The César Manrique Foundation (FCM) will host next Thursday, October 10, at 8:00 p.m., the conference entitled Habitable futures, curatorial stories and socio-ecological transitions, given by the art historian Blanca de la Torre. The event will take place in the José Saramago room (La Plazuela, Arrecife) and will be broadcast live through the FCM website and YouTube channel.
During her conference, de la Torre will reflect on how, in her opinion, collapsism and dystopia are playing a paralyzing role. Faced with climate pessimism, she proposes that curating and artistic practices stimulate collective action, build alternatives and promote environmental empowerment.
Through her experience as chief curator of the XV Cuenca Biennial (Ecuador) or her current role as chief curator (together with Kati Kivinen) of the Helsinki Biennial 2025 (Finland), Blanca de la Torre will go through a selection of case studies of her own curatorial praxis, to review models such as the Biennials. Following this same line, she will present other examples of experimentation of more sustainable curatorial forms in different Contemporary Art museums and will present some of her methodologies, including a series of sustainability parameters and decalogues created ad hoc to implement other models when developing projects.
This conference is part of the reflection space Divergent Views. A forum in which critics, historians and art professors have participated to review the assessments and canonical concepts established in contemporary culture on historical stages, trends, artistic movements, especially outstanding personalities or the connections between the different arts.
Blanca de la Torre holds a PhD in Fine Arts, art historian, researcher, exhibition curator and project director, whose work is located at the intersection between visual arts, political ecology and sustainable creative practices. She is currently Chief Curator of the Helsinki Biennial (Finland) and artistic director of ISLA.
She was Chief Curator of the 15th International Biennial of Cuenca, Ecuador, and co-artistic director of the Overview Effect Project at the MoCAB Museum in Belgrade and With feet on the G(g)round at the CAAM, Atlantic Center of Modern Art, where she is also in charge of the Sustainable Classroom. She has curated exhibitions developed for the Network of Cultural Centers of the AECID in its different Latin American venues. In all these projects mentioned, she developed sustainability parameters to reduce the ecological footprint. From 2009 to 2014, she was curator, conservator and responsible for exhibitions and projects at ARTIUM, Basque Museum-Center of Contemporary Art (Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain).
She has curated exhibitions in international museums and art centers, among which are: MoCAB, Museum of Contemporary Art of Belgrade, Serbia; Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg, Austria; EFA, Elisabeth Foundation Project Space, New York; Museo Carrillo Gil of Mexico City; CentroCentro, Madrid; MUSAC, León or 516 Contemporary Arts Museum of Albuquerque, USA, among others.
She has published more than a hundred specialized texts in books, catalogs and magazines and regularly participates in international conferences and symposia on culture and sustainability.
