Let's think a little about the stones.
Stones that were once lava from the Paricutín volcano, which could eventually become fragments of Mexican architecture.
Or stones that were extracted from Uxmal, Yucatan and from there they migrated to upstate New York.
Stones that perhaps gave shape to huge concrete buildings, derived from the projection and imagery of an engineer.
Thinking and reflecting on the movement of these stones over time, on how they are transformed and what story they tell, is not only a central part of the recent research by Paulina Ascencio Fuentes, who recently concluded her stint in the Anthropology Department at the Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, DC, but also gives an account of a professional and personal historical congruence, from which we can better understand the vision and work of this young curator, for whom diversity, open-mindedness and teamwork are essential detonators of new approaches and dialogues inside and outside the contemporary artistic field.
From adolescence, Paulina Ascencio Fuentes (Guadalajara, Jalisco, 1988) became interested in art and visits to museums, a passion a little removed from the family ecosystem, where the financial and business inclination predominated.
This interest and cultural curiosity led her to develop a path on her own, inclined to work and write about art.
However, her art history career in her native Guadalajara did not attract her attention so much, she did not convince him.
It was thus that the passage through the career of philosophy and social sciences at the Technological Institute of Higher Studies of the West provided her with a much broader panorama that, together with a series of circumstances and opportunities, would lead her to focus on artistic curatorship from a much broader, dynamic and transdisciplinary vision.
Installation view of the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay, Kalle Hamm & Dzamil Kamanger, Cecilia León de la Barra and Pedro Neves Marques in the exhibition They Cannot Stop Spring, Ladra Oeste, Guadalajara, 2019.
As soon as that first stage of studies concluded, between 2010 and 2011 Ascencio Fuentes began to participate as a curator in exhibitions, first in a very intuitive way, working with artists who were also graduating from art school and then with a generation older than she, who already had a longer career.
This empirical and gradual development in all possible places endowed the young curator with an approach and experience that would gradually find her collaborating in more institutional settings, museums or independent spaces run by artists with greater structure.
Almost a decade later, in 2019 Ascencio Fuentes was invited to study for a master's degree within the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS) program at Bard College in New York, which was when Paulina Ascencio moved to the United States.
In an early reflection on this type of recurrent professional migration, the curator and researcher brings to mind the paraphrase of the Argentine painter César Paternosto, who once said he realized that he was Latin American until he arrived in the United States.
Installation view of Claudia Peña Salinas' work at the Uxmal on the Hudson exhibition, Hessel Museum, CCS Bard, New York, 2021. (Photo: Olympia Shannon)
Many stories happening at the same time
From her research interests, which include disputed modes of production of knowledge, cultural exchanges between Mexico and the United States, as well as the role of museums, archives, and collections as contact zones, in an exclusive interview for El País, Paulina Ascencio Fuentes is emphatic in the various historical narratives that are simultaneous and adjacent to the official ones, as well as the intersection of points, references, dialogues, visions and revisions, inside and outside her professional field.
The collective past in less institutionalized spheres, as well as his recent passage through an environment apparently outside the conventional artistic ecosystem, reaffirm Ascencio's vision of the figure of the curator.
“My work has always been based on research and dialogue and collaboration.
When I talk about the exhibitions I speak in the plural, 'we think this, we achieve this' and that part of collaboration is very important in my work;
I don't think of something like an 'independent curator', especially since you are always working with other people”, emphasizes the curator of the Uxmal exhibition on the Hudson.
Migrant Mutants and Fake Ruins (New York, 2021).
Aware that the curatorial practice has a certain openness and flexibility to draw from other disciplines with much firmer and written rigor and methodologies, as well as his recent stint at the Natural History Museum, today Ascencio Fuentes conceives his work as an important public service , a bridge but also a facilitator of dialogue between knowledge coming from different places.
Installation view of the work of Joy Laville and Lucía Vidales in the exhibition Night during the day, Mexican Art Gallery, Mexico City, 2019.
Just as she has been involved in other types of museums that are not only art museums, working at the Smithsonian after graduating as a curator in 2021, Paulina Ascencio Fuentes is now about to start a doctorate in anthropology.
This possibility of touching on methodologies, ideas and knowledge from other sources that are not necessarily related to artistic work, history or the art market, has allowed the curator to develop her own language in her work, as well as the possibility to explore deeper readings of other topics.
“For me, curatorial practice is a way of doing, or a series of tools, to generate knowledge, which does not necessarily have to be constrained to an art system, but to a broader field of knowledge.
An important part of my work, even before studying for my master's degree, had to do with archives, collections;
the way in which we are documenting history, culture and what remains as material culture, as well as the ways in which these materials are read in relation to the historical context, current situations and the possibility that these archives can have different readings.
We know that history is not a single narrative but is made up of many historical narratives”, reflects Ascencio Fuentes.
And he concludes: “For me one of the most important things when I do my work is the viewer's experience, it has always seemed to me a responsibility of the curator to be generous in terms of experience, to offer different ways of relating to the exhibition.
Perhaps you just enter the room and the spatial experience between you, the works and the space is already a sensory experience in itself.
The next one if you want to go deeper are the cards, you start to get a little more into the conceptual part.
Then you begin to reconcile both and mediation seems to me to be one of the fundamental pieces of curatorial practice.
And finally, many other resources can be offered: bibliographies, guided tours, workshops or talks in relation to the exhibitions.
It seems to me a responsibility of the curator to provide access points but also bridges between ideas so that the visitor can have an enriching experience.
Ultimately, curating is creating a constellation or assemblage of objects, spaces, information, and people.
And what is generated with that is an experience that would ideally integrate these elements to generate new knowledge”.