"How should an institution of the future be designed from the South? How can I make changes from within? Can we maintain the intellectual creativity of a small organization in a large institution? How can a contemporary museum sustain a critical role in relation to heritage and its own role in society, and at the same time remain permeable to different audiences and ways of seeing ? What does it mean today to conceive from artistic practices and exhibitions art institutions and museums not patriarchal or with a colonial discourse? In the RESET collective, we don't want to ask from the center bell from the corners or margins of the institution itself. The guiding ideas, the perceptions, and the collaboration must be very close together but not driven from a single place. In a sense, we think of the “ecology of things”.
Our proposal is called for a genuine interdisciplinary dialogue that allows us to understand structures as tools to work together instead of thinking of institutions as clean and white spaces. It's about awakening curiosity, and curiosity has no discipline.In RESET, we want to develop relationships with artists, curators, and educators, with all of them involved in our thoughts of what it means to be an institution based on contexts built from processes more than objects. This was not something we imagined; it appeared as a secondary effect of the relationships we have established [with third parties] since the beginning. The mental architecture of the institution itself was a case of finding the right ecology for each function, developing new concepts, and streamlining the institution.
Rosario García Martínez has a degree in Art History from the University of Buenos Aires. She did postgraduate studies in pedagogy and education at FLACSO Argentina, and has worked at Fundación Proa since 2008. She currently directs the Public Programmes and the Academic Programmes. She is the author of the book Por una institución híbrida. Experiences of interaction between Museum and University, published by Fundación Proa in 2020. Based on this publication, she created the program "Escribir al Hilo," a writing clinic on educational practices in museums, in collaboration with the Education and Public Programmes area of the University Museum of Contemporary Art (MUAC), UNAM, Mexico. She has been invited to conduct activities, conferences, and workshops at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, La Casa Encendida (Madrid), the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Santiago de Chile, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de México, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, the Museo de Arte Moderno de México, among others. He has published articles on art and education in A*DESK (Barcelona); La Escuela; Art on Trial. In 2017, she was a member of the advisory team for the distance proposal Museos, Formación y Redes of the Ministerio de Cultura de la Nación (Argentina) and the distance program Residencias Artísticas 2019 of the Dirección de Cultura de Cusco (Peru). She is a member of the RESET platform coordination team for criticism and thought.
Natalia Sosa Molina
Artist and cultural manager. She graduated from the University of Buenos Aires with a degree in Textiles. She studied Political Science at the Universidad Nacional del Litoral (UNL) and Performance and Interdisciplinary Creation at the Universidad de San Martín (UNSAM). Her artistic and curatorial work has traversed the intersection of information technologies and Latin American ancestral cultures, exploring visual, conceptual, and critical relationships about identity, colonial nature, landscape, and exploitation. She has been the director of the Chien Noir gallery and curated exhibitions, art and technology cycles in Argentina and the United States. She has published articles on art in the magazines Tramontana (Spain)and Global Art Daily (Japan). Currently, she is a member of the coordination team of the critique, and thinking platform RESET at Fundación Proa and curator of the cycle "Montes no visibles" at MACBA.
Victor López Zumelzu
Chilean poet, critic, and curator. He has a degree in art theory and criticism. He was part of the Artists and Critics programme at UTDT and a member of the teams at Fundación Proa (Argentina) and Metales Pesados (Chile). He has been co-director and curator of the Bigsur art gallery (Buenos Aires, 2015 until 2018). He constantly writes essays in contemporary art magazines such as Artishock and Rotunda Magazine. His most recent curatorial art projects include "Yeguas del apocalipsis", Fundación Proa (2019-2020), FUTURO? Felipa Manuela (2021). As a writer, he has published more than 8 books and received several awards, including the Hispano-American Poetry Prize (2005), Neruda Foundation Scholarship (2006), Municipal Poetry Prize (2011), Best Works Award from the Chilean Book Fund (2021) and different incentives, including those from the Chilean National Fund for the Arts. In curatorial terms, his work has crossed the relations between Latin American literature and visual arts, especially performance art, participating in meetings such as Tordesillas (Brazil), Latinale (Berlin), and Rotterdam Festival, among others. He is currently a member of the coordination team of the critique, and thinking platform RESET at Fundación Proa and curator of the cycle "Montes no visibles" at MACBA.