Museums at the End of the World
Museums at the End of the World
Led by Ana Ruiz, Junior Curator, Medellin Museum of Modern Art, Medellin, Colombia.
📅 Tuesday, June 3, 2025
On January 28, 2025, the Doomsday Clock was set 89 seconds before midnight. What does this mean for art museums, devoted to the "future" through the conservation of collections and artistic heritage? What does the Global South have to say about this —what can we learn and what can we teach? Finally, how to honor, nurture, and be nurtured by our local, regional, and global contexts, and serve as platforms for societies to create, expand, and articulate possible presents?
The proposal for this CIMAM Connects, proposed and led by Ana Ruiz, Curator at the Medellín Museum of Modern Art, MAMM, arises from the feeling —more or less generalized— that the future is vanishing. “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Capitalism” would say Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek.
The end of the world seems very real while some old known evils have taken on a strength not seen since the Second World War. This polycrisis presents itself with the resurgence of fascism, genocides, environmental collapse and climate crisis, neocolonialism, inequality, and exploitation of resources in the name of development and technological well-being, which together have eroded what was left of confidence in international institutions and States as social structures supposed to work for the common good.
Although it might seem that Art and contemporary museums have nothing to do with this —some could say that they are not directly to blame, and they do not seem to have any real weight in political and economic decision-making— they are institutions that, on the one hand, have their origins in the colonial systems that have shaped the world we live in today (so maybe they should question their current role on them), and on the other hand, have evolved to become agorae, spaces with a potential for fostering critical thinking and for articulating new/diverse knowledge(s) and worldviews. Art museums’ vision and impact vary immensely according to the region of the world and the budget in which they operate; contemporary art practices have also changed in the last decades, and the Art world today is much more polyphonic than it was a few decades ago.
This CIMAM Connects session wants to bring together curators and museum workers from different parts of the world, from both the Global North and South, to discuss the specific issues affecting their respective contexts. Let's think about feasible, short-term strategies to co-operate and col(labor)ate, and find actions in the present that connect knowledge(s), technologies, and peoples from diverse contexts to create agendas for our current times, in which the question of the present is, literally, vital.
Interesting readings and media:
Ailton Krenak - Ideas to Postpone The End of The World
Rodrigo D. No futuro (1990) - Film by Colombian director Víctor Gaviria, filmed in Medellín.
Seba Calfuqueo - MAPU KUFÜL
Spanish: https://vimeo.com/499196065
English: https://vimeo.com/455055310
Ana María Millán with Las Andariegas - LAS SOCIAS (video game)
Visit the Members Only dedicated section to find the link to register for the upcoming sessions.
Ana Ruiz, Junior Curator, Medellin Museum of Modern Art, Medellin, Colombia.