Both civic space and cathedral of culture: museums and galleries are at once sacrosanct temples of knowledge and spaces of conviviality. What are the terms and protocols that either proscribe or allow for wider access? From the item label to the wall text, peripatetic architect, curator Maite Borjabad López-Pastor discusses the institutional voice with Carlos Mínguez Carrasco, chief curator of ArkDes.

This conversation is part of KoozArch's issue "Polyglot".

FEDERICA ZAMBELETTI/KOOZPolyglot is a quest to grow the vocabulary we need to expand the diverse potentials of spatial practice. How do you both approach language within your reciprocal curatorial practices and approaches?

CARLOS MÍNGUEZ CARRASCOIt's a very wide question, so let’s start completely off-script. The first reaction is to think about language through the lens of our work at the museum, where we often wrestle with the challenges of translation. I think translation is one of the key questions when we think about what kind of language we use, and why. It’s always important to situate those challenges in context; I work at the National Museum of Architecture and Design in Stockholm, which holds responsibilities towards not only the official language of the country, but also the minority languages in the country of Sweden. For example, one of the lines of work that we pursue is very much connected to Sámi culture and to the indigenous cultures of the Scandinavian Peninsula.

This is in itself a big challenge. There are several Sámi languages, so how many translations should we use? We work with Swedish and English, but then there is also Northern Sámi, Southern Sámi and several other languages from other minorities, like Romani, Meaänkieli, Finnish, Yiddish… The choice to translate into English, for instance, is not a neutral one — it reflects a broader decision to use English as the default language for welcoming tourists and guests in Sweden. This choice carries with it implicit political connotations, as it aligns with global power structures and cultural hierarchies.

Today, AI is present and has the capacity to automatically translate certain words into other languages. Of course, this data always passes through a specific software, designed within a very specific data set and so on. I think my first reflection about that is that language is, of course, not neutral. The decisions about what language you use, the forms of captioning, translation, and definition across different languages is something that should be considered as part of the design decisions taken when developing a project; I believe this is relevant in the presentation and programming of all cultural institutions. Still, I recognise the difficulty; it's often a question of resources and how they are directed.

MAITE BORJABAD LÓPEZ-PASTORI think I have two answers; one which has more to do with how I relate to language within the curatorial process, and the other relating to outcomes where text and language are present within curatorial practice of exhibition making — to me, this operates very differently through the curatorial process. For me, language and text actually exist within their own right and within their own format. All along, within my practice, I've always been very conscious and want to stretch each format's right to exist. Each piece of knowledge, each creative act has its own native way of being in terms of format. It’s about trying to preserve their existence within their own format up to the end, and resist the representation of ideas; for me, text is also part of that. 

All of this is to say that when I'm in the creative process and I'm rambling through content, ideas and practices, I will include artworks, I will have practices that haven't yet consolidated into an artwork as well as text within their own right. Sometimes texts are not representations of other things (meaning they don´t have to exist in an exhibition as a translation of an artwork for example), for me they are works in themselves, right? Sometimes they exist as quotes, or crystallise within one word that becomes hyper-loaded, so the significance of that word becomes modified as the practice develops. I really like to sustain that evolution up to the very end, so that reflection would be more about the use of text within the process of curatorial development. The presence of text is very different when the exhibition is realised in space. Then you have introduction texts, labels, and it becomes a challenge as to how much try to capture without duplication or representation of what you're seeing — as well as how much space you leave for other forms of knowledge to exist as a complement to the artefact or the work that is presented.

This intersects with the issue of languages and translation, in terms of the translation of an idea into written text, — which I understand can be important, as a matter of accessibility. But I tend not to over-represent those ideas in text, preserving the potentiality of fragmentary knowledge and imagination that can be activated by the experience of an exhibition and the works themselves. If I transcribe that experience too literally as an explanation on a label, I'm closing some of that down. It's always a fine line between some form of accessibility, — which doesn't mean a full translation of an idea, but rather opening a door to access authentic knowledge of the work as a matter of accessibility — then that moves into language. At the end for me is a matter of acknowledging the multiplicity of languages in exhibition making meaning: visual language, sonic language, experiential vocabulary, written text and so on as complementary. Each operating on their own right within their logic, rather than one as representation of each other.

At the Guggenheim in Bilbao, we also had the challenge of a multiplicity of languages: Basque, Castillian, English and French. Again, evaluating all of that, some of those languages respond to the acknowledgement of community and identity; others respond to global circulation, obviously. Tourism means the number of visitors may grow but they won't be an engaged community, because they're not usually returning visitors — but despite that, there is the choice to translate for that audience, right? It's messy, but I think it points to the way in which the institution really position itself within audiences, visitors and community building, through the the use of language.

CMCIt's true, the language that is used is symbolic of a specific position or ground on which the institution stands. For example, this was very important when we were organising the Oslo Architecture Triennale 2016, with the project After Belonging — where even the graphic identity engaged questions of translation, incorporating a range of different accents, characters and diagrams used in some languages but not others.It was an effort to articulate the need for a new vocabulary, one that could express the shifting conditions of belonging, of being at home.

Then too, when we at ArkDes organised the exhibition Kiruna Forever, we recognised that in Sápmi all the words, as well as the living reality of the towns and cities within the indigenous region of the Sámi — are unstable for many different reasons. Even the place names aren't fixed; you’ll find certain towns having multiple names, referred to in Swedish,in Sámi, and Meänkieli, depending on where you look and who is referring to them. There has been a complete destabilisation of what certain things are called precisely by the use of different languages with different purposes. So I think it's true, the choice of language and translation reflects a fundamental position that the institution takes. One of the curator’s responsibilities is to advocate for certain words, messages, terminologies and languages that actively support or respond to a culture that has been historically marginalised or unrecognised by the institution one represents.

KOOZMaite, staying with the politics of identity, that's something that you have explored substantially in your research, especially in relation to the space of the museum. Can you talk about the ways in which you have used language as an act of resistance in relation to ideas of identity and otherness?

MBL-PThere are many moments and examples that could build upon what Carlos was saying. In the exhibition I curated at the Contemporary Arts Centre in Cincinnati, A Permanent Nostalgia for Departure: A Rehearsal on Legacy with Zaha Hadid, in order to be consistent and accountable with what I was doing with the curatorial strategy I needed to display the title in English and Arabic — and to do that in an intertwined way, both at the same hierarchy. It requires more work, more conversations, you have to negotiate two logics, two modes of thought, as well as the physical space available on the wall or in the graphic identity. This is a simple example to note that it’s really important to know how you want to do things, because sometimes that means that things get more complicated. What sustains is the standard logic, the ‘normalised’ logic that is just a colonised mode of defining what is correct, right? As everything is made to shift in order to sustain that logic, the moment you try to do something different, of course it requires more work; you have to reconcile many existing protocols and systems. The mere attempt to discuss an exhibition title and proposing a graphic identity that would hold two languages at the same level, in the same hierarchy, was an effort that became messy. Of course, there are solutions for that, precisely through graphic design; there are always possibilities. The process always becomes messy, because you're behaving in a way that you're not expected to behave — which is, in general, what institutions do. Not to say everything is predetermined, but institutions have certain protocols and infrastructures that are upheld to protect works, practices or knowledge in some form and shape. Yet sometimes those protocols just replicate themselves rather than necessarily protecting artistic practices. That's the moment where the friction starts to exceed, right?

As I reflect on the curatorial text of the exhibition The Production of Otherness, it is first important to acknowledge that the concept of otherness emerges from a discursive process, where a dominant group — let's say the USA — defines one or more subordinate groups like the other by marking a difference, then marking that difference, whether real or imagined, is perceived as a denial of identity, right? This difference is always hierarchised as inferior, allowing for varying forms of discrimination: racial, class, gender-based, cultural, religious; the list is infinite. Otherness is not only an external social construct; it's also deeply internalised, as a state of being — the reproduction of that logic is maintained by many processes. Language is one of those. So as the “normal” keeps being naturalised, the ‘other’ continues to be manufactured. While difference refers to facts — neither good nor bad, nor superior nor inferior — “Otherness” belongs to the realm of discourse. Difference and power are distinct issues: those who hold power decide the meaning of that difference. Within that, there is a very specific place in whether museums exercise a specific agenda or leave room for discourse.

However one important question for me today is how representation operates within unmaking this otherness, as in a way representation also produces fixation of an identity. Through this production of “otherness”, many categories have been neglected and invisibilised through history. So naming these erased categories, historically made inferior, making them visible is a way of resisting the otherness (but not the only needed one). This strategy brought to the extreme in a non-intersectional way, by means of representation, is what has brought today the instrumentalisation of identity politics and the crisis of representation. As although they make visible the invisibilised, they fix the category (losing the complexity required to change structural logics). Fanon was already warning about this, or Glissant’s reclaiming of the right to opacity (as a way to resist the fixation of identities). So it is not enough, because representation is not the only way to change the subaltern position of those categories — yet it is fundamental and important, to name those categories that have been made inferior. But it's not enough. Representation is not necessarily activism, it is a tool but it doesn't fulfill all that is required to dismantle the colonial logic of thought and order.

Back to the exhibition, if you get into the labels, they are intended to formally reflect the cultural background or identity of the artist, which, depending on the museum, include the city where they were born and/or a country. That’s already assuming a lot. It's assuming that the nation state is what gives you an identity or cultural background, right? So my take on this was to push it further, in The Production of Otherness at FAD in Barcelona, but it had some roots in other instances. One of those was at the Art Institute of Chicago, when I was acquiring a work by a Palestinian/Jordanian artist. In terms of museum protocol, they share a questionnaire that the artist has to complete. In that form, they ask where you are born and then the place of birth becomes the adjective in the label. So this artist answered the questionnaire as requested by the museum. That translated into an idea of citizenship, assumed from that city (from a country that was neither Palestine nor Jordan) — which, of course, is not her nationality, nor her identity because her parents had to leave Palestine. This brought us into a situation where I started arguing that regardless of whatever “automatic outcome” the questionnaire had produced, that line of the label should read Palestinian/Jordanian which was what reflected her cultural background. That opened up an endless amount of discussions that the institution would argue on the name of the “Editorial Style Guide” and would end up with statements about the validity of Palestine as a nation state or not. Beyond having to state relentlessly in some of those meetings statements like “In my opinion, it’s not your place to decide if a country exists or not, as an editorial decision” the key strategy was to argue that the role of that line in the label was meant to register the cultural background of this person. Another key strategy for me here was using a precedent of another artist before who had wanted to self identify as African American, and that had not produced any issues in the institution. Is that a nation state? No, but it opened up conversations and reflected his intention. So it was this mobilisation — from not taking for granted that the artist passport represents an identity — to open up the possibilities and tools that we find in language to learn how to express cultural background.

As we were saying, the role of the label is to provide brief cultural background information, in terms of the author’s context and that of the work, right? So that small displacement literally opens up a whole Pandora’s box that reflects on the colonial agency and legacy of the institution, but also it opens us to many possibilities. Fast forward in the exhibition of The Production of Otherness, when I started to do the labels for the works, I got stuck with the credit lines; I had artists from Uganda, Iraq, Guatemala, Dominican Republic… but those countries wouldn't necessarily represent the identity of the artist. For some the passport was just that, an admin document but what would articulate who they were was another State, some would have been living and working for that long in a place such that it confirmed their identity as much as their birthplace, some would be part of indigenous communities from the Amazonas that acknowledging a State like Peru as their sovereign would go against their identity… while some would have issues with citing age (meaning making birthdate available for living artists). So sometimes I would avoid the state, citing only the city where the artist lives or works. That would work for some — for others mentioning two states, for others just one name of an indigenous community… and the list of style options was as long as artists in the exhibition. What was clear is that their cultural background and a fair definition of their cultural identity overflowed the “nation-state,” so forcing an editorial style of homogenisation would have been going against the mere premise of the exhibition. So in the end, I chose the style of accreditation that benefited each artist, in terms of representing their identity. That puts pressure on our second issue: namely, how political is language within museum practice and how critical is the need for consistency? Sometimes that need — in the name of consistency, which is a fiction of neutrality (institutionally called manuals of style) — forces people into a shoe that doesn't fit; this is what keeps us renewing the erasure of some identities, right? So those two points could act as an explanation of what I wanted to address in The Production of Otherness, which comes from observing these tendencies in many institutions.

Going back to this notion of identity, in the same way it is important to name and represent identities and categories that have been erased and invisibilised, I also think it's important to understand that it is not enough. This resonates with Amin Maalouf, for instance, who says Identity is an evolving composition of multiple affiliations that cannot be compartmentalised or fixed, as different aspects come to the forefront depending on context and moments in life — or the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, Chicano writer, who in her texts consciously mixed Spanish and English as a mode of resilience against this sterilisation of languages, preserved as static. Or even Glissant’s discussion of opacity, which goes critically into the logic of the representation of categories, the right to serve those categories without making them visible — without assuming what is representable as favourable. Hiper-legibility can be a bit of a trap. And in all this, language is key. The result of all of this is messy and when something is messy, you cannot make a protocol out of it; you cannot institutionalise it, right? I think there is tons of resilient potential on that, on messiness.

CMCThat's so interesting. It reminds me of a project that I love by Palestinian artist Khaled Hourani and the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, under the directorship of Charles Esche at the time. The project, titled Picasso in Palestine was as simple and difficult as it sounds: to show a work by Picasso from the collection of the Van Abbemuseum in Palestine. That in itself — presenting an artwork in a country that doesn’t officially exist, at least not in legal and bureaucratic terms — is an impossibility for any of our works at ArkDes, for example. You could not secure insurance, arrange transportation, or obtain the permissions required to turn this idea into a reality. Yet the whole project was accomplished and they presented a Picasso in Ramallah, West Jerusalem. The way it was explained was like a series of understandings, synchronicities and liaisons produced across time and space. In Esche’s account of the project, what I found fascinating was his assertion that this is precisely the shape of curatorial practice: those negotiations, those small discussions, persuading some, persuaded by others. Those are the tools that a curator deals with, no?

It is also linked to the notion that if we think about exhibitions as acts or ‘works’, then texts should be considered in the same way. A text can be as short or long, as complex, standardised or replicated as one decides — that too is part of the institution and curatorial labour. Of course, as Maite hinted, this is intertwined with communication practices, with PR, with forms of marketing; that's the nature of curatorial labour. The clearer it is for curators to recognise those parts as tools — not only to describe specific works, but to use texts, from a little caption to a longer introduction text — the more effectively they can support the curatorial concept.

There is a form of language that I'm interested in that has to do with different levels of accessibility in the texts. One way of leaving people behind or excluding them is to create texts that are too interpretative, for example. . Sometimes texts try to be too pedagogical, like a lesson to the audience. I’m interested in text stepping back, as much as possible, leaving the space for the work to speak. Maite mentioned this as something that is important for her too: the idea that words, or the language spoken by architecture or design is not always translated into a brilliant piece of writing. A work of architecture has its own language, and that in itself is a vocabulary, a form of communication — in the same way that an artwork has a certain form of communication. We were talking about translation between languages, but there is also a translation between disciplines: how do architectural documents, architectural objects or design objects speak to the audience?

MBL-POn one hand, it's true; we might have advanced a lot within accessibility — but at the same time, we're replicating a canonical understanding of colonial thought, which is the notion of universalisation. We must acknowledge that what we thought was universal, it really only deals with a tiny section. So now we try to grow that idea of universality a little bit more. Within writing for exhibitions, universality is translated into hyper-legibility. But at the end, for whom is this legibility, really? Something I wished we had learned from all the critiques of ableism that point out how the alternative to that normalised Western colonial universal is not another universal. Because if you really revise language that carefully, it ends up being the most normative appeal that wins out, even in terms of text and writing. Even through supposedly hyper-pedagogical agendas that museums sometimes have — that failure to actually acknowledge the potential capacities of the audience, beyond the institution’s expectations — I think it really diminishes the visitor, in many instances. Again, I don't have a clear solution for that; the path is not consistent. Again, it's messy and it's uncomfortable: you might succeed in one aspect, while holding the uncomfortable feeling of failing in another. But maybe it is more honest to assume those inconsistencies, and sometimes prioritise some people's needs in one exhibition, and in other exhibitions prioritise others. As far as that priority keeps shifting its subject of priority and does not always fall in the standardised “normal” (which falls into the white, colonial, male, fully normalised body etc).

This came up in very specific discussions with the writing labels for the architecture collection in Chicago, in terms of legibility. If I'm going to use the two hundred words I have available for a label in order to describe a floor plan (that is hung in front of you), I don't have room to say anything else. The question for me is about who I am addressing. For some, a floor plan is already self-explanatory; so I could use the two hundred words to provide other types of information, rather than a translation of a plan. At the same time, I do understand there are people who don't read floor plans. My goal was that someone who has nothing to do with architecture should be able to gain something after walking through the architecture galleries — but I also wanted someone from the field, who has vocabulary to read a floor plan, to get something too. So there may be things that one person experiences that the other doesn't, and vice versa — but their experiences would be unique to each of them, and will provide something specific. I might talk in one disciplinary voice, while in other moments, I will use the words that can translate that vocabulary into non specialised visitors. But I would never claim one or the other as the total solution, because then we're just trying to find a new universal; a premise that will be wrong and we will fail again.

CMCI totally agree, and that brings me to thinking about the role of a museum. What exactly is happening in a museum? I believe a museum is a place where you think, you see objects, and you see other people. You think and reflect, you get inspired and you criticise. So then the question is, what is the role of text in that context, right? Anything that helps the multiplicity and diversity of people and thoughts to feel invited, to feel non-threatened, and to create an atmosphere of respectful argumentation, the more democratic the space becomes.

I think that’s helpful, and not always made possible by widening the language and the mediation. Sometimes it is quite the opposite. For example, I remember reading about a project at the New Museum in New York, a performance project that was made by and for young Black women: the project was made for them and nobody else, happening only after hours, when the museum closed. Only that group of people was invited to experience the performance, which was not communicated in any other form; no photography or video or anything during that time. In some cases, the opening of a safe space, with a shared language, for a very specific group of people can be really powerful. At the same time, there is the fact that institutions feel the need to appear open, to “reach out” as much as possible. But there is a tension there; a negotiation between the desire for openness and the recognition that universality is not possible. We work within this complexity, but I think the juxtaposition of freedoms or scales — between those forms of translation and mediation — sets up a good space for reflection and work.

KOOZMaite, you introduced this distinction earlier between the idea of building a community and building an audience. And Carlos, ArkDes just went through a huge kind of renovation — I was wondering how you thought about the difference between community and audience — and how that might have guided the presentation of works, programming and acquisitions.

CMCYes, we have been involved in a process of reorganisation of the museum in which we really tried to address both the idea of building a community and audience. I’m sure there are other words too, but we have to focus on understanding who might feel a connection to the museum. Sometimes that connection is because you have trust in an institution, as a place where you know you’ll find an interesting exhibition. It might be because you find opportunities to participate in different activities, or because visiting the museum is a hobby that you do during the weekend. There are many gradients between community and audience in there; we haven’t drawn rigid distinctions, but remained open to different forms of engagement.

We’ve approached this from a very infrastructural level; for example, rethinking the strategy for acquisitions. What are the things that have not been included in the collection before, and what should be collected to produce and reflect the museum’s communities. We have opened a line for contemporary acquisitions programmes, which didn't exist before. This requires curators to make studio visits to offices of architecture across Sweden. It is a process of meeting, talking and letting practices know more about ArkDes, who we are and that we are curious about what they are doing; that, in itself, is a form of construction – of networks, communities. There is a whole network of people who may not have been interested in the museum before, but by reaching out, we are pushing for that engagement. That's one level.

There is another level that has to do with studying the collection and its history — advancing research into acquisitions and the presentation of works of practitioners who have been silenced for many years. For example, we have a project that intends to show the work of women throughout the twentieth century in Sweden, including practitioners, but also historians, academics, writers, curators and other alternative forms of practicing architecture. This too involves building audiences that are interested and aligned with the practices we are presenting.

On a third level, we initiated a project called “Unboxing”, whereby one member of the curatorial team is out in the gallery, opening folders and archive boxes from the collection in front of the public for two hours, every single day. It really does build an amazing, almost magic moment of excitement, of shared curiosity and excitement with whoever is in the gallery.This too involves cultivating audiences, to talk directly, to exchange ideas and even adding a layer of oral history into the collection.

So we’re trying to build ways for visitors to come as close as possible to the practices and events that we present; I think this is something crucial for museums. When I was working at Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York — which is open to the street — that idea was so central. When you can really be with people in the room, things can happen that are very inspiring. Sometimes people are very critical and not so positive, but at least there is some debate, some real connection. I don't know if that's a “community” — whether they are “audience” or just “visitors” — but what matters is that there are people in the room, having a shared experience. At the end of the day, that's what a museum produces. The gallery becomes a democratic space where dissent is possible, where hopefully, ideas can be shared and presented in a respectful and diverse way, with others. As curators we use the tools that we have for talking, visiting, supporting, producing platforms, and putting things together in order to nurture that discussion, that interaction between human beings. That's the central question of our work, every single day.

KOOZWe've spoken a lot about language in terms of rendering the space of the museum more accessible and also more inclusive. How can language push the museum forward so that it remains relevant today — not only as a space for exhibiting, but also as a space of discussion?

MBL-PHaving worked in big institutions, but not considering myself a very institutional person, it really relies on identifying what those institutional protocols are. Not to naturalise them or take them for granted, but precisely to identify how each of those protocols sustain an institution. Maybe some of them are no longer serving their purpose, or perhaps the original purpose was not correct from today’s perspective, right? Maybe there are some protocols that, once identified, can actually be hacked. One example of this came up during the installation days of The Production of Otherness.

Despite all my criticality around the label — in a bid to preserve the possibility of imagination and critical thought through other vocabularies, like aesthetic, visual, sensorial experience — it is also true that labels are the device that signals in a way that an artwork in an exhibition space it actually is an artwork. Thus it has a value (symbolically by being part of a collection, economically etc) and deserves attention. So unpacking that role of the label gave me the key tool during the installation The Production of Otherness, involving a couple of works by two artists both based in Beirut. Neither they, nor some of their works could arrive because they were living through a nightmare, under the continued bombing of Zionist attacks during the autumn of 2024 (and still ongoing) during the development of the exhibition.

Before I explain the point that connects to labels and their absence, is fundamental for me to avoid any romanisation of the gesture and stress the order of priorities (and that a short conversation won't fully acknowledge) but how relevantless is the fact of being making an exhibition while lifes, the very possibility of being alive could be uprooted in a second. Nonetheless, with the helpless feeling from afar one thing I had agency to do and protect was to sustain the possibility of their participation beyond any agreed institutional deadline (and assume all the butterfly effect of that)… and just hold that possibility to the very last minute. In their absence, I had two choices. I could have removed the plinths, figuring no one would notice — or call out that absence. So I had the labels. The label says: this is important. This is worth your time and your attention, it says this has value. So I decided to keep those spaces — that, in some cases, included a pedestal while in others, only a white wall — and putting a label with the description of the artwork as if it was there. It signaled the space with its absence. I also thought it was fundamental as a matter of accountability explaining why the work is not present and that was an extra label. It was one of the hardest texts to write, as nothing felt enough. That is literally what allowed those works to be present in the exhibition, despite their absence. So what allowed that simple but important gesture, was appropriating that institutional language that decrees that something is an artwork, even if you’re not seeing anything. That could be a critical example of retaining an existing protocol, and fully understanding how to exercise it within the institutional logic.

Other instances might have to do with gender, which is more present in the Spanish language, for instance, than in English. It's always a challenge, and that challenge relies on the premise that protocols exist to ensure simple, hygienic solutions. Language is not hygienic. Language is fluid; it's mutant, it's not static. By now, there are plenty of possibilities to have non-binary gendered approaches to language in exhibitions, and in life. Why do you barely see any attempts of that in museums? It's because there is no one simple solution, no clear protocol, not one single option to create an unequivocal manual of style. Again, I think the way to go is to assimilate the messiness — things don’t have to be hyper consistent, because language and life are not just categorisable in that way, it is much more free than that. It's not that we don't have options.

Another protocol that has given me a lot of thought has to do with the style of language, the voice we use in exhibitions; the tone and all of the construct that creates the institutional voice, that is presumed to be “neutral”. I want to put a million air quotes around that word, because, of course, it's not neutral. The institution is no such thing: the institution is a multitude of people, and as people, it should have a multiplicity of voices. I once made an attempt to write the introductory text for an exhibition in first person. I wanted to address the visitors as a you, from an “I” that was not abstract or generic, but situated rather than the impersonalised third person. Because if we think in first person, a conversation between me and you, we have already humanised that. Of course, it was impossible. But to me, it was important — it was a matter of imbuing my voice, a personal voice with that superiority held by a museum text. The museum text assumes that it is more correct than what you are thinking as a visitor, right? That’s how power works: if you're reading a text in the third person, in a vocabulary and language that is institutionalised, you keep building into that hierarchical production of value in what is being said. Whereas if the text is in first person, you're bringing this value down to the level of a single human person. You might really disagree, but you have the ability to trace that point of view, to situate where that text is coming from. It opens a very different point of conversation and relationship between the omnipresence of the institution and the person experiencing the exhibition — sometimes the first person could be useful.

I was told, ‘this is not your voice; it is the institutional voice.’ It was a good crystallisation of what this meant — when we put something into the institution, it assumes a kind of forced neutrality, but it also sterilises realities. I think we should be able to keep working on the styles of language, even of formality, as language advances; you can see this in literary production over the last decades, in the breaking of canonical approaches. There are some amazing contemporary writers who are fundamental for me and inspiring — and it's not a coincidence that most of them are women or trans or gender non-conforming people — who experiment with language, with the voice, with punctuation styles and norms, with the length of a sentence or paragraph. How can we bring that within the exhibition and curatorial practices? We see examples that we can learn from, then the hammer comes down through that institutional voice. For me, that points towards a path: how can we keep diluting that institutional voice that digests everything that we discussed before?

CMCThat's so beautiful. I just finished the novel Greek Lessons by Han Kang, which is a reflection of what language and communication really is. Without any spoilers, the main character loses her voice; the story is about a relationship between a person who loses their voice and a person that loses their sight. It gets into the human need for communication, and how communication will always find a way, even through shared trauma.

What you were explaining made me think about how the reduction or elimination of certain capacities might even be helpful in questioning certain forms of communication. All in all, it’s about breaking or dismantling the understanding that there is one truth that the institution can provide — one of the daily challenges we have is to resist that idea that the national museum of architecture and design is a place where visitors will find the history of architecture. No, you're going to find a series of objects; those objects happen to be the result of many different biases and subjective processes over many years. Objects have been deposited here because of bias in power, gender, class, geography — all we can do is show the objects that we have, precisely in order to think about those biases, and who built them. To resist the idea of ‘truth’, as a canonical reference for standardisation, — I think that’s one of our main goals.

For example, one significant initiative we are working with involves rethinking how we categorise the collection by using geolocation to organise works based on where they are situated. This has made it possible to introduce new categories, such as ‘Sápmi,’ which helps identify and highlight projects located within the Indigenous Sámi region. It’s a meaningful shift that allows us to reframe and re-center works in ways that weren’t previously possible. These small steps challenge rigid institutional systems, taking the search engines of museum datasets as critical places for curatorial decisions. Language also operates here.

MBL-PAs you were talking, Carlos, I was thinking that many of these protocols — which preserve the logic if not the culture of an institution, enabling that logic to keep reproducing itself — rely on history, or the manufacture of History with a capital H. As with the production of Truth with a capital T, a singular entity, it relies on this layer of separation between people's narratives, and that other layer of superior knowledge or dominion, right? When I tried to write a text in first person, it was because part of the text was addressing the visitor as “you” — as me talking to you directly, which was a direct link between the person who has made decisions in a space and the person who is experiencing that space, right? It was creating a link between that which the institution has preserved as two separate layers, through the institutional voice. For me, that was key to understanding and reconsidering the need to preserve the institutional voice versus any human voice; that then opens the way you see and understand the rest of the institution’s decisions or at least to wonder about them. 

You were talking about truth, which we always understand as a noun. A conversation came to mind that I did with Eyal Weizman; the title was Truth is Not a Noun, to really examine truth not as a noun, as a finished thing but rather as a practice of production. When you open the door to that idea, everything that you have already assimilated can be questioned, even dismantled. What are those avenues of connectivity between the so-called institution — which is at the end a collection of people — and those who inhabit the institution either as visitors or as community or even as co-workers? It’s tricky, but the more I work on this — or struggle with it — the more firmly I believe that the radicalities are in the nuances. There are a lot of things that look like subtle nuances; these are the codes that hold onto these hyperbolic structures of power. Like the tiny fact that the idea of identity that we have naturalised is represented by a nation state. Even that adjective of national identity is such a short gesture, and so diluting that adjective shows that it is no longer serving the purpose that it was meant to serve. So let's search for the tools we have in language to try to provide a better definition to situate or describe cultural background, which is complex (and maybe changing) and we should resist any attempts of oversimplification.. This is why I try to believe in those small steps, as you were saying, Carlos. I believe there's a lot of radicality in the nuances.

KOOZIt was really a pleasure to take a step back and listen to the interrelations between your perspectives, from two very different points of view.

CMCWell, thank you so much, Maite. 

MBL-PThank you Carlos, for your amazing work. 

KOOZAnd thank you both so much for your time.

Bios

Carlos Mínguez Carrasco is an architect and curator based in Stockholm. He is Chief Curator at ArkDes – the Swedish National Centre for Architecture and Design - where he oversees the content production of the museum, ranging from exhibitions to public programs, publications, and acquisitions. He is editor of various publications and he has taught at Columbia University GSAPP and lectured in several universities and cultural centers in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and the US.

Maite Borjabad López Pastor is an independent curator, researcher and architect whose work revolves around diverse forms of critical spatial practices that span visual art, performance and architecture. Having worked for the past ten years as a curator at major cultural institutions such as the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the Art Institute of Chicago, both taking care of the collection as well as exhibitions; she describes her curatorial practice as an “institutional infiltration” that takes place at the intersection of these disciplines, as well as museum studies and institutional decolonial critique.

Federica Zambeletti is the founder and creative director of KoozArch. She is an architect, researcher and storyteller whose interests lie at the intersection of art, architecture and regenerative practices. Prior to dedicating her full attention to KoozArch in 2024, Federica collaborated with the architecture studio and non-profit agency for change UNA/UNLESS working on numerous cultural projects and the research of "Antarctic Resolution".