María Berríos is a mother, sociologist, editor, and curator. She is
currently Director of Curatorial Programmes and Research in MACBA (Barcelona
Museum of Contemporary Art), Barcelona. Her work focuses on contemporary art,
politics, and culture in Latin America and beyond, with a special interest in
collective cultural experiments linked to internationalist solidarities and the
“Third World” movement of the 1960s and 70s. She was cofounder of the vaticano
chico collective in Chile. Among her curatorial projects are Song for Many
Movements (2024) at MACBA in Barcelona, In the Jungle There is Much to
Do: 50 years of the Solidarity Museum (2022–23) at Museo de la Solidaridad
Salvador Allende in Santiago de Chile, The Crack Begins Within
(2020) at the 11th Berlin Biennale, and Drifts and Derivations (2010) at
the Museo Centro Nacional de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid.
Can artists be in solidarity through their work? Can donating a work of
art be an act of solidarity? Can solidarity be curated? What could a
Museum of Solidarity look like? All of these questions were posed as
instituting acts by the MSSA (Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende) born in
solidarity with the 1970 Revolution in Chile and in support of the struggles of
the “oppressed people of the world”. After the 1973 military coup, it turned
into a museum in exile, a vessel of resistance inhabiting the homes and
movements of the political refugees fleeing the military dictatorships of the
south. Art is – and always has been – situated and committed to the
materiality of the world: art is always political. This is the premise of the
solidarity museum, whose history of instituting became a method of political
action. Not through the weaponisation of art, but by understanding art as a
weapon.