Chotin’: Curatorial Practices at the Edge is the third iteration of a three-part cross-institutional collaboration between the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, MAC Panamá, and MoMA PS1.
This program posits Chicago as a transcultural crossroads and a site of diasporic convergence for the Americas in the Midwest, reorienting and decentralizing conversations about migration, exchange, memory, and global history that are too often constrained by geographical and linear approaches, with their debates restricted either to the coastal metropolitan centers of the United States or select academic networks in Latin America.
On the one hand, local and regional curators consider the relationship between diaspora and new curatorial practices from the premise that most cultural and historical processes can no longer respond to a single physical place. At a time of global mobilities and migrations in which the subject-land-identity relationship is undeniably uprooted, what does it mean to think from Latin America or the Caribbean in Chicago? And to think archipelagically? These panelists reflect on their locus of enunciation not as the continental, geographical site in which they work, but as the reticular, diasporic space of historical consciousness and affective memory from which they think.
On the other hand, yet still focused on how to liberate the regions from the colonial geographies that limit them, a group of curators from Latin America and the Caribbean are invited to address how their various curatorial projects challenge western canonical structures of art and act not only as counter-hegemonical interruptions of the canon, but as methodological interventions. These “new museologies” imagine the museum and the gallery as porous spaces whose aesthetic exercise cannot be detached from the social mobilities and (im)possibilities of their context. Beyond national or international geographic frameworks, the curatorial practice is conceived as an intimate and affective space for the generation of knowledge and the production of meaning.
Chotin’: Curatorial Practices at the Edge is organized by Carla Acevedo-Yates, Marilyn and Larry Fields Curator, and Cecilia González Godino, Marjorie Susman Curatorial Fellow, in collaboration with Juan Canela, Chief Curator, MAC Panamá, and Elena Ketelsen González, Curator, MoMA PS1.
Learn more about this collaboration with MAC Panamá, and MoMA PS1.
