Workshop on the Care and Preservation of Time-Based Media Art in Latin America (TBMA in Latam)

Spanish version | Portuguese version

Are you in charge of modern and contemporary collections in your museum or institution in Latin America? Do these collections contain items such as digital art, video art, and electronic art? If so, please join our upcoming workshop! The Conservation Center at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University has organized a workshop regarding the care of time-based media art to help address the needs of colleagues in Latin America. The workshop will have three sessions prioritizing Spanish and Portuguese. Our first session will have lectures from people currently in the Conservation Center’s network. The second session will have speakers from Latin America.

This workshop is informed by a survey that was shared in spring 2024 to identify current best practices and open questions about these types of artworks and how they are cared for in Latin America. (People can continue to submit responses to the survey.) Research and education regarding this emerging field develops gradually and locally. The relevant literature may be difficult to reach and language barriers can inhibit the exchange of information. Promoting exchange is essential and an interdisciplinary and international network is needed.

The Conservation Center is committed to establishing outreach efforts with colleagues in Latin America. One of our goals is to build, enlarge, and engage with the community of “time-based media” professionals and to create a forum that facilitates extensive discourse within our highly collaborative field. “Time-based media” (TBM) artworks have a durational element that unfolds to the viewer over time and may include film, slide, video, digital art, electronic art, performance art, computer-based art, software-based art, and internet-art, to name a few.

Questions can be submitted to tbmconservation.nyu@gmail.com.

Please feel free to share this information with other TBM art colleagues in Latin America.

SESSION 1

Our first session will focus on case studies of established time-based media art preservation practices from a variety of perspectives. This first session draws from the Conservation Center’s current networks. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer will begin the session and discuss caring for time-based media art from an artist’s perspective. Ursula Dávila-Villa will discuss legacy planning. Caroline Gil Rodríguez will discuss caring for these kinds of artworks in museums and arts nonprofits. Christine Frohnert will discuss the perspective of private practice. The first two hours will involve lectures and a short discussion with the artist. In the last hour there will be a live discussion with the speakers. This session will have lectures in Spanish and English with live interpretation to English and Portuguese.

See the speaker biographies below.

Our first workshop session was on Zoom for three hours on October 28th, 2024

09:00 - 12:00 (Ciudad de México, UTC-6)

10:00 - 13:00 (Bogotá, UTC-5)

11:00 - 14:00 (New York, UTC-4)

12:00 - 15:00 (São Paulo, UTC-3)

It is free and open to the public. Please RSVP below to receive the Zoom link. We hope to see you there!

SESSION 2

Our second session will focus on time-based media art conservation practices at various stages and contexts in Latin America. We will also discuss advocating for time-based media artworks in collections, and establishing conservation protocols based on developing media workstations. The session will begin with four case studies. Julio Cabrio will discuss his independent work with Uruguayan media artists. Mariela Cantú and Ana Raviña will share their work at ARCA Video Argentino, a non-profit archive of experimental Argentinian video art. This will be followed by Erick Santos who will present his work at Museu Afro Brasil and Pinacoteca do Ceará, both museums in Brazil. Ángela Sánchez Barajas and Mayra Natalia Rubiano Cajamarca will share the final case study on the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá (MAMBO) in Colombia. The case studies will be followed by a discussion and Q and A session which will be moderated by Caroline Gil Rodríguez and Humberto Farias. All speakers and moderators will be speaking Spanish and Portuguese and there will be live translation to Spanish, Portugues, and English.

See the speaker and moderator biographies below.

Our second workshop session will be on Zoom for three hours on April 7th, 2025:

09:00 - 12:00 (Ciudad de México, UTC-6)

10:00 - 13:00 (Bogotá, UTC-5)

11:00 - 14:00 (New York, UTC-4)

12:00 - 15:00 (São Paulo, UTC-3)

It is free and open to the public. Please RSVP below to receive the Zoom link. We hope to see you there!

RSVP

SESSION 3

More details will be announced.

ABOUT THE CONSERVATION CENTER

The Institute of Fine Arts (IFA) at New York University (NYU) is an international leader in research and graduate teaching, and committed to global engagement and advancing the fields of art history, archaeology, and the theory and practice of conservation. Founded in 1960 as part of the IFA, the Conservation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU is the oldest degree-granting graduate program in art conservation in the United States. The Conservation Center offers a four-year, dual MA/MS graduate degree combining training in art conservation with historical, archaeological, curatorial, and scientific studies. The new specialty in Time-based Media Art Conservation was launched in January 2018. The series It’s About Time! Workshops in Time-based Media (TBM) Art Conservation is part of a project on Time-based Media Art Conservation Education and Training funded by the Mellon Foundation.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We are grateful to the Mellon Foundation for funding this workshop and to our speakers for helping organize the event and sharing their expertise. We thank Shu-Wen Lin for her advice on organizing a multilingual event for time-based media art colleagues. We also thank Hannelore Roemich, Elizabeth Torres, Patricia Falcão, and Marcelo Diego who helped with proofreading translations. We are also grateful to all who have helped us distribute the survey and information about the workshop. We used DeepL and Google Translate to help with initial translations of text from English, which were then proofread by the above four mentioned people and by the speakers and organizers of the event. The company who provided live interpretation services for our events was Translate by Humans. Thanks also to Jason Varone who helped us with the website and Myong Jin who helped with grant administration, as well as NYU staff and faculty for their support.

SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES

Julio Cabrio is a researcher, specialist in audiovisual preservation and teacher. He is a PhD student in Communication (Universidad Católica del Uruguay- UCU, Doctoral Fellow by the National Agency for Research and Innovation), Master in Art and Visual Culture (Universidad de la República - UdelaR) and Bachelor of Arts in Photography (Universidad de la República - UdelaR).

Starting in 2023, he is in charge of the Preservation Area of the Centro de Fotografía de Montevideo. Between 2012 - 2024 he worked as Audiovisual Preservation Specialist at the General Archive of the University (UdelaR), he has consulted for: the Instituto del Cine y el Audiovisual in Uruguay (2013), Archivo Nacional de la Imagen y la Palabra (2013), the Cinemateca Uruguaya (2014) and the collection of artistic work of the Banco Central del Uruguay (2018). Since 2014 he has been co-organizer of the Audiovisual Preservation Exchange program (MIAP-NYU). He has held internships in Digital Preservation at the Media Department of Human Rights Watch (NYC), at the Brooklyn Museum's film archive and the Media Preservation Lab at Bobst Library (NYU) during 2015 and 2016.

His research and publications attend to issues and strategies related to the preservation of archives with time-based media.

Mariela Cantú is a researcher, audiovisual preservationist, artist, curator and teacher. She is a PhD student in History (IDAES-UNSAM, CIAP Doctoral Fellow, UNSAM-CONICET), Master in Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image (Univ. of Amsterdam) and Bachelor and Professor in Audiovisual Communication (Univ. Nacional de La Plata).

She is the creator of ARCA Video, Archivo Colaborativo de Video Arte Argentino. Her research area focuses on the history of experimental video and the preservation of magnetic video, around which she has had residencies and training courses at the Associação Cultural Videobrasil (Brazil), the Film Preservation and Restoration School Latin America (CINAIN, Cineteca de Bologna, L'Immagine Ritrovatta and FIAF, Argentina), at the Laboratorio La Camera Ottica (Italy), Media Burn Archive and Video Data Bank (USA) and at the Cinemateca Boliviana (Bolivia).

She has taught at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, the Universidad del Cine, the Universidad del Arte and the Universidad Nacional de La Plata, as well as in various institutions and independent spaces. She has been curator and coordinator of several exhibitions related to contemporary audiovisual arts, and her editorial activities include writing and compiling publications on audiovisual arts. As an artist, she has been selected and awarded in several national and international exhibitions and festivals.

Ursula Davila-Villa is the co-founder of Davila-Villa & Stothart (DVS), an organization devoted to supporting artists and their families on artistic legacy planning and stewardship, as well as expanding art historical understanding of underrepresented artists. She was a Partner at the contemporary art gallery Alexander Gray Associates from 2012–2017 and from 2005–2012 she was Associate Curator of Latin American Art at The Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin. In 2012 she was co-curator of El Panal/ The Hive: Third Poli/Gráfica Triennal of San Juan de Puerto Rico. She completed her M.A. in Museum Studies at New York University, and holds a BA in architecture and urbanism from the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, Mexico, Université Laval, Quebec, Canada, and the Technische Universiteit Delft, Netherlands. She serves on the board of Women's Studio Workshop (WSW) and ArtTable.

Humberto Farias is an adjunct professor at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, where he has taught contemporary art conservation since 2012. He completed an academic residency at the conservation laboratory of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in 2014 and participated in the Visiting Scholars Program in the Moving Image Archiving & Preservation program, at New York University (NYU) in 2016. He was assistant researcher in the project “Arte concreta brasileira. A materialidade da forma: O industrialismo e a vanguarda latino-americana,” funded by the Getty Foundation. From 2009 to 2014, he was a member of the cultural committee of the Brazil-United States Institute (IBEU), where he commissioned solo exhibitions. He holds a PhD in conservation-restoration from the Universitat Politècnica de València with a dissertation entitled “The curator as manager: possibility of political action at the institutional interface,” under the supervision of professors Dr. Salvador Muñoz Viñas of the UPV and Dr. Lino García Morales of the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. He is a member of the advisory board of the Rubens Gerchman Institute and a visiting researcher at the Tunga Institute. He is a member of the Brazilian Association of Art Critics - ABCA, the International Council of Museums (ICOM) and the International Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (IIC).

Christine Frohnert is a partner of Bek & Frohnert LLC, Conservation of Contemporary Art in New York City. She is the Time-based Media Art Conservation Program Director of the first Time-based Media Conservation Program in the US at the Conservation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She was the inaugural Judith Praska Distinguished Visiting Professor teaching a seminar course Art with a Plug – The Conservation of Artworks containing Motion, Sound, Light, Moving Images and Interactivity in Fall 2012. Christine continued to teach TBM conservation foundation classes, organized public lectures, workshops and co-organized the conferences It’s About Time and Reflections and Projections Time-based Media Art Conservation Education and Outreach. Christine was the chair (2008-2012) of the Electronic Media Group at the American Institute for Conservation and initiated the conference series TechFocus. She held the position of Chief Conservator at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany, from 2000-2005. Building on her original training as a painting and sculpture conservator, Christine graduated from the Conservation of Modern Materials and Media Program at the University of Arts, Berne, Switzerland (2003).

Caroline Gil Rodríguez is a time-based media conservator, archivist, and writer from Puerto Rico. Caroline has experience working in time-based media conservation within a variety of contexts, including: museums and cultural heritage institutions; artists and artists estates; media art collectors and arts nonprofits. Caroline has held positions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Public Library, Wildlife Conservation Society and the Smithsonian Institution amongst other cultural heritage institutions. Caroline holds a M.A. in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation from New York University, a M.A. in Cinematography from the Escola Superior de Cinema i Audiovisuals (ESCAC) and a B.A. in Visual Arts. She is currently a Conservator of Time-Based Media at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and Archival Consultant for Electronic Arts Intermix, a New York based non-profit dedicated to the distribution, promotion and preservation of media art. Her areas of interest encompass the conservation of electronic and software-based artworks, digital preservation systems and workflows, and collectivism.

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, born in Mexico City in 1967, lives and works in Montréal. Mexican-Canadian media artist, he creates platforms for public participation by using technologies such as robotic lights, digital fountains, computerized surveillance, media walls, and telematic networks. Inspired by phantasmagoria, carnival, and animatronics, his interactive works are “anti-monuments for people to self-represent.”

He was the first artist to represent Mexico at the Venice Biennale with an exhibition at Palazzo Van Axel in 2007. He has also shown at other Art Biennials such as Havana, Istanbul, Kochi, Liverpool, Melbourne, Mercosul, New Orleans,Shanghai, Singapore, Sydney, and Wuzhen. His large-scale participatory art installations transform public spaces, creating connective environments for communities. In 2019, he presented “Border Tuner”, designed to interconnect the cities of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. The project brought together tens of thousands of people, reuniting families on both sides of the US-Mexico border. Other works were commissioned for events such as the Millennium Celebrations in Mexico City (1999), the Cultural Capital of Europe in Rotterdam (2001), the UN World Summit in Lyon (2003), the Winter Olympics in Vancouver (2010), and the pre-opening of the Guggenheim Museum in Abu Dhabi (2015), among others. His works are in collections around the world such as MoMA, Guggenheim, TATE, Reina Sofía, Hirshhorn, NGV, MUAC, and MONA. Major recent solo exhibitions include “Unstable Presence,” a mid-career retrospective co-produced by the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal and SFMOMA; “Listening Forest,” installed over 120 acres of land at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas; “Common Measures,” his first solo exhibition at PACE Gallery, New York; and “Translation Island,” a 2-km parcours which included ten public artworks, in Lulu Island, Abu Dhabi. Please read further on his website.

Ana Raviña is a researcher, archivist, artist, curator and teacher. Certified in Management and Conservation of Art Archives (CEE/TAREA-IIPC-UNSAM). Professor and Bachelor of Fine Arts (FBA-UNLP). Archive Manager at ARCA Video Argentino and the Marta Minujín Archive. Specialized in the management of artists' archives, she has collaborated in projects for the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes, the Museo de la Ciudad de Buenos Aire, the Centro de Estudios Espigas and Centro de Investigaciones de Arte y Patrimonio (UNSAM), the Fundación Federico J. Klemm and personal estates such as Marta Minujín (1943), Mirtha Dermisache (1940-2012), Alejandro Puente (1933-2013), Luis Pazos (1940-2023). She has worked as a teacher at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata, as well as in various institutions and independent spaces. She has completed postgraduate studies in Visual Arts Curatorship at the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero (Argentina). She has coordinated art spaces and conducted research for exhibition curatorship and production of catalogs of Argentine and Latin American art. As an artist, she has participated in several national exhibitions and festivals.

Mayra Natalia Rubiano Cajamarca is a conservator and restorer from the Universidad Externado de Colombia, with a Master's degree in Preventive Conservation from the University of Northumbria at Newcastle upon Tyne, England and a diploma in Conservation and Restoration of stone material from the Universidad Externado de Colombia. She has extensive experience in conservation and restoration of works on paper, photographs, negatives, paintings and contemporary art. She worked as coordinator of Conservation and registration of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art of Bogota (MAMBO) for more than five years, where she also supported the museum team in the production of temporary exhibitions. She has worked in research, cataloging and restoration of cultural property in heritage buildings. Last year she served as Preventive Conservator of the National Museum of Colombia. She has experience in project management and currently works as a Conservation Specialist in a private practice in Abu Dhabi.

Angela Sánchez Barajas is a conservator, restorer and manager specialized in contemporary art, with more than 13 years of experience in conservation, valuation and management of cultural heritage. Her work focuses on the preservation challenges of digital art and new media, approaching them from an interdisciplinary approach that integrates theory, research and practice. She holds an MA in Art History and an MA in Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Heritage from the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, as well as an undergraduate degree in Conservation and Restoration from the Universidad Externado de Colombia. She currently coordinates the Conservation and Registration Department of the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá (MAMBO), where she manages innovative strategies for the management and conservation of contemporary art in Colombia.

Throughout her career, she has led the implementation of preventive conservation strategies, environmental monitoring and collection management in institutions such as the Museo Nacional de Colombia and the Museos del Banco de la República. Her work transcends material conservation, promoting research, curatorship and production of exhibitions and academic programs that contribute to the appreciation and preservation of contemporary art, with an emphasis on digital and new media. As a professor at the Universidad del Rosario, she encourages critical reflection on the conservation of cultural heritage among artists and designers in training, providing them with tools to integrate preservation into their practices.

Erick Santos has a master's degree in art conservation and restoration from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain. He works in different areas of Museology, such as conservation and restoration, cataloging, exhibition production and museum planning. He has been working in the field since 2004, first as a collaborator in the collections department’s cataloguing project of the works at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), then as a conservator in MASP's conservation and restoration department until 2022. He was coordinator of the conservation and restoration department at the Pinacoteca do Ceará until 2024. He has worked on conservation projects at the Teatro Municipal de São Paulo, theInstituto Lina Bo e Pietro Maria Bardi and was a trainee at the Museo Nacional Reina Sofía. He is currently coordinator of the collections department at the Museu Afro Brasil Manoel Araujo.

Other Workshop Organizers

adrian hernandez (they/them) is a third-year graduate student and a Mellon Foundation fellow in time-based media art conservation at the Conservation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. After completing the program they will receive two degrees: a Master of Science in conservation with a focus on time-based media art and three-dimensional objects and a Master of Arts in art history with a focus on modern and contemporary art of the Americas. They also have undergraduate degrees in art history, studio art, anthropology, and electrical engineering. adrian has interned in 13 conservation labs in institutions across the country, recently including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the National Museum of American History. Their experience organizing events includes scheduling and hosting conservation lectures for the Washington Conservation Guild, scheduling and giving tours at museums and galleries, and coordinating events on behalf of the student government in college. Their parents are from Mexico and El Salvador.