this edition, it took place as a full scale intervention of five museum collections, their architecture, and their digital infrastructure, rupturing the traditional presentation of the small-scale salon format that was traditionally offered to young artists. The project was presented in three cumulative cycles over the course of two years; new artists were introduced in each cycle and were invited to respond, not only to the curatorial prompt, but also to the existing interventions from previous cycles. Many of the works of Nuevos Nombres 2017-2019 were subsequently introduced to the National Bank collection and some remained as permanent interventions.
Participating artists include: Snyder Moreno, Matilde Guerrero, Juan Pablo Pacheco, David Medina, María Leguízamo, Henry Palacio.
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A PILGRIMAGE TO THE RUINS OF THE FUTURE
2016-2018
LA Times Media Center, Pasadena, CA and other locations
This curatorial initiative was organized as a series of single channel videoprograms by different guest curators from around the world. My purpose increating such a format was to enable the widespread disseminationshowcase of contemporary art in a format that would allow internationalartists and curators to present their work in spaces and locations otherwiseunavailable to them. For this purpose, I invited the curators to reflect on theidea of regionalism and locality, to see how creations from specific regionswould configure their intellectual universe through their differentexperiences, which ranged between the hyper-local and the trans-national.
Participating artists include: Laura Huertas Millan, Claudia Joskowicz, Juan Manuel Echavarria, Carlos Guzman, Felipe Steinberg.