Report: Curatorial Intensive Montevideo 2026

By Fabiana Puentes, Luiza Testa, Andrés Gorzycki, and Paola Nava
On May 6, 2026

Montevideo, Uruguay

The Curatorial Intensive Montevideo took place in March 2026, in collaboration with ESTE ARTE and the Faculty of Arts of the Universidad de la República (UdelaR), and focused on emerging curatorial practices that strengthen cultural infrastructures, foster artistic creation, and bring communities together through shared experiences. In this entry, four Intensive participants reflect on their experiences and how the Curatorial Intensive has impacted their practices. This report was first published in Spanish on Artishock Revista.

Those of us who live in Montevideo often say it's a city best explored on foot, where time pauses and waits. Although the rhythm of daily life doesn't always allow for stopping, the Curatorial Intensive provided precisely the opportunity to inhabit that pause. The experience took place at the Faculty of Arts, a place I know as a professor, but which seemed different during that week, as if the space itself were transforming, and we with it. This transformation took shape in Ionit Behar's seminar, which proposed a return to the essential, to what each of us seeks: What interests us through our practice? A question that doesn't admit a simple answer, but which, in that pause, reminded me why I chose curating: because of its nature as a practice built with others.

The project I presented at the Intensive stems from this idea and aims to connect artists from Uruguay and Namibia, territories that, millions of years ago, were one and the same. It also seeks to challenge the narrative used to explore these relationships, a tool now appropriated by oil companies that speculate on the presence of hydrocarbons based on the geological continuity between both sides of the Atlantic.

However, challenging this narrative is not only a matter of content, but also of method. Along these lines, Keyna Eliason shared an idea that resonated with me: curatorial practice is work born of care and love, but also of self-care. To build with others, to engage with a community, it is necessary not to lose oneself along the way. It is not about absolute surrender, but about sustaining the practice without losing oneself in it. From this idea, I understood that my project needed to inhabit the pause. I know artists on this side of the Atlantic who work on these issues, but not on the other, and this encounter becomes necessary to continue. Living in pause doesn't mean stopping, but rather enables other ways of moving forward, guided by intuition, where detours aren't obstacles but part of the journey.

Along this path, there are places one returns to after days, months, or even years, like a kind of refuge that unfolds new questions over time. The Curatorial Intensive occupies that place in my practice: a space to return to, where sometimes it's not about discovering something new, but about rediscovering what we already knew through the voices of others.

Luiza Testa: Disenchant, then Re-Enchant

The weeks prior to my arrival in Montevideo for ICI’s Curatorial Intensive had been hectic; I was traveling a lot, working on an upcoming exhibition, and still couldn’t feel good about my practice. In the wake of the war with Iran, the ongoing devastation in Gaza, the upcoming elections in Brazil under the persistent threat of the far right, the dire situation in Cuba and Maduro’s capture by the USA, many of the troubling predictions for this century, from Hannah Arendt to Achille Mbembe, seem to have come to pass. In light of this, it became hard to make sense of why curating art exhibitions mattered. And although I don’t take a utilitarian approach to art, we still can’t escape the fact that curators are workers—and as such, we want to feel useful within the systems we inhabit.

In that context, meeting my fellow participants at the Intensive was like a breath of fresh air: it only took us a few hours together to realize that we could be vulnerable with each other. Soon enough, I began to open up about how dissatisfied I was with our role: in a world where the independent curator has recently been declared dead, did artists rely on us? What place did we have within institutions? Did we matter at all to the world at large? And above all: can art really do something for a world that seems doomed? This is how gloomy I was.

Fortunately, my peers were patient and generous with me. One of them told me to tear this idea apart and throw it in the garbage; another argued that curators were in fact needed because we produced meaning. One of the colleagues I became closest to asked me, in the sweetest way possible: “How can you even think that we are not needed, Luiza?”

(Photo: Bruna Costa)

While their listening and their words carried weight, the Intensive truly reoriented me in that moment of disillusionment by placing me among peers who were troubled by the same things I was. They genuinely asked me about the situation in my country while trying to cope with the chaos in their own communities; they were critical of the art world, yet still doing their work with dedication and attentiveness. It was in how we all became so emotional listening to Maya Juracán’s unsettling account of censorship and persecution; how we were struck by Keyna Eleison’s speech on self-care, and by Ana Laura López’s moving initiative at Casa de Mario; how we felt it so acutely while listening to our Uruguayan peers open up about the challenging art scene in their country.

The critical stance of my colleagues and mentors toward the art world and, at the same time, their persistence and care, reminded me that moving forward didn’t depend on certainty or optimism. There, I realized that meaning is neither stable nor guaranteed, and I returned to Mbembe and Arendt, to the idea that we can only respond to the present collectively. That’s precisely where our practice is key.

When I arrived in Montevideo, I didn’t know what awaited me, but I did know what I didn’t want to find: prescribed paths and ready-made answers. What I encountered was a space for working through a clearer sense of our place in the world. I like to think of us fellow participants as twelve insects who met, exchanged, and created something together—and who flew back to our respective territories to disperse it. I’ve already started to do so.

Andrés Gorzycki:

Throughout the ICI Curatorial Intensive, there were several of those conversations that offer a fresh perspective and end up reorganizing the structures of what you’ve been thinking. On a bus trip to Punta del Este to visit various art institutions, I spoke with participant Mateus Nunes about his work with André Taniki for an upcoming exhibition, which features a series of drawings the artist-shaman from the Yanomami community made in the 1970s. From there, we discussed how to produce an ethics of representation that not only avoids epistemic extractivism, but also opens up space for productions outside the matrix of the Western image. I found a shared horizon regarding the challenges of working with Indigenous cosmologies that helped me put into words a process I had been developing intuitively.

I work in ancestral Mbya Guaraní territory as the curator of the Museo de la Triple Frontera (MUTRIF)—a nomadic, dissident museum project without a fixed venue, situated on the border between Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay—where these issues are imperative as the pulse of the globalized world coexists with Guaraní communities and their ancestral practices. With the certainty that curatorial practice must be committed to the territory it inhabits, I recently chose to relocalize my practice to this border context (following my time at the Städelschule in Frankfurt and work in Germany), a choice that was reinforced during the ICI intensive.

Other conversations gave me new perspectives on the possibilities of curatorial work within an institutional framework. During her seminar, Keyna Eleison spoke to us about the power of art structures to dignify the intellect present in community practices through the example of a Carnival passista. Recognizing her specific knowledge and mastery to lead an entire group through dance, Keyna invited her to occupy a place of teaching as a professor. In this way, curating functioned as a framework for the passista to exercise an intellectual authority that always belonged to her but had never been recognized in those terms.

These conversations did not happen in isolation, but were woven together over the course of the days. In the daily friction with participants during walks, meals, and the spaces between activities, theory was digested to make our research more precise and to discuss what curatorial practice means in our current contexts. These exchanges say a lot about the type of learning the Intensive proposes, and it is where my practice found a vital echo. I met cultural actors in Uruguay like Agustina Rodriguez of MACMO, a Montevideo-based museum without a venue, and we found methodological harmony within our respective contexts. Sharing thoughts with participant Guad Creche helped me understand curating as an exercise in kinship with queer and Indigenous communities; their practice in northern Argentina became an essential reference for rethinking my own ways of working in the territory. Experiences with history like those shared by Marina Reyes Franco about La Ene—a critical museum that operated independently in Buenos Aires, questioning the opposition between the alternative and the institutional—made me aware of the living genealogy in which my curatorial practice is situated.

I heard from others who are using curating as a tool to build frameworks that support risky practices, committed to their context and giving visibility to what would otherwise have no place. Finding this constellation of projects, I understand my practice is part of an active network of curators working in different parts of the globe with shared questions, which is sustained and made visible precisely in spaces like the ICI Curatorial Intensive. This network, which began among strangers and transformed into a community of affects, is what allows ideas to materialize. We said our goodbyes with the certainty that we would meet again and, as a mark of that situated learning, with our feet wet from the Uruguayan sea.

Paola Nava:

“The present is the instant when the wheel of a speeding car barely touches the ground,” wrote Clarice Lispector in Agua Viva. I think of that phrase when I recall the days of the Curatorial Intensive in Montevideo because, looking back, I see that it was an experience where everything moved very quickly. And yet, that very speed allowed me to feel deeply connected to the most tangible aspects of my present.

The days of the Intensive unfolded amidst readings, presentations, conversations, walks through the city, and shared moments that transcended what the learning experience had been for me up to that point. During one of the first days, Ana Laura López took us on a visit to the Casa de Mario Bennabi cultural center, located in the Pueblo Victoria neighborhood of Montevideo. It's a space built with and for the residents, where workshops, meetings, and other community activities take place. It bears the name of the photographer Mario Bennabi, who lived there until his death in 2006 and documented the daily life of the neighborhood, its celebrations, festivals, sports, and collective activities. It struck me how this space promotes the idea that a cultural center is directly connected to its surroundings, the desires and possibilities of its inhabitants.

That day, we also walked along the Miguelete stream. Ana Laura told us how, together with neighbors, they spearheaded its cleaning and restoration, demonstrating a form of situated action in which collective practice directly impacts the transformation of the environment. It was the first of many acts that placed us before practices where the curatorial dimension unfolds in continuity with the territory, anchored in processes sustained over time and in forms of organization that enhance collective action and a sense of belonging. Throughout the week, the professors built a framework of references from their own practices. In their interventions emerged concrete ways of making decisions, dealing with institutional limits, sustaining processes in specific contexts, and taking positions regarding what it means to work with others. Each seminar showed us the diversity of ways that exist to practice curating, marked by tensions, adjustments, and negotiations.

A large part of this experience was shaped through my relationship with my classmates. Listening to their processes, their doubts, their moments of clarity, and their ways of naming what they do gradually created a space of trust that was reaffirmed day after day. This had a direct effect on my work; it allowed me to recognize the urgency of transforming it, opening it up to the collective, and incorporating community-building as a central axis. I felt the joy of finding happiness each time I imagined how I might reconstruct my ideas from this perspective. As a Venezuelan living in Chile for over eight years, I hadn't realized until now how much I needed to think about my projects from this place.

Three weeks have passed since we returned from the Intensive, and I keep revisiting moments like Ionit Behar’s seminar, where she asked us to answer questions like: What interests us in curating? What runs through it? What forms of collaboration make it possible? These questions remain open and unanswered for me, and it is precisely in that indeterminacy that I find their strength. Maya Juracán's idea of embodying the practice also resonates: understanding it as something built in relation to others, to contexts, and to that which affects us. I hear it with Keyna Eleison's emphasis: sustaining this practice also means learning to listen to ourselves, learning to care for ourselves.

All of this lives within me, along with the memory of the day we ended up on the beach, embracing one another before an open horizon between the Atlantic Ocean and the Uruguayan land. Now that I'm back, I have the feeling that the Intensive isn't over yet; it remains awake in the urgency of care and love in everything I do. Awake, like the instant Lispector describes, when something touches the ground and, for a moment, becomes completely present and necessary.

Contributors

Andrés Gorzycki

Andrés Gorzycki is a curator and visual artist based in Posadas, Argentina. Their practice explores the intersections between contemporary art and public space, investigating how artworks, contexts, and communities shape one another through acts of presence, displacement, and encounter.

Paola Nava

Paola Nava (Maracaibo, 1994) is a Venezuelan curator, researcher, and writer based in Santiago, Chile.

Fabiana Puentes

Fabiana Puentes (Montevideo, Uruguay, 1986) is an independent curator, researcher, and professor specializing in contemporary art and critical perspectives.

Luiza Testa

Luiza Testa is an independent curator who works on projects that articulate social debates in the fields of feminism, sexuality, ecology, and digital art.

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