Cuenca should converse with its neighboring countries, Colombia and Peru, as exchanges between us seldom occur. To do this, we had to talk to our other love: the Fundación Bienal de Cuenca, to request that part of the budget be spent on travel, both domestically and internationally, to Lima and Bogotá, something never done before. Now, during the research and selection process, with or without travel, curators must be open to everything that surrounds them, porous if you will, and take seriously the stimuli coming from outside, thus allowing the ‘necessary love’ that one has with art to be contaminated by ‘contingent loves’, lending oneself to surprise. Without loves that madden, the exhibition becomes a stagnant figure that could fall into the repetition of strategies that block the transformative potential of what we want to translate. For example, while exploring for the 12th Bienal de Cuenca, we successively ran into artists that worked around the co-production of works with non-humans. We were captivated, passionate, which ultimately resulted in two new productions for the biennial and in one of the locations dedicated to these questionings. This is how such tactics show that curatorial practice requires personal relationships with artists, both local and international, not to go out on a whim but for a ‘necessary love’ that contributes to the exhibition. The exhibition, in turn, must ally itself to love as producer of experience and thought. Whilst it is the curator who generates the exhibition, the exhibition itself is an autonomous being, with its own agency. The ‘necessary love’ is the covenant established in the encounter between an engaged public and the artworks and their relations. In a context where art institutions are scarce, as is that of Ecuador, pedagogical strategies by curators do not necessarily translate to being instructive. Rather, to knowing what intensity of guidance should be produced so that the works and their relations occur within the narrative framework that is established and for the public to generate interpretations from tools, knowledge or experiences. Just as the transformative potential of the context in an exhibition should not be underestimated, there will be works of art whose aspects are amplified and others are reduced depending on the context in which they are displayed. At the 12th Bienal de Cuenca, as in many other biennials, some negotiations were more difficult than others. One example was negotiating to guarantee attendance on weekends. We were surprised when discovering that the premises of the exhibition of the 12th Bienal de Cuenca were only open to the public Monday through Friday during normal business hours, as were all gov-
Manuela Moscoso
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