Curatorial Residency
This residency is aimed at graduate students, recent graduates, or emerging scholars interested in curatorial practices and museum studies, who seek to enhance their skills through active participation with MAMBO’s Curatorial Department, with a focus on digital practices. The selected resident will gain practical experience in the conceptualization, planning, and research for the third cycle of MAMBO’s exhibition programming, collaborate on the development of projects related to the exhibition cycle, and receive mentorship from the curators and museum staff.
The residencies at MAMBO focus on the intersection of digital tools with artistic and research practices in museums, aiming to expand the reach and accessibility of the MAMBO Collection, while questioning contemporary museum practices and the creation of knowledge at the Museum.
The winner of the first edition of the Curatorial Residency is Federico Reyes.
About the 2024 Residency
my computer is afraid of dying is the title of the web project created by Federico Reyes Mesa in response to the research and conceptualization process for the current exhibition Collection on stage #5: Fetish: Material Conversations, which features 42 works from the MAMBO Collection. The project’s title is a metaphor for Federico’s first day as a resident at MAMBO, when his computer stopped working. It reflects on concepts such as virtual relationality, artificial intelligence, and the relationship between people and computational technologies—elements central to the current exhibition cycle at the Museum.
The Curatorial Residency consisted of two primary phases: one focused on research and conceptualization, and the other on creation. During the first phase, Federico actively participated in the research and conceptualization processes of Fetish exhibition, part of MAMBO’s third exhibition cycle in 2024. He engaged in working sessions with the Museum’s curatorial team, allowing him to explore both the theoretical aspects of curating and the direct organization and planning of the exhibition.
Through this collaboration, Federico worked with artworks from the collection, exploring the historical and conceptual relationship between the artists and the Museum, as well as how these pieces were integrated into the collection. He also identified additional works that aligned with the conceptual frameworks of Fetiche, further enriching the curatorial process. His participation not only focused on analyzing the works but also on deepening the artists’ trajectories, examining their ideas, motivations, and themes linked to the curatorial categories developed for the exhibition. This first stage of the residency concluded with the creation of the curatorial text for the Animismo / Espiritismo section and the review of other curatorial texts, to which he contributed his perspective and interpretation.
Foto installation view sección Animismo / Espiritismo
The actions within my computer is afraid of dying unfold on the web and on a computer desktop, yet extend into other temporalities, each exploring the relationship between the user, artificial intelligence, and various computational and digital technologies. will I burn down my house? involves a meticulous search for the shadow of Google’s camera in random locations on Google Maps, revealing flaws in the logic behind self-concealment algorithms. Kentucky Derby documents the penitence of a woman in a church, using images obtained from insecam.org, a website that hosts live streams from publicly accessible security cameras, highlighting the extent and normalization of various digital surveillance practices. In 道德經 three AI-generated characters created via synthesia.io recite chapter eleven of the Dàodé jīng, reflecting on the untranslatable, digital spirituality, and hollowed entities. RIP (Positivist Interior Reconstruction) invites the viewer on a tour through the interior of 3D models of ceremonial or ritual spaces and objects like temples, tombs, or ornaments, published on sketchfab.com and created with scaniverse.com, exploring the negative spaces produced by 3D scanning reconstruction algorithms and speculating on what these technologies fail to capture. Lastly, Finally, The Future is a composition of windows presenting a fragment of dialogue between the Painter and the Poet in the first act of Timon of Athens, accompanied by imagery related to contemporary technological development, such as satellite transmissions or audiovisual records of coltan mines.
my computer is afraid of dying plays with the notions of invisibility and negative space through movement captured by the camera: when we position ourselves in front of it, the image freezes, and we see our reflection; when we hide from the camera, the actions come to life and begin to unfold. There is an exchange of actions and reactions between the user and the computer.
In the text introducing the web project, Federico begins by recounting stories that, even without knowing each other, feel familiar. He mentions social media trends anecdotally and invites us to dive into understanding and questioning computational behavior, connecting everything with the concepts explored during the first phase of the project.
Federico Reyes Mesa (Colombia) is an artist, editorial designer, and holds a master’s degree in Cultural Studies. He has worked as an advisor on research-creation processes for the 46th National Salon of Artists, the Women, Arts, and Care Program, and various music programs at the Ministry of Cultures, Arts, and Knowledge in Colombia. He has also been a production assistant and designer for Espacio Odeón, a production and programming assistant for Fundación Ambulante Colombia, and an editorial design consultant for the IOM.
His interest in the poetic dimensions of virtual relationality and internet culture has driven him to explore, through his artistic practice, diverse media such as textual art, expanded graphics, digital and analog printing, poetic computation, digital craft, net art, and electronic art. He has participated in group exhibitions in Bogotá, Buenos Aires, Miami, and New York.
About Federico’s Participation
“Far from reaffirming a stable and institutionalized definition of curatorial practice, this residency, where I will have the opportunity to closely and actively engage with the work of the MAMBO’s Curatorial Department, offers the possibility of continuing my search for alternative means that have shaped my creative practices and interests to date. I hope this opportunity will allow me to uncover pathways that lead to thinking about broader, more diverse, and plural curatorial practices, distanced from the more traditional and hegemonic manifestations of curatorial work, which have historically proven to be structurally exclusionary and reductive. I believe it will be a challenge to use the digital realm as a framework for systematization and circulation, because digital media are ambiguous and porous, and although they may seem to hold infinite connective potential, they are also decisive within various contemporary systems of exclusion.”
About the Open Call
From July 8 to 19, 2024, the open call for the Curatorial Residency was announced. A total of 97 applications were received from Colombia, Spain, Mexico, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Portugal, the United States, and El Salvador, from a diverse group including graduate students, artists, art historians, curators, museologists, writers, designers, audiovisual creators, architects, historians, communication professionals, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, archaeologists, emerging researchers, conservators, heritage managers, and cultural managers. Through these open calls, targeting both national and international audiences, we aim to expand the reach of the MAMBO Collection and enhance its accessibility, with the goal of enriching perspectives that contribute to the museum’s knowledge construction.
Acknowledgment
The Curatorial Residency is generously supported by the Government of Canada’s New Frontiers in Research Fund [NFRF-2022-00245] in collaboration with Susana Vargas-Mejía.