‘I Think Friction Is Important’: Maite Borjabad on Challenging Art Institutions’ Status Quo

Terence Trouillot: I know that before becoming a curator you started out as an architect. Can you speak a little bit about that and how architecture informs your curatorial practice?

Maite Borjabad López-Pastor: Yes, I’m a fully trained, licensed architect back in Spain, where I grew up. I studied at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and while studying there two important things happened. One, I started architecture school at the height of the construction boom, right before the financial crisis of 2008. For me what I was being taught at school didn’t resonate with what was happening in real life. Like, I was never going to be building these kinds of massive edifices. There was this dissonance between what I was being taught at school and what was happening in the built environment. It made me question the production of space beyond traditional understandings of architecture, such as the engagement with ecology and communities, and all the social and cultural implications that architecture forgets to consider.

The second thing was that I went to a public university and when I was halfway through my program, public universities in Spain were under attack with historic cutbacks in government funding. At that moment the curriculum for architecture was also being redefined on a national level through extremely problematic propositions defending neoliberal understandings of the field. It was these changes that drew me to student activism. I was engaged first at a local level in my architecture school, and then I ended up representing architecture students across the country, helping establish student organizations in many schools.

TT: So, you came to curating through student organizing?

MB: I started curating these national symposia in different cities, bringing in student representatives from different architecture schools. We’d use these gatherings not only to organize resilient strategies against the cutbacks but also to spur discussions about different pedagogies: how we talked about the production of a space, what we were being taught, etc. We brought all these people over from the arts and social sciences. Unconsciously, this was my start in curating, although I never used that word then.       

TT: This idea of activism as a way of thinking about curation is interesting. Of course, architecture and the built environment involve community and invoke a kind of social practice as well. Do you conceive of your curatorial practice as a social practice? 

MB: Absolutely. To be conscious of the context that I am in and the agency that I have within certain institutions has always been something at the forefront of my practice. It’s funny because, looking backwards, I’ve engaged with a lot of institutions, but my practice is not at all institutional. It’s a bit more like a practice of institutional infiltration – working within to push boundaries, to create friction. I think friction is important. I don’t see it as something negative. There is a level of self-consciousness from institutions that they need to address issues of equity, diversity and inclusion. And that requires disrupting things, right? But at the same time there is so much fear or hesitation from institutions to do that. There’s no comfortable path to decolonizing our minds and institutions. We need to embrace discomfort in order to engage and make change.

TT: So, you worked for five years as Architecture and Design Curator at the Art Institute of Chicago. And before that, you were at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Could you talk about those experiences?

MB: When I was finishing my masters at Columbia University [in Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture], I started working at the Met in the Modern and Contemporary Art department processing the very first architecture acquisitions for the collection. That experience forced me to conceptualize what it means to think about constructing collections; how to face historical absences and the disciplinary boundaries integrated within institutions. I then joined The Art Institute of Chicago in 2017, to co-curate the institution’s first permanent Architecture and Design collection galleries and since then I took care of evolving the contemporary collection. One of my approaches early on in Chicago was to challenge the fixed disciplinary definitions that constitute the structures of museums. My curatorial practice crossed photography, performance, visual art – all within this loose definition of architecture. Those are the moments where I’ve managed to achieve friction. Because you are stepping out of the box, you’re not being contained within a singular disciplinary definition. We need an interdisciplinary approach to deconstruct the normative narratives that the built environment constantly performs.

TT: Can you give some examples of the acquisitions you made at The Art Institute of Chicago?

MB: When I joined, Latin American architecture was mostly non-existent [in the museum’s collection], but at the same time, Latin America is a massive region. How do you approach that without falling into generalities? So, I always return to this international scope in a way that has a hyper-local resonance. For instance, the acquisition of 73 works by Mexican architect Frida Escobedo, that present the design process behind the restoration of [muralist] David Alfaro Siqueiros’s studio La Tallera in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Including this project in the collection was not only a tribute to a renowned contemporary architect but also a way of bringing one of the most important artists of Mexican muralism to Chicago, which is home to the one of the largest Mexican diasporas in the US.

Another acquisition was from Clarissa Tossin, a Brazilian artist who, through an installation with a model made of cement bags and a video performance [Monument to Sacolândia, 2010], centres the testimony of the forgotten workers who risked their lives in the construction of Brasilia, Oscar Niemeyer’s 1960 iconic modernist city planned as the capital of Brazil. There is also Emmanuel Pratt’s Landscapes of [Re]construction [2019–21]. In it, he uses traditional mapping tools from urban planning to reconstruct through archival material silenced narratives of Black spaces and the history of Black segregation in the US.

TT: How do you see the role of exhibition-making in challenging the status quo of art institutions?

MB: Contrary to how collection acquisitions operate on more invisible layers of curatorial strategies – and thus are less expedient at addressing pressing issues in the art world – exhibition-making can crystalize those important conversations much faster. For me, engaging artists in exhibition-making means holding space for them to question the very foundations of the institution and the narratives sustained by it, in order to question and transform the institution from within.

A good example of this is the last exhibition I curated at the Art Institute of Chicago: Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s ‘If only this mountain between us could be ground to dust’ [2021–22]. Abbas and Abou-Rahme have a powerful and long invested practice across sound, video, installation and web-based formats that challenges the colonial narratives that are imperative to sustaining the occupation of Palestine. At the very entrance of the space was the piece Once an artist, now just a tool [2021], specially commissioned for the exhibition. The artists gathered fragments of texts from a massive archive of tweets – collected throughout a decade – responding to different Arab revolutions. Sampling and repositioning these textual snippets, the artists forced the institution into direct conversation about the colonial violence of museum practices. In a way, for the duration of the show, that gallery became a portal into another world, one of resilience and rebellion.

^{Main image: ‘If only this mountain between us could be ground to dust’, 2021–22, installation shot. Courtesy: © the Art Institute of Chicago}