The Social Responsibility of Documentation:
Contextualizing Data
Dominic Oldman
Dominic has over 28 years of experience of managing, researching and developing cultural heritage and humanities systems with a focus on underlying historical research methods, and is a historical researcher. He was Deputy Head of, and then led, the Information Systems department at the British Museum before concentrating full time on the ResearchSpace project as principal investigator. The project has delivered a practical community platform used in universities and cultural heritage organisations for representing history and historical sources with richer data narratives, resolving the dialectic of quantitative and qualitative methods, and addressing the issue of reductive databases by addressing complexity in data using knowledge representation - a specialisation within Artificial Intelligence (AI).
He is currently researching a history of computing from an humanities perspective to inform digital research methods, the effective use of computers by historians, and to support a practitioner-researcher approach in cultural heritage organisations. He is a bachelor of law, and passed the Solicitor's Final exams before joining the Scientific Research department at the British Museum. He has a masters degree from King's College, London in Digital Humanities and is currently a research student at the University of Oxford in the Faculty of History.
Is everything you do precarious?
Archiving, documentation and access/contemporary art practices
Sol Henaro
Manager, curator and considers herself an activist in memory politics. She was co-curator of the MUCA Roma from 2000 to 2003. In 2004 she founded the Celda Contemporánea, which she directed until 2006. She has cured dozens of exhibitions including “No-Grupo: Un zangoloteo al corsé artístico” and "Melquiades Herrea, el peatón profesional”. Her interest in questioning the construction of the historiographic story has led her to consider various singularities not so visible within the artistic genealogy, an interest that echo and complicity in the Red Conceptualismos del Sur, which she has been part of since 2010. She has published Various texts, highlighting her book "Melquiades Herrera" published by Alias Editorial in 2015.
From 2011 to 2015, she held the position of curator of the art collection of the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, where nowadays occupies the charge of curator of the documental collections and is responsible for the Arkheia Muac documentation center. In 2017 she received the recognition of the Universidad Nacional for young academics in the field of artistic creation and extension of the culture that UNAM grants.
Jo Ana Morfin
Curator in Time-Based Media. She is a teacher in Curatory from the University of Sunderland, the United Kingdom, and graduated in Restoration of Personal Property from the Escuela Nacional de Conservación, Restauración y Museografía (ENCRyM-INAH), Mexico City. She realized her doctoral studies at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, currently writing her doctoral thesis: “Unsiblastable Events: Conservation and Archiving practices with Contemporary art” under the direction of Dr. Paul Clarke, which addresses the theme of preservation and performativity of contemporary artworks and collections in analog and digital media.
Throughout her career, Morfin has collaborated with multiple artists, institutions, and independent spaces; in research and coordination of multidisciplinary projects focused on documentation, preservation, and reactivation of collections and collections in variable media. Through the combination of theoretical-methodological approaches in the Performance Studies and Media Art Preservation areas, Morfin develops its lines of research around digital preservation, performativity, digital curation, and technological obsolescence.
The tianguis and the collection
Renato González Mello
Graduate in History and Doctor in History of Art from the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras of the UNAM, with honors. He has been a Researcher at the Institute for Aesthetic Research at UNAM since 1992. His lines of research include modern Mexican painting, particularly mural painting and the work of José Clemente Orozco. He has also published works on political iconography in Mexico in the 20th century, about the relationship between architecture and education, and the material analysis of the arts. His current lines of research include studies on the systematic cataloging of heritage, violent images, and the production of replicas.
His publications include the following: The painting machine: Rivera, Orozco and the invention of a language, 2008; the coordination of Jose Clemente Orozco in the United States. 2002 (with Diane Miliotes), Directing the gaze: architecture, pedagogy and images in Mexico, 1920-1950. 2010 (with Deborah Dorotinsky), Vanguard in Mexico 1915-1940, 2013 (with Anthony Michael Stanton) and Paint the Revolution. Mexican Modern Art. 1910-1950 (with Matthew Affron, Mark Castro and Dafne Cross).
He has directed two research groups: one about political iconography; and the other about art and education. Likewise, an internal group at the Institute for Aesthetic Research to analyze the work The Birth of Fascism, by David Alfaro Siqueiros. He is member of the National Laboratory of Sciences for the Conservation of Cultural Heritage (LANCIC).
He has been a professor at the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras of the UNAM since 1991. He has been a visiting professor at the Universidad Veracruzana, the Universidad Autónoma de San Luis Potosí, the Universidad Iberoamericana, El Colegio de México, and Columbia University. He was the manager of the Posgrado en Historia del Arte from 2008 to 2010, and Director of the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas from 2010 to 2018. He received the Edward Laroque Tinker Scholarship in 2007, and the Salvador Novo History Scholarship in 1984. Since 2014 he has been a member of the Academia de Artes. In 2020 he was awarded the Premio Universidad Nacional in the field of Arts Research. He was the Coordinator of the Posgrado en Historia del Arte between 2008 and 2010, and Director of the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas from 2010-2018.
