EDUARDO CARRERA

Eduardo Carrera Rivadeneira is the chief curator of the Center for Contemporary Art (CAC) in Quito, Ecuador. He was co-director of No Lugar - Arte Contemporáneo, as well as Advisor and National Director of Museums and Archaeological Sites of the country’s Ministry of Culture and Heritage from 2015 to 2016. He has collaborated on projects with the Metropolitan Heritage Institute of Quito since 2012, and previously worked as curatorial assistant at LOOP Barcelona in 2015 and researcher at the CAC from 2011 to 2015. In addition, he conceived and organized the seminar Estrategias en uso, a cycle of conferences and meetings about curatorial practices, museums and artistic institutions, also in Quito.

José Esteban Muñoz. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York and London: New York University Press, 2009.

José Esteban Muñoz begins his book, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009), with these words: “Queerness is an aspiration toward the future. To be queer is to imagine better possible futures.” He goes on to consider the role of desire in the transformation and representation of a city, arguing that queer geographies critically examine experiences based on desire and the construction of diverse subjectivities in that urban area. This book not only asks readers to reconsider ideas such as hope and utopia, but also challenges them to feel hope and utopia, and sometimes even curiosity. Interestingly, my recent personal choices have seemed to respond to some of the ideas expounded upon in this book.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Epistemología del armario. Barcelona: Ediciones de la Tempestad, 1998.

This book was an important addition in terms of studying responses to the construction of identities that the dominant heterosexual world creates. After reading this book, I began investigating practices by individuals and groups that deal with queer and gender-related issues in their work, and I became interested in putting them in contrast to my own experiences as a queer person. It was a way to look for tools I could use to build other stories and readings of queer and gender-related topics. This is perhaps a window into how I became interested in curating in the first place: the desire to look for things in common that reflect on the queer experience.

Terry Smith, Thinking Contemporary Curating. New York: Independent Curators International, 2012.

My curatorial practice responds to the possibility of developing a steady flow of work for the benefit of local communities, and my expositions address issues such as representation, art production systems, contemporary archives, affective devices, landscape and territory, the city, body identity, gender and subjectivity. This book undoubtedly made me reflect on the curatorial practice, as well as understand that models, formats and strategies have been produced to re-imagine the artistic institutions, design of exhibitions and relationships between artists, curators and the public sphere. It also made me realize that curatorial practices are activated according to the contexts they occupy. This book was a great influence on my training as a curator and formed the basis for my work in that field while always trying to integrate as many curatorial visions as possible into the projects I got involved in.