Meet the Three Keynote Speakers
Victoria Noorthoorn, Director of the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (Argentina), CIMAM Board Member, and member of the Content Committee for the CIMAM 2025 Annual Conference, introduces the three keynote speakers who will open each day of this year’s conference with thought-provoking perspectives.
Through her insightful presentations, Victoria highlights the vision and ideas of each of these remarkable women - voices that will inspire the conference’s daily sessions in Turin.
Day 1 – “Doing Less vs. Doing Differently”
Keynote Speaker: Françoise Vergès
Senior Fellow, Sarah Parker Remond Center for the Study of Racism and Racialization, UCL, London, UK.
Vergès is a writer, a decolonial antiracist feminist, an independent curator, and an activist; in whose latest book, A Programme of Absolute Disorder: Decolonizing the Museum, she states that the museum cannot be decolonized as it results from the processes of colonization itself; but it can be pulled apart, disordered, and a post-museum can arise, if we understand the crucial role of imagination as an urgent call to reactivate the tradition of pragmatic and emancipatory utopias. This program of disorder is composed of “rehearsals for life”—those practices that Vergès identifies in so many pockets in the world: “I have seen spaces that seek to expand the imagination, to preserve joy and life… and in which every idea is examined: How will it work? What is needed? How to keep the cost as low as possible? How to sustain energy and joy in a world led by people who do not want others to have joy? How would this space work for all kinds of ages and bodies? Should we whisper?” she asks. “What they share is collective thinking.”Vergès is radical. Acknowledging diversity is not enough at a time in which vacuous multiculturalism has become a pacification tool to maintain the anger and frustrations of history silent. Today, what is needed, Vergès argues, is antiracist antifascism.
Read Françoise Vergès's biography here
Day 2 – “Mapping Desires”
Keynote Speaker: Elizabeth Povinelli
Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology & Gender Studies, Columbia University, New York City, USA.
Povinelli is Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University in New York. She draws on her long-term work with Indigenous communities in northern Australia to invite us to rethink some of the deepest assumptions of Western thought, especially the distinction between Life and Nonlife. Povinelli calls [this] the emergence of geontopower, a mode of governance that not only manages living beings but also organizes and defines the very conditions of existence itself: water, land, atmosphere, minerals. For those of us working in cultural institutions, her work resonates deeply. Museums don’t merely preserve objects; they mediate relationships between humans, nonhumans, and the environments we inhabit. They are experimental hubs where artists and researchers are already exploring alternative forms of existence and new ways of imagining life and scenarios of communal living. Povinelli challenges us to reconsider how we represent, narrate, and engage with these entanglements at a moment when the categories sustaining modern thought are under profound strain. Her book Geontologies is an open invitation to speculate, to rethink what counts as life, and to explore the forms of existence, human and otherwise, that our institutions can make a home for.
Read Elizabeth Povinelli's biography here
Day 3 – “Transactions and Transmission: Tactics of Togetherness”
Keynote Speaker: Mariana Mazzucato
Professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value, University College London (UCL), and Founding Director of the UCL Institute for Innovation & Public Purpose, London, UK. Author of The Public Value of Arts and Culture: Investing in Arts and Culture to Reimagine Economic Growth in the 21st Century.
Mazzucato is an economist, and she takes inspiration from the “moonshot” programmes that once took us to the moon, to advocate for the same level of boldness and experimentation to be applied to the biggest problems of our time. She asks us “to rethink the capacities and role of government within the economy and society, and above all, to recover a sense of public purpose.”It is important for us in museums to listen to Mazzucato advocate for the importance of innovation, of creativity. She invites us to be collaborative, mission-oriented, taking risks together, but also sharing the rewards between public and private arenas. We need to think bigger and mobilize our resources to restructure capitalism to make it more inclusive, sustainable, and driven by innovation to tackle concrete problems.
Read Mariana Mazzucato's biography here
Discover these leading voices and their contributions to “Enduring Game: Expanding New Models of Museum Making”, the CIMAM 2025 Annual Conference, taking place in Turin from 28–30 November 2025.
Further reading:
Mazzucato, M. (2021). Mission Economy: a moonshot guide to changing capitalism, London, UK: Penguin Allen Lane.
Mazzucato, M. (2018) The Value of Everything: making and taking in the global economy, London, UK: Penguin Allen Lane
Mazzucato, M., and Ryan-Collins, J. (2022). ‘Putting value creation back into ‘public value’: from market-fixing to market-shaping’, Journal of Economic Policy Reform, 25(4), pp. 345-360. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/17487870.2022.2053537
Mazzucato, M. (2025). The Public Value of Arts and Culture: Investing in Arts and Culture to Reimagine Economic Growth in the 21st Century. UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. Available at: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/publications/2025/sep/public-value-arts-and-culture
Bason, C., Conway, R., Hill, D. and Mazzucato, M. (2021). A New Bauhaus for a Green Deal. UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. Available at: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/public-purpose/publications/2021/jan/new-bauhaus-green-deal.
A Decolonial Feminism, by Françoise Vergès. Pluto Books, April 2021.
A vital feminist manifesto from one of our most inspiring political voices.
A Programme of Absolute Disorder. Decolonizing the Museum. by Françoise Vergès, Pluto Books July 2024.
A call to end the Western museum.
Geontologies. A Requiem to Late Liberalism, by Elizabeth A. Povinelli. Duke University Press, October, 2016.