Curating Memory, Protest And Resistance Of Women’s Collectives Against The Enforced Disappearance In Mexico.

The practices of political aesthetics carried out by the enforced disappearance search groups in Mexico reveal a production of the imaginary and self-representation that is located at the most critical side of the creative spectrum. Through embroidery, photography or performative practices, collectives of women that look for the disappeared people, constructs a space for sharing in which the group creates an imaginary opposed to the hegemonic narratives of re-victimisation and segregation. But also, within these practices, the collectives have developed a strong strategy to create memory, to make their struggle visible to people who consider themselves outsiders to the problem of enforced disappearance, and to consolidate the group as a form of resistance and direct action that engages other people who are not part of the collectives.

The intention of this research and curatorial project is to review and enable strategies for being part of the task of producing memory under the conditions of global capitalism, and trough this, dynamise social narratives and political imagination. It also asks what it would mean to carry out a curatorial project on these materialities, which relations it would make visible and for whom, and what conditions of production it would require in order to concretise the intention of agency.

Whether it is the space of the march, self-publications, interventions in physical or digital collective spaces, workshops and collective productions, or spaces for encounters, these are ways of opening up times and dynamics that have a specific consistency. The political relations triggered by women’s actions produce and recreate non-hegemonical imaginaries, whose materialities, politicis and resistances can be linked through a curatorial logic in order to motivate readings of a major scale.

Alma Cardoso is academic and researcher at the Universidad Iberoamericana Puebla, Mexico, where she coordinates the BA in Contemporary Art and the MA in Cultural Management since 2019.

Her research interests focus on the curatorial and cultural critique of artistic practices in non-hegemonical territories, artistic production and visual culture led by women collectives, and labor and social reproduction in contemporary art. She has published, participated in encounters and curated exhibitions related to these topics with collectives at institutions like Labor Art Review (New York), Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza (Madrid), MUAC (Mexico City), Amparo Museum (Puebla), BUAP (Puebla), University of Guayaquil, Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros (Mexico City), the Palace of Fine Arts Museum of Mexico, Cal Gras (Catalonia), among others.

She is a Board Member of the Residency for Artistic Research Error (Mexico City), Curatorial Director of the Laboratory of Contemporary Art Projects Espacio Cotidiano (Puebla) and part of the Editorial Board at Universidad Iberoamericana Puebla.