Guadalupe Garcia
IKT Board Application
What specific skills, expertise, or perspectives do you believe you would bring to the IKT Board?
On one hand, I can bring my experience as Curator and Assistant Director at the two most important public museums of Mexico, (the Palace of Fine Arts and the National Museum of Art). I was in charge of curating big shows (400-600 works per exhibition), working with many of the top established artists from Mexico and abroad. This means not only having experience in curation but also in project management as well as the direct involvement on building institutional programs according to the goals of the organization.
I’ve also had a brief period as Curator of the Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, having the opportunity to learn how the American museum system works.
On the other hand, I decided to start a non-profit organization, The Ant Project, born from the need to have a non-biased space for artists and curators to interconnect in a horizontal structure emulating an ant colony.
My goal in this organization is that all the voices of creators are heard in the same level, aiming to work on a co-creation basis. The results have been surprisingly positive as the collaboration always opens spaces for unexpected connections between seemingly disparate practices. The core of our practices is to stimulate diversity of viewpoints, cultures, backgrounds, and geographies and develop a common ground to interconnect. It is like creating a breeding ground for new ideas to emerge from the richness of the individual contributions in a collective basis.
Founding and directing The Ant Project has been like walking into unknown fields where nothing is written and yet all the possibilities are open to find new models of collective interaction for the benefit of the community as well as for the individuals. It is a fertile field that we cultivate as we walk in it, which brings unlimited room for creativity and experimentation.
What motivated you to apply for a position on the IKT Board, and what do you hope to achieve or contribute if selected?
I am applying for a position on the IKT Board because I see an opportunity in a global community to rethink together the way we are impacting (or not) the communities we act in. And, in my experience, we can do that in a context where we listen more and develop the ability to integrate other’s point of views in our understanding of the phenomena we are working with. As in the Earth’s biome, the more diversity coexists, the richest the nutrients of the environment will be.
What I’m saying is that the more diversity we integrate in our experience with reality, the better informed our judgements will be about what we see from a single point of view. This is where I find enormous value and potential in a global association of professionals working in the same creative field.
As a Mexican born and residing in Mexico City, I consider that broadening the spectrum of members in terms of nationality, ethnicity, culture, etc, would bring the benefit of hearing from direct experience what different mindsets could be working on, adding richness to our ability to understand, empathize and search for common ground to establish dialogues and collaborations.
The more we can see the world through more diverse eyes, the more we can broaden our views on our own work.
If selected, I wish to expand the reach to curators working on overlooked issues, marginalized groups, underrepresented communities, as everyone’s voice is part of the whole we immerse ourselves in when we frame a fraction of reality from our particular point of view.
I envision interconnections between apparently dissimilar visions finding common points to establish a path of integration, incorporation of new ideas and perspectives, connecting dots that had not been previously observed, expanding the points of reference to unlimited aspects that have remained invisible to the eye, often informed by hegemonic reference points of interpretation of reality.
We are used to drawing lines between the same points, but zooming in can lead to connecting previously unseen dots, like the imaginary lines that connect the stars of a constellation that open up to the surrounding stars that have not been seen as part of the same integrated constellation system.
The integration of points not previously considered in the field of work not only gives us a closer look at reality in its entirety, but also makes these points not a distant object of study in an observer- observed relation, but we could end up understanding that they are part of our own constellation in the interconnection of millions of points that affects us beyond what our eyes can see.
I feel that the more we understand this, the more humble we become in the way we approach the object of study of our research and projects, because in the end we can see ourselves in every reflection that the object of study returns to us.
Expanding the exposure to what’s different, strange, unfamiliar and distant, would be one of my main goals for the IKT community, since, to quote the words of Hardt and Negri in their book Common Wealth, “Love of the stranger, love of the farthest, and love of alterity can function as an antidote against the poison of identitarian love, which hinders and distorts love’s productivity by forcing it constantly to repeat the same.”
Not repeating the same would be my greatest accomplishment as a member of the IKT Board.