We received an award from the TyPA Foundation and Wikimedia Argentina among 50 proposals from 9 countries across the Americas
The exhibition Tiempo para escucharnos. Manifestaciones del arte indígena en Colombia organized by the Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín in 2022 was awarded by the Fundación TyPA and Wikimedia Argentina in the call Acciones y exhibiciones para descolonizar las narrativas de los museos, in which 50 projects from 9 countries in the Americas participated: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, and Uruguay.
The Fundación TyPA is a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting reflection and contact between cultures; establishing connections that facilitate the acceptance of diversity and promoting positive changes in museums across Latin America, fostering networking in the region. In 2023, this Foundation, together with Wikimedia Argentina, launched a call for museums in Latin America and the Caribbean that have projects inviting reflection and action toward decolonizing the institutional and curatorial management of museums, as well as enabling a culture of equity and absolute transparency that reconfigures the social landscape in which the museum exists.
The exhibition Tiempo para escucharnos. Manifestaciones del arte indígena en Colombia was an initiative in which the Museum invited knowledge holders, leaders, and community organizations of indigenous peoples to collectively build an exhibition based on the need to establish a more fluid intercultural dialogue among the various peoples present in the country.
According to Jorge Bejarano Barco, curator of special projects at the MAMM, “this was a disruptive project from many points of view, as it taught us other logics, other ways of working, another conception of time, and understanding that processes like these require time for conversation and a sense of ritual.” This is a stance that the museum has strengthened after the pandemic through exhibitions such as Medellín. Pulso de la ciudad and Desafiar. Atravesar el sol desde un gran Pacífico, exhibitions that have enabled the presence of and collaboration with groups and organizations that have been historically excluded from these spaces.
The recognition by the Fundación TyPA and Wikimedia Argentina involves the inclusion of this experience in the publication Acciones y exhibiciones para descolonizar las narrativas de los museos and the donation of study material focused on the decolonial to continue nurturing this stance in the institution’s curatorial endeavors.
This publication is a contribution to the consolidation of a body of study in Latin America from the perspective of museums, since bibliography on the subject is scarce and generally, those who think about museums are academics who are outside the institutions, which in turn have few spaces for reflection and research. It is therefore valuable that the professionals of the cultural institutions themselves generate reflection on these experiences.
Continuing to work on these issues is urgent because these communities hold fundamental knowledge for finding solutions to the environmental, social, and economic crisis the world is currently facing, and this knowledge has been outside the pragmatic frameworks of Western academia and institutions.