work in progress 1
Collecting Museums / Collecting Practices (working title)
work in progress by Sofia Dourron
The Collecting museums / Collecting practices research project will explore the possibility of conceiving and designing a set of decolonial collecting practices. One that contemplates not only the objects —in the widest possible sense of the word— to be collected, but also the processes involved in the act of collecting, cataloguing, storing, accessing, and displaying collections. I will do this by researching a specific set of Latin American institutions that purposely or accidentally managed to escape the modern universalist paradigm. Research will focus on the peculiarities that differentiate them from the standard model set by western museums of modern art, and on their collections, in order to find common traces that can start to narrate an alternative and open genealogy for contemporary institutions. Through these new institutional paradigm I seek to enable a more horizontal perspective on Latin American art history, unravelling its own canons and paths. While at the same time proposing an intersection with other global south contexts which might share a similar pattern in the development of their institutions.
Some case studies like the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires [Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires] (1956-1970); Walter Zanini's MAC-USP [Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of Sao Paulo] (1963-1978) turned experimental laboratory for artists and cultural producers; the first Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende [Solidarity Museum Salvador Allende] (1971-1973), later Museo Internacional de la Resistencia Salvador Allende [International Museum of Resistance Salvador Allende] (1975-1990) of Santiago de Chile and its network collection; the Museo del Barro [Mud Museum] in Paraguay and the Museo Travesti [Transvestite Museum] in Perú, will allow me to develop a more complex narrative of our institutional history, attempting to identify how these projects, each in their own way, managed to create agency and function as catalysts in times of crisis for institutions, citizenship and democracy. With this research I intend to find precedents to our current and future institutional landscape, providing decentred models that challenge notions of institutionalism, exhibiting and collecting and the way globalizing art institutions replicate the structures of multinational powers and its distribution of knowledge
This research will result in an essay / collection of museums.