Researching Cultures- CURATORIAL MEXICO: Unfolding Heritage Through Curatorial Practice

This course will get us immersed in Mexico's rich cultural heritage through the perspective of curatorial practice as dispersed throughout its myriad museums, heritage sites, and everyday spaces. We will focus on curatorial discourse as a unique form of communication, a genre in itself that is often understated on the role it plays in shaping, shifting, and contesting cultural and social identities. We will analyze how curatorial language inhabits not only writing but visual culture, speech, heritage collections, gallery installations, and even architecture, fashion, and food. We will discuss how the instability of curatorial discourse reveals the instability and contradictions within cultural heritage itself, deceivingly presented constantly as a neutral, unchangeable, and unquestionable entity. The materials and reflections in this course will ponder on cultural heritage as inevitably curated, discern the forms and implications of such mediation, and study curatorial practice and the trade of the curator as a form of agency that should aim to be ethical, inclusive, collaborative, and always challenged and renewed. We will work with a wide variety of materials from the early 20th century to contemporary Mexico that range from gallery and museum texts to political speeches, mass-media dispatches, literary texts, scholarly research, critical essays, interviews, fiction, magazine articles, manifestos, fashion statements, food menus, and architecture. These will lead us to reflect on how curatorial practice is a dynamic tool for understanding, renewing, preserving, and sometimes defying cultural heritage and what it stands for at different times and for different people. *This course has a substantial, mandatory and graded written communications component and is taught in Spanish. It also fulfills the Writing Intensive (WI) requirement for Arts and Sciences students. Students who have taken more than four Spanish Debating/Researching classes are not allowed in this course and must proceed to a Major Seminar (4XX).