María Berríos

María Berríos is a Chilean ex-sociologist, writer, educator, mother, and curator. Her work focuses on storytelling as an emancipatory practice and as a way of navigating the entanglements between art, culture, and politics. Her research has delved into stories of counterinformation, collective experiments in radical pedagogies, internationalist and third worldist artistic solidarity movements, with a special interest in their exhibition formats and ways of worlding. She has been a professor and guest tutor at universities and art academies in Europe and Latin America and has published her work extensively. As a curator, her projects mostly forefront collaborative practices, often curating together with others. Relevant past projects include: Drifts and Derivations on experimental architectural collectives from Chile and Brazil (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 2010) together with Lisette Lagnado; 'Our Unknown, Our Chaos…' on the Valparaíso School collective (Museo Experimental El Eco, México, 2014); The Body of the Architect is not that of just one Man on the work of Alberto Cruz (MAVI, Santiago, 2017), co-curated with Amalia Cross. In recent years Berríos curated the 11th Berlin Biennale The Crack Begins Within (2019–2020) together with Renata Cervetto, Lisette Lagnado, and Agustín Pérez Rubio, as well as In the Jungle There is Much to Do at the Solidarity Museum Salvador Allende (MSSA, Santiago, 2022–2023) together with the museum's team. While serving as director of Curatorial Programs and Research at Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA, 2023–2026), she curated Song for Many Movements (2024) with Sabel Gavaldon, as well as Carlos Motta. Pleas of Resistance with Agustín Pérez Rubio (2025). Currently she is Director of the 10th edition of MACBA's Independent Study Program (PEI): Sol-y-dar-y-dad: Collective Learning for an Inadmissible Present (2025–2026).

Curatorial Unsilencing: Rumours against this Inadmissible Present

Drawing on curatorial experiments with picture-books, intergenerational microcinemas, and non-separatist exhibition making, I will explore what it means to do curatorial work against the compartmentalisation of specific subjectivities and the growing demand for silence, political “neutrality” and censorship, often in the name of protection and “care”. How can curatorial practice become a space of intergenerational solidarity, within which art and cultural work have a role in shaping and sharing the stories we need as part of the struggle against this inadmissible present.