Q&A with Daniel Arturo Almeida, 2023-2024 Guest Curator

TLP: We congratulate you on your selection as the winner of our curatorial open call for 2023-2024. Can you share a bit about your most recent curatorial involvements?

Thank you so much for this opportunity. I am a transdisciplinary cultural maker working from various vantage points, assuming roles as an artist, educator, and curator. My approach to curation is collaborative in nature, often centered around mapping knowledges, interchanging resources, and delving into tensions within opposing views or finding overlaps in shared experiences. Over the past couple of years, I have been advocating plural approaches to making that resist singular narratives. This aspect of curation resonates with me, as it allows me to amplify my research along with folx to craft multilayered conversations that extend beyond my knowledge and scope.

Since 2021, I have been a NEW INC member in the Future Memory track, centered around shaking up dominant historical narratives and redefining the power communities hold. In 2022, I joined artist Jennifer Wen Ma and oral historian and artist Nyssa Chow to create an ongoing series of co-creative oral history community retreats where we explore shared knowledge. Most recently, I have been teaching and mentoring young artists at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami, where I curated two annual student shows.

During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, I co-founded and launched Please Don't Come to this Show, a transient curatorial platform sponsored by the School of Visual Arts. We pushed the limits of a web domain to host several shows, screenings, fundraisers, and talks with artists when exhibiting opportunities and community gatherings were not possible in the physical space.

TLP: Tell us about your forthcoming exhibition with The Latinx Project in spring 2024. What do you want people to take away from it?

The exhibition I am curating addresses cultural extraction, Eurocentric archaeology, and anthropology. It delves into the legitimization, institutionalization, and instrumentalization of colonial frameworks that perpetuate the subjugation of Latinx, Caribbean, and diasporic modes of existence. The artists featured in the exhibition employ decolonial thought, critical research, radical spirituality, and monument-making to redefine dominant knowledge structures by decoding notions of ‘universality’ while amending and expanding Latinx and Caribbean histories.

‘Facts’ often refer to biased ideas and concepts validated through museum labels, humanities, science, statistics, historical records, etc. Yet, what is the foundation of these facts? What is their origin? Who do they account for? Under what conditions and for what purpose? 

Coloniality is an ingrained mindset, influencing societal perceptions, aspirations, and actions. The works showcased in this exhibition break away from monolithic franchises of knowledge that arbitrarily dictate value and legibility. The show aims to provide active tools for unlearning that challenge erasure.

TLP: How does this project relate to your overall practice as an independent curator, artist, and museum advocate?

Cultural production has allowed me to process and peel away layers of social construction. I advocate for art’s pedagogical potential to bring awareness and ignite transformative dialogues. In my work as an artist and curator, I study the dynamics of patriotism, political posturing, loss, and symbols of power in the «Americas».

Historical art museums regularly display and scrutinize cultural heritage through survey exhibitions of their collections. The origins of these collections often stem from invasion, looting, forceful extraction and questionable transactions… Inside such institutions, material culture is enshrined behind vitrines, staging compressed chapters of civilization ascribing hierarchies of 'sophistication' and ‘development.’ These artifacts are codices to histories, wisdom and traditions severed by colonialism, and delinked from their place of origin. 

This exhibition is an opportunity to think critically and beyond these conditions along with remarkable artists and the supportive team at the Latinx Project, who has been a driving force stewarding such conversations.

Photo Credit: Andres Ibarra