Sylvie Fortin
IKT Board Application
What specific skills, expertise, or perspectives do you believe you would bring to the IKT Board?
If selected to join the board of IKT, I would bring expertise in the areas of governance, advancement / fundraising, communications as well as strategic visioning. I would also bring the network and perspectives of a curator / writer / editor living and working across diverse cultural, linguistic, geographical communities. As we all know, hard times are ahead for the curatorial field and many IKT members. As a result, the organization's resilience will be tested as it faces both internal and external challenges. However, I firmly believe that together, as an increasingly diverse community constellating across all continents (although still unequally), we can mitigate if not overcome these challenges by fearlessly committing to solidarity, equity, and justice. For this, the power is with us curators and IKT can become a vector, if we learn from each other and join voices, share knowledge, experiments, and strategies, and create opportunities for each other. I would be honored to work with the board and membership to deliver on the organization's strategic direction as we amplify IKT's capacity and influence.
What motivated you to apply for a position on the IKT Board, and what do you hope to achieve or contribute if selected?
I have been a member of IKT for 9 years and have attended 3 congresses. I was also a Harald Szeemann Grant recipient in 2018. This involvement and IKT's support have allowed me to meet and learn from many IKT members with whom I have developed invaluable relationships. IKT has impacted my professional trajectory.
I greatly value the wide range of views, experiences and practices of IKT's membership and decided to apply to do my part to support the organization. I would be honored to work with IKT's dedicated board to strengthen the organization, expand its membership as well as its financial and organizational capacities, develop exciting partnerships that increase the resilience and sustainability of the field, allocate resources in alignment with our commitment to equity, solidarity and justice, and amplify the voices of curators within and beyond cultural institutions in the politically and economically challenging times ahead.
I hope to contribute to the organization by working tirelessly to grow and diversify the membership (including by removing economic barriers), to expand the ways in which IKT supports and connects curators, and to ensure that the organization reflects the changing needs of our field. Over the last few years, national associations of curators have emerged around the world (in Argentina, Austria, France, Italy, etc.), often to improve curators' professional status and working conditions, while other organizations (ICI, AAMC, etc.) have been in operation for longer. I would work to facilitate information sharing across these different organizations and possibly joint programming and resource sharing as we build solidarity.
In this expanded field, I feel that the most precious contribution of IKT--its very core--is discourse around curating. Of course, this discourse can take many forms. This is what makes IKT different from all the other organizations. IKT should remain a place where we come together to explore challenging ideas, find allies, and develop projects, as we reflect on our practices.