A CONVERSATION AROUND POLITICS, AFFECTION AND LISTENING WITH SOL HENARO

In conversation with Arte al Día, she proposes thinking the museum as a space of negotiation, affect, and dispute. One where desire, the collective, and the political run through institutional practice.

How have you been navigating your role at the Museo del Chopo? What excites or challenges you?

I embraced it as a very stimulating challenge. I see myself as a researcher and a curator, and for a long time I was focused on writing, exhibitions, and work related to archives and documentation centers. It felt like a good moment to take on this responsibility and to think the management and direction of a museum in a curatorial way.

I was interested in moving away from the figure of the director understood in a vertical way, with a kind of masculine energy that often defines it, or from those who lead with a certain asepsis and division of labor that makes it difficult to be fully involved in a museum’s needs and possibilities. I wanted instead to open up the pores of the institution and allow other kinds of care-and affection-based policies to permeate it.

How do you think the relationship between the museum and its audiences or communities?

I prefer to speak of communities, plurally. There isn’t just one community, there are many and this museum has shown that over its fifty years of existence. For example, communities connected to sex-gender freedoms found a space here in the early 1980s. There has also been a strong relationship with counterculture and with artistic practices such as performance or live arts.

Our work involves trying to perceive or read, always with caution, different desires. On one hand, those of the museum’s historical communities; on the other, the construction of new communities that have not had a sustained or clear presence. For instance, we are developing programs to bring in children and older adults, but also working with artists and professionals interested in Latin American narratives and practices, with a certain emphasis on Central America.

In that sense, we are trying to expand what a museum can be. I’ve said it before: this is a social center transvested as a museum. What drives me is offering a plurality of content from a critical horizon, resisting the logics of a dominant market and taking risks on content or practices that have not yet received sufficient support or visibility.

How do you understand the role of the museum within the broader art ecosystem?

The art ecosystem is deeply heterogeneous. All agents, whether individual or collective, public or private, take part in it and affect it. There is no absolute hierarchy.

I have respect for all those forms of practice, even if I may feel closer to certain ways of working or understanding the world. What matters is how each practice comprehend its political dimension and what kind of awareness or commitment it exercises from its position. The museum has a relevant role, but it depends on how each administration understands its moment. Institutions are not stable; they go through stronger or weaker periods depending on who leads them and what kinds of tools, resources, or sensibilities define that leadership.

I’m interested in thinking both the museum and management politically. There is, of course, an administration of needs, but also a way of intellectually engaging with the complexity of the institution.

In this case, it’s a public role within a university, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. That implies a concrete responsibility, a position from which to put my tools, skills, and experience at the service of improving an institution. I’m interested in the idea of service, facilitating, guaranteeing, and defending the right to culture.

What does it mean, for you, to work “in service” within an institution?

Being in service does not mean cancelling one’s own desire or responding uncritically to that of others. It means working from a conscious listening, where there is an ongoing negotiation between what one considers meaningful and what emerges from dialogue with others.

It also means understanding that one arrives with a trajectory, with experiences and a vision that can put forward ideas and desires, always in relation to that listening.

What is one of the main challenges in your role?

One of the biggest challenges is how to pollinate. I mean by that how to activate desire in others and move through the inertia or frustration that often runs through colleagues and teams.

This takes place within a context marked by structural contradictions: labor precarity, lack of fair conditions, instability. Even in positions like mine, there are no long-term guarantees. That’s important to say, because there is a fantasy of “having made it” that doesn’t match the reality of the art field.

In that context, I try to sustain good practices, open spaces for listening, and create fairer working conditions. But resistance has a history, it doesn’t disappear easily. Wanting to change things is not enough; that change has to be sustained, insisted upon, worked through constantly, and sometimes it also means resisting frustration when you hit a wall and changes you consider necessary don’t materialize.

Thinking about your participation in the FORO at Pinta Lima, what interests you about interregional dialogues?

Spaces for dialogue are very important to me. They are an opportunity for learning and exchange with colleagues working in different contexts, a way of thinking about what strategies we can imagine together.

This has been part of my trajectory for years, through collective networks that have allowed me to exchange tools, experiences, and ideas. I’ve been part of the Red Conceptualismos del Sur since 2010, and that space has been very important in my formation.

It’s a kind of shared pot that everyone can draw from and also contribute to. I carry many of those ways of working into the spaces where I operate. It has also made me very accustomed to engaging with colleagues from across Latin America, which has enriched my perspective not only historically, but also in terms of practice.

I’m interested in thinking in terms of affinities rather than borders. Those affinities allow us to continue building connections and to blur geopolitical limits, generating forms of collaboration that develop over time.

Many times, these encounters don’t produce immediate results, but they open up relationships that later turn into projects, alliances, or collaborations. And there’s also something that happens in the embodied experience in shared spaces, in conversations. Those moments also produce knowledge.