After several weeks of living and visiting the various centers of the
Museums Foundation of the City
of Quito (FMC), during which we were able to learn firsthand about the work of the mediators of the
Community Mediation Department
, on July 17 we met with the entire team, composed of Andrés Basantes, Alejandro Cevallos, Valeria Galarza,
Let us remember that Community Mediation is a department that works transversally in the five museums that make up the Foundation, in which it develops three main lines of action: participatory architecture and design, education and research and the urban agriculture program ¡A la huerta! Regarding the visit of Alejandro Cevallos and Valeria Galarza to Tabakalera in Donostia, the friends of Transductores published a few months ago this article about the project of the Community Mediation Department that could well serve as an introduction to this chronicle.
Although comparisons are always hateful, we find it necessary to highlight—and it is something that we never tire of repeating in Quito—that in the Spanish state there are very few community mediation projects in museums with the institutional solidity, breadth of vision, and resources—material and human—that the Community Mediation Department of the FMC has. In fact, perhaps the list can be reduced to the project of
Community Mediation-Hezkuntza of Tabakalera
. We also find it important to highlight the professional value of the team of mediators, not only for their knowledge—which too—but for their practice based on a complex, critical, and emancipatory conception of culture and its links with the social. This consideration leads us to underline what Javier Rodrigo and others so often emphasize: and that is that the Anglo-Saxon institutional, academic, and economic predominance, added to a Eurocentric view that is difficult to get rid of, makes invisible practices and discourses that occur in the “peripheries” and that would be very useful to transform and renew our own cultural sphere and its institutions. However, not everything is perfect, far from it: as the members of the team themselves point out, the experience of Community Mediation of the FMC is still an exceptional project in the Ecuadorian context and although apparently the institutions that form the FMC have more resources to invest in community and education than others, and despite the fact that the colleagues in Quito are less precarious in terms of work than in Spain, the inequitable difference between the resources allocated to curatorship versus those allocated to education-community remains. These resources are still subject to the will of the museum coordinator on duty and to the ability to convince and seduce that the Community Mediation Department is capable of deploying at all times, so there is still no policy or stable institution that supports its work.
We can understand the work of the Community Mediation Department as a series of practices of creation, collective production of knowledge, and organization closely linked to the territory and the communities that inhabit it. The cultural institution is inscribed there as one more node in the network of relationships that articulate these practices, not from an illusory horizontality, but in a way that problematizes the power relations that are established in the territory between the different social agents and their knowledge. An example of this could well be the participation of Community Mediation in the context of the San Roque Market and its collaboration with the Intercultural School linked to the market itself.
As we said elsewhere, the San Roque market is a space crossed by great political, cultural, and economic tensions and frictions between various interest groups (if you are curious to know more about the subject you can see the brief documentary recently published by the Community Mediation team itself). In a context like this we can ask ourselves: How do cultural practices work there? How do they relate to the practices, forms of organization, representations, and interests, sometimes opposed, of diverse groups?
But going to the concrete, what is the work of Community Mediation in this context? We could say that it consists of building knowledge around the San Roque market and its context—which goes from the neighborhood to the global scale—in collaboration with the market’s own agents and taking into account and incorporating their knowledge. An example of this could be the research project and participatory workshops developed in 2013, the documentary itself that we linked above, or the work with the Intercultural School of the market for the creation of an agrofestive calendar based on ancestral Andean knowledge and linked to the cultivation of the garden.
From a political perspective, the work of the Community Mediation Department cannot be considered neutral since, in one way or another, it contributes to a process of collective construction of conceptual and sensitive tools and devices (stories, narratives, cartographies, representations, discourses, modes of relationship, practices and rituals…) that, ultimately, entails a taking of power by those groups and communities with which it collaborates.
Faced with this notion of collectively building culture, we find the purpose, widely extended in the institutional sphere, of bringing culture to contexts such as that of the San Roque Market—to impoverished neighborhoods, subaltern groups, people at risk of social exclusion, etc.—; we can understand that this idea is deeply disabling insofar as it denies the knowledge and the very culture of those who inhabit those territories and at the same time can be used as a pacifying strategy in scenarios of social conflict. The Community Mediation Department establishes among its objectives «To put in dialogue, in a critical way, the contents, agendas and programs of the museums with specific territories and social contexts»; but not only that, since at the same time it proposes «To implement procedures and channels of participation and social impact on the models and spaces of management of the museums». If the dialogue between cultural institutions and social contexts is to be transformative, it must be so in both directions, otherwise we would fall back into a kind of assistance that would keep the functioning of the cultural institutions themselves intact and without blemish—something that, it goes without saying, is implicit in those programs organized on the idea of bringing culture to—.
At this point we find one of the knots of the social, institutional and political framework in which the Community Mediation Department is located because, while it is inscribed in the structures and functioning of the museum institution, it works in favor of its radical transformation. The work of the department and its workers must respond, in one sense or another, to the demands of the institution on the one hand and to those of the groups and communities with which it collaborates, on the other. It is obvious that this position is not at all comfortable, since those who occupy it are often subjected to the frictions, pressure forces and tensions exerted by the different agents that, directly or indirectly, operate in this field. It is also a very precarious and vulnerable position, since the power of the department—and of this type of initiatives, in general—is usually very limited within the institutional architecture. All this conditions, of course, the very taking of positions of the community mediation team in specific cases and situations of work: how far is one willing to push the limits of the institution? What consequences is one willing to assume when the limits of the institution are strained or broken? Are strategies viable that allow to expand or cross those limits in a way that goes unnoticed by the institution itself? What margin of dialogue and negotiation exists between the mediators and the institution?
At some point during the conversation, one of the members of the team warned that, in reality, the Cultural Mediation project enjoyed a high degree of autonomy with respect to the functioning of the FMC and that, in the eyes of other people, it functioned in a certain way as «an institution within the institution». This almost accidental image seems to us, on the one hand, quite suggestive: can we generate instituting practices within the hegemonic cultural institutions themselves and that at the same time retain a sufficient degree of autonomy? To what extent can these practices transform the institution itself? Can we be the eighth passenger? (Nah! this last question is not serious). However, on the other hand, it is somewhat sad as the mediation team itself pointed out to us, since we can understand that large cultural institutions grant spaces and allow the existence of departments critical that work with the communities and with critical education projects, etc. and allow them to exist because they thus provide themselves with a cool-radicalmakeup, while their more conservative programs and teams advance in another direction without permeating. Talking about an institution within another institution would be equivalent to recognizing the failure in the project of transforming the cultural institution and the impotence in the face of the flexibility and double discourse that some cultural institutions have learned in order to survive.
Precisely in relation to this last point, the Community Mediation Department has been going through a moment of ‘existential crisis’, in which only the recognition of alliances with other departments of the museums, the solidarity and sympathy of their teams, has returned the energy that allows it to imagine a greater opening of the fissures within the institution, or if nothing else, to leave traces that make a retreat difficult. The challenge is therefore, to institute practices in the face of the political wills of the moment.
Although we do not work within an institution—forming part of it, as is the case of the Community Mediation Department of the FMC—we have worked in and with institutions in various projects. Saving the distances, many of the circumstances, difficulties and satisfactions that the colleagues of Quito described were in some way “familiar” to us. The work session continued with joy, striving to avoid sterile complaint and lament, pointing out the difficulties and opportunities, gaps and possible avenues of action.
We took away from Quito a lot of learning and a very rewarding personal experience. We take advantage of this text to publicly thank the Community Mediation team for their enormous generosity. We hope to be able to keep up to date with their tasks and that, precisely the institutions, do not frustrate a project that for many is already a reference.