Curating and Cultural Difference in the Iberian Context: From Difference to Self-Reflexivity (and Back Again)

ABSTRACT This article analyzes how curatorial practices deal with coloniality and, in a broader sense, with the legacies of colonialism and imperialism in our postcolonial present. To do so, it approaches the curatorial landscape of the Iberian territories in a moment of a radical geopolitical transformation, marked by the inclusion of Portugal and Spain in the European Union, the critical responses to the commemoration of their imperial past, and the rethinking of their postcolonial, post-dictatorship identity. Frequently framed from the point of view of exceptionalism, in a separated way, this article argues that Iberian postcoloniality can be better understood when approached from a comparative perspective.

Consider the following quotes dealing with visual creativity and curatorship in Portugal and Spain: "Não tivemos praticamente uma antropologia colonial; os esforços para repensar a história colonial portuguesa e a nossa situação pós-colonial estão ainda nos seus estágios iniciais. [. . .] Nos domínios das artes visuais-da crítica, da história, da curadoria, da própria prática artística-o silêncio e a invisibilidade sobre o não-ocidental ainda são dominantes." 1 "No hay en estos comisariados una articulación del contexto cultural y artístico en el que emergen las obras escogidas. Se opta por exhibirlas de forma inconexa como pertenecientes a una categoría historiográfica o estilema vacío que las desgaja de su función social, convirtiéndolas en un producto de consumo visual." 2 Written in two different languages and belonging to two different contexts, these quotes outline a similar situation. They are part of the scarce number of texts dealing with how curatorial practices shaped the postcolonial, postdictatorship present of Portugal and Spain. Both authors give account of a similar difficulty: that of displaying and confronting the legacies of colonialism in Iberian societies. They derive that difficulty from heterogeneous reasons, alluding to the silence of Iberian societies towards their postcolonial reality, but also to the risk of isolating critical discourses into thematic clusters, where those can be easily commodified and turned innocuous.
The main objective of this article is to compare a group of curatorial initiatives emerging in Portugal and Spain between 1990 and 2015 and dealing with the legacies of colonialism in both countries. 3 This article analyzes how curating has been used since 1990s in order to define postcolonial cultural representations in the Iberian context. The curatorial examples that will be discussed engage (with heterogeneous results, as we will see) with this predicament in multiple ways, among them, by showcasing the artistic work of the former colonial territories and by challenging normative views of Spanish and Portuguese art through the reinforcement and display of alternative geo-cultural links. The focus of those practices is on making productive the challenge of certain representations on how the ex-colonial territories are perceived and how the Iberian territories think their own identity and cultural policy in relation to its colonial past.
There has been a tenacious resistance to comparing the Spanish and Portuguese curatorial genealogies dealing with coloniality, despite the centrality of curatorial practices in reshaping both contexts' supposedly postcolonial identity. 4 There is no doubt that the transition to democracy and the construction of a modern national identity took very different paths in the cases of Spain and Portugal. These differences are also evident when looking at their postcolonial socio-cultural configurations, shaping the ethnic origin of migrant communities in both cases. They also apply to what concerns the conditions of social exclusion and the processes of racialization of individuals and communities. It is also true that both countries build their postcolonial imaginaries ignoring each other: 5 Portugal does so through the critical rethinking of Lusofonia, challenging the myth of past Descobrimentos as a mirror of a democratic and multicultural present-day Portugal. 6 In the case of Spain, a parallel thinking exists dismantling the assumption that the country's colonial past turned the country into a pioneer of globalization and cultural miscegenation. More importantly, the dissimilarities shaping both territories' historical process are evident: Portugal built its democratic image through the coupling of decolonization and the 1974 Revolution; Spain, through economic modernization and territorial reorganization. In the Spanish context, furthermore, this process took a specific form, since each Comunidad Autónoma reclaimed its historical and contemporary singularity through highlighting its relationship with the non-European space. 7 Despite those differences, however, the effervescence of art exhibitions dealing with the imperial legacies and the postcolonial present of Iberian societies matched and somehow responded to a historical process shared to a large degree in Iberian recent history. In other words, Portuguese and Spanish cultural institutions developed a parallel interest in rethinking both countries' postcolonial condition, something that turns curatorial practices into a suitable object of comparison. The abovementioned process is marked by economic development and the imbrication with neoliberal capitalism and modernization through incorporation into the space of the European Union. 8 It produced a redefinition of Portugal and Spain's geopolitical position, turning them into receptors of migratory fluxes from former colonial territories. 9 Both countries attempted then to create an image of themselves as modern, developed, cosmopolitan societies, one allowing (at least in theory) a coming to terms both with the traumatic memory of dictatorship and empire. Economic modernization, postcolonial remembering (or forgetting) and democratic normalization, thus, were seen to run side by side. In this context, contemporary art became the most suitable herald of that desired image.
The rise of contemporary art as a central concern matches this historical process. Curating was frequently used by Spanish and Portuguese museums and cultural institutions to imagine and fix their postcolonial identity within the landscape emerging after 1985. 10 The curatorial discourses arising in that historical moment were, however, caught up in a complex dynamic concerning the negotiation of Portuguese and Spanish role within the European space, the management and reconstitution of critical memories around the legacies of colonialism, and the use of cultural industries and institutional platforms to embed artistic creativity within a globalized consumer society. 11 The creation of several contemporary art centers and museums in both countries during the 1990s can exemplify that last point. 12 From the standpoint of these common points, a possibility of comparison within the Iberian context emerges. 13 Curatorial practice is concerned both with practice as well as with questioning how that practice is conceptualized, displayed and circulated. 14 It has to do with creating images and imaginaries as much as with understanding how those are hierarchically organized. This article will aim to show how this double dimension allows witnessing from a privileged standpoint the way in which images of identity are constructed and publicly manifested. Dealing with the intersection between curating and coloniality requires paying attention to a complex confluence of elements. To begin with, the set of practices engaging that intersection are far from homogeneous. Some of the examples analyzed here reinforce the supposed centrality of Portugal and Spain within their supposed areas of influence (thus continuing uneven elements of the imperial imaginary). Others, in turn, are actively concerned with dismantling that centrality of former metropolitan territories and with unmaking uneven power relations and cultural policies.
In many ways, Portugal and Spain imported their postcolonial models, adding a layer of cultural dependence to the power relations manifested through the curating of art from former colonial territories. Their curatorial landscapes, in that sense, are informed both by their postcolonial interest in their own imperial history, but also from their culturally dependent and semi-peripheral position. 15 For instance, when Portuguese institutions approach African art, or when Spanish institutions do the same with artistic practice from the Caribbean territory, they are not just producing discourses on a distant Other. Rather, those practices are also fully embedded within a larger framework of competing views and representations. In other words, whereas there is no doubt that those curatorial initiatives are embedded into the colonial bonds of those territories, this connection is framed also through a comparison with the curatorial models put into practice by other European and American territories concerning Africa and the Caribbean. 16 It is important, therefore, to understand the curatorial postcolonial approaches to Portuguese and Spanish reality as responses to a specific, singular historical and social conundrum, one not explainable through external theories or practices, although potentially influenced by and influencing them.
Curating Coloniality in the Iberian Context: Between Curiosity, Spectacle and Self-Reflexivity What follows is an analysis of the main curatorial initiatives related in different ways to coloniality in the Iberian space. Before undertaking this examination, three considerations are in order: firstly, the register presented here does not intend to be exhaustive; secondly, the curatorial examples gathered here are far from homogeneous in their formulation; and finally, the considerations developed here rely on significant historical precedents spanning the second half of the twentieth century.
If this article begins this survey from the period of the 1990s and the 2000s, it is because it was in that particular moment that those manifestations multiply in number and gain cultural relevance. Broadly speaking, we can divide our case study in two stages: a first strongly influenced by the cultural policies linked to the commemorations taking place in the 1990s, prone to celebrate a positive image of globalization, mobility and multiculturalism; and a second in which we can see that a concern regarding how the postcolonial image of both counties should be dealt with starts to become a pressing matter. Although the turn of the century could mark the separation between them, there are multiple continuities, and indeed the first trend will be kept very much alive-and dominant-until the present moment. From that position, in this article those practices will be categorized within four (interconnected) groups, as follows below.

Curating and/against the Commemorations
The first group of curatorial practices examined here is linked to the commemorations taking place in 1992 in Spain (date of the anniversary of Columbus's arrival in the Americas) and in 1998 and 2000 in Portugal (the first date responded to the commemoration of the 500 anniversary of the Descobrimentos, the second to the so-called discovery of Brazil). In the Spanish context, 1992 emerges as a suitable date to begin this itinerary, not just because of the weight of the Quincentennial anniversary and the Seville International Exhibition, but also because it was then that the first exercises attempting to conceptualize curating as a critical exercise able to reflect on how artworks and discourses appeared.
That year was marked by exhibitions such as America Bride of the Sun (1991, Antwerp Royal Museum of Fine Arts), Tierra de nadie (Granada, curated by José Lebrero Stäls) or Plus Ultra (Seville, curated by Mar Villaespesa), being the latter the most interesting project in critical terms. Plus Ultra consisted of a series of public art interventions linked to the Andalusian Pavilion of the 1992 Expo. Eight artists were asked to confront the main aspects of Andalusian identity, which in the Seville of the commemorations meant addressing the region's so-called transatlantic vocation. 17 Plus Ultra was the motto of imperial Spain, meaning "further beyond." In using it as exhibition title, it attempted to subvert this allegedly colonial vocation of Spain, in order to take the identity redefinition associated with 1992 beyond a simple celebratory tone. Four Spanish artists (Francesc Torres, Soledad Sevilla, Agustín Parejo School and Agencia de Viaje) and four U.S. artists (James Lee Byars, Denis Adams, Alfredo Jaar and Adrian Piper) were asked to make artistic interventions in spaces of cultural relevance in several Andalusian cities. A first element of interest, thus, comes from the fact of translating the locus of criticism outside the museum, but also outside the spectacularized and official space of the Expo. Plus Ultra criticized the celebratory tone of a Spain in process of modernization and democratization, pointing out the persistence of the darker side of the legacy of colonialism in that society. In order to do that, Mar Villaespesa, the curator, needed to ensure the project's independence from regional and national political organisms, while at the same time raising funding from those sources. In order to do that, the practical management of the project was controlled through Carta de Ajuste/BNV, created in 1989.
Plus Ultra, then, was innovative for several reasons: it constituted the first curatorial exercise that showed a clear interest in challenging the Spanish official imperialist rhetoric and in addressing Spain's postcolonial condition. Moreover, the exhibition stepped out of the spaces dedicated to so-called high culture and contemporary art in order to place this criticism in highly symbolic popular venues. 18 Related to that, it portrayed a reflexive detachment from any logic of commemoration, and also from the contexts associated with it. 19 Further, it provoked a confrontation and self-awareness of the uses of contemporary art in the branding of the new image of a modern, cosmopolitan Spain by political powers. It also achieved a de-exoticization of the icons involved in the 1992 celebrations, through relating the memorabilia of colonial nostalgia with the contradictions of the here and now of a country in process of being rebranded as democratic entity. Finally, the project pursued a reconsideration of the figure of the curator, who in Plus Ultra appears as a collaborator instead of an all-powerful manager. 20 Villaespesa's curatorial activity continues to investigate the contradictions of present day Spain. Her exhibitions delve into the deficiencies derived from the articulation of a sanitized imperial memory, the consequences of that memory in the forms of migrations and racism, and the conjunction of democracy and neoliberalism. This is evident in Além da Água, Copiacabana and, above all, in Almadraba, two projects curated in 1996 and 1997 respectively. Além da Água was a project co-curated with Jorge Castanho that took place at the two sides of the border between Portugal and Spain, consisting of a series of interventions that problematize the use and distribution of water in the regions of Alentejo, Extremadura and Andalucía, with the influence of EU politics as their backdrop. 21 For its part, Almadraba, co-curated with Corine Diserens, consisted of a series of multidisciplinary activities disseminated between Algeciras and Gibraltar in the South coast of the Iberian Peninsula and Tanger in Morocco, which sought to make evident the consequences of neoliberalism within the European space for migrants and for the own understanding of the EU's role within the Mediterranean context. Successive interventions organized through the UNIA (International University of Andalucía) Arte y Pensamiento program continue to confront this issue. 22 In the case of Portugal, the turn of the century was also a politically charged moment in Portugal due to the conjunction of the commemorations. 1998 marked a constructive frenzy in Lisbon manifested in the 1998 International Exhibition, dedicated, problematically, to the Oceans, which implied the reurbanization of the Parque das Nações area. The International Exhibition brought a reformulation of the concerns that were present in the 1940 Exposição do mundo português (Exhibition of the Portuguese World) organized by the Estado Novo, where Portugal was presented as a rural and conservative nation that had applied a supposedly soft version of colonialism. 23 In 1998, the weight of Portugal's colonial and imperial glories did not disappear; on the contrary, these glories were repackaged as a central element of modern-day Portugal, a democratic, cosmopolitan and fraternal nation ready to play a key role in the European operational board. This ideological staging implied adopting a celebratory view of that past and, linked to that, a tenacious forgetting of the open wounds left open by the decolonization process that took place as recently as in 1975. 24 The relation with Brazil was addressed, among other means, through a series of art exhibitions. Although there had been earlier interest in Brazil from Portuguese cultural institutions, the years between 1998 and 2002 registered a significant peak. 25 Five main projects must be mentioned here: Isabel Carlos's Trading Images exhibition series, Século XX: Arte do Brasil, Mostra do Redescobrimento, Ricardo Basbaum's Mistura +Confronto, and Ruth Rosengarten's and Paulo Reis's Um océano inteiro para nadar.
Trading Images comprised four exhibitions, dedicated to Adriana de Varejão, Eugénio Dittiborn, Narelle Jubelin and Fernando Alvim (this last one, entitled Memória Íntimas Marcas, was in fact a restaging of Alvim's collaboration with Carlos Garaicoa and Gavin Younge at Cuito Canavale, Angola). 26 The curator of those four shows justified their articulation through the artists' interest in raising concerns on the postcolonial condition of the Lusophone territory: Varejão deconstructed the Portuguese tradition of azulejos and Jubelin approached the case of Timor (at that time still politically dependent on Portugal). Although not directly addressing any issue linked to the context, Dittiborn's Pinturas Aeropostales shared the interest for exploring memory and archival registers. Mistura+Confronto consisted of a juxtaposition of Portuguese and Brazilian artists; Arte do Brasil used the last edition of the São Paulo Biennale to reconstruct Brazilian´s recent art history. 27 In fact, the exhibition followed a chronological perspective, thus reinforcing the sense of exhibiting a national art context instead of problematizing the linkages between those creations, the Brazilian cultural milieu, and the Portuguese context of display-Renata Ribeiro alludes to a lack of confrontation that locates Brazilian art "within a parenthesis, happening in another space (and time)." 28 Of all the exhibitions organized around the commemorations, Um océano inteiro para nadar stands as the most critical, inaugurating a new way of understanding curatorship based on self-reflexivity, context awareness and a balanced articulation of aesthetic discourses and timely comparisons. It was commissioned in 2000 by Culturgest and National Committee for the Commemoration of the Portuguese Discoveries. Its curatorial statement, elaborated through a dialogue among the curators Ruth Rosengarten (responsible for the selection of the Portuguese side) and Paulo Reis (who curated the Brazilian side), evidences the need for surpassing stylistic and generational criteria. Costa Dias, who analyzes the exhibition in detail, categorizes it as "both the outcome of a celebration of nationality, and an attempt to hold a curatorial contra-imperial discourse, thus a deconstruction of existent national identities." 29 The text opening the catalogue is a summary of the dialogues held among the curators, in which the art historical considerations on the possible historical links between Portuguese and Brazilian modernity are questioned in the light of the viability of establishing any kind of comparison in light of the Centenário. Whereas Reis wanted first to develop a chronological comparison between the art of both countries, Rosengarten embraced a curatorial process challenging monumentality and natural correlations, favoring transitority and identity incoherence, and voicing self-criticism. She also rejects the idea of juxtaposing both countries' artistic genealogies. The ideas of commemorating anything and of contraposing in virtue of the colonial link are, therefore, the first elements to be questioned. For Rosengarten, the historical circumstances are an unavoidable reality that should be present at the core of the curatorial experience. At the begining of the catalogue, she wonders: "Continuo a achar algo aleatóriomas certamente um desafio-articular a arte brasileira e a arte portuguesa. Qual a razão de tal articulação? Um passado histórico comum? No seu papel de colonizador, Portugal tem tido pouco espírito de autocrítica-em comparação, por exemplo, com a Inglaterra em relação à Índia. Basta ver a euforia do discurso dos 'Descobrimentos' que ainda hoje reina neste país." 30 Later, she argues that "obviamente o facto de esta exposição coincidir com as supostas celebrações dos '500 anos do Brasil' não pode ser posto de lado. Ou se celebra, ou se sujeita a uma análise crítica qualquer." 31 That curatorial basis was also present in the selection of artworks. Rejecting the idea of offering a nostalgic account of both countries' so-called encounters, the exhibition focused on contemporary creativity, mixing pieces from the 1970s and others created for the purpose. Many of them, furthermore, addressed the colonial question in direct terms, as exemplified by Fernanda Fragateiro's Só é possível se formos dois, Ângela Ferreira's Amnésia, Anna Bella Geiger's Orbis Descriptio com Fronteiras Indiferentes II, Nelson Leirner's Terra à Vista (A primeira Missa), Paula Rego's A primeira missa no Brasil, Julião Sarmento's Amazónia, Manuel Valente Alves's A Victória de Samotrácia or Ana Vidigal's Penélope.

Displaying the Other
A second group of curatorial initiatives displayed art from supposedly peripheral contexts as a strategy to counter the Eurocentrism and localism of the Iberian curatorial arenas. Many of those exhibitions served a very particular purpose: that of constructing actively the Self's identity in sight of that supposedly distant Other. However, many of those discourses will end up producing stereotypical images of that Other, leaving the colonial matrix of Iberian cultural policies untouched.
In Portugal, the exhibitions taking place after the commemorations had Africa as their main referent. This interest matched the boom of African art that followed Enwenzor's Documenta and exhibitions such as Africa Remix, but also the emergence of Lusophone Africa in the international panorama, and the commemoration of the independence of Angola and Moçambique in 2005. 32 In that sense, although there are important precedents in former decades, this exhibitional model dealing with African art found its moment in the 2000s. 33 This interest was to be framed mostly through ambitious cultural programs and initiatives that transcended the materialization of a single exhibition. With regard to art shows, we find a wide number of initiatives, among them Arte moçambicana (1999 Some common elements among those exhibitional practices can be mentioned: they had a thematic orientation; although there are exceptions, many of them eschewed the critical interest in problematizing the meaning of displaying African art in postcolonial Portugal; many also kept a celebratory and exotic approach to an African art; few questioned the role of Portuguese cultural institutions in categorizing and inventorying African artistic discourses; 34 and finally few challenged the connection between those African discourses and the conflictive condition of the Portuguese postcolonial nation.
Réplica e Rebeldia, one of the clearest examples, summarizes many of the issues that those shows confront. Curated by António Pinto Ribeiro and orchestrated by the Camões Institute to travel between Brazil, the Lusophone African countries and Portugal, the show excluded the presence of Portuguese artists. This exclusion of Portuguese artists, which is presented as a gesture of respect, is nevertheless framed through a position in which the Rebeldia will only come after the Réplica, the mimesis of Western values. Furthermore, the presence of a múltipla orfandade is contested in order to justify the exhibition's territorial coverage. That leads to the inclusion of Afro-Brazilian artists as the unique representatives of that country, something that is justified by alluding to a similar equation with traditional, non-modern values. Although this is a valid point of departure, the fact of having the Camões Institute as the patron funding body, and the final impossibility of bringing the exhibition to Portugal, impeded the dialogues that the exhibition sought to create.
If we move now to Spain, we will find that many of the thematic exhibitions organized during the 1990s and 2000s shared similar constraints. Several exhibitions attempted to think through the consequences of globalization and migratory fluxes in terms of the creation of hybrid identities and cultural dialogues. Projects such as Cocido y Crudo (1994, Reina Sofía Museum, curated by Dan Cameron) or Comer o no comer (2002, Centro de Arte de Salamanca, curated by Darío Corbeira) exemplify this tendency. The first revolved around the parallelism between cooked and raw, between the modernized and civilized and the so-called traditional, somehow echoing (and being trapped in) the Magiciens ethos. The second also borrowed the culinary metaphor to highlight issues of cultural difference and inequality, in this case elaborating a journey through the relations between art and food in the twentieth century.
The consolidation of a system of biennials and art events also borrowed from this interest in displaying the Other, something accomplished with different degrees of critical value and interest. The most evident example of this can be found in ARCO's policy of inviting a country as special guest for each edition, a measure that turned the art fair into a tool for foreign relations. Other cases, however, prove to be worthier of analysis. For instance, in 2010 Murcia was chosen as the venue of Manifesta 8. 35 That edition was shaped by the establishment for the first time of a curatorial topic: Europe's relations with North Africa. 36 This was behind the selection of Murcia as the venue: the region was supposed to stand for a privileged, century-long relation with the Maghreb (a "particular emphasis on the history of Arabic culture rooted in the Region of Murcia" is mentioned in the official information of the biennale). However, in practice, this framing led to major pitfalls: while shaped by a history of Arabic culture (as is the rest of the Iberian Peninsula), the relation of present-day Murcia with North Africa was overemphasized and far-fetched. Furthermore, those artists who had had no previous contact with the South of Spain displayed a rather exotic gaze towards the Murcia region. This contrasted with the work of local artists, many of whom had a previous trajectory of collaboration with and research on North Africa. Those were grouped under the Parallel Events exhibition, which took place in different locations across the Comunidad Autónoma and was far more sustainable and connected to the local population. Manifesta 8 stood for an alliance between spectacularization and thematized difference. Not only was the project imposed from outside; it also relied heavily on a colossal expenditure that would not have any continuity in a region affected by the economic crisis.
A more sustainable example of biennale developing a regional approach more fortuitously can be found in Pontevedra. Its last editions were dedicated to exploring the artistic production of contexts that receive Galician migration, and usually implied the juxtaposition (and in some cases the collaboration) between local and foreign artists. The 2010 edition, for example, was dedicated to the Caribbean and Central America and, more specifically, to the memory of Virginia Pérez Rattón, driving force of TeorÉtica, one of the oldest and more active alternative art spaces in the Central American region. Curated by Santiago Olmo, who followed the models of the last editions of the Mercosul and São Paulo biennials, the event stressed the importance of the educational aspect and the connection with the local context. This was achieved in several ways: besides the main exhibition, the biennial engaged several independent art collectives from Galicia, which made site-specific interventions in the Ría de Arousa; it also involved Vigo University and the Pontevedra Museum and included a series of meetings with the American artists.
The Canary Islands offer what is perhaps the most sustained and critically-informed example of curatorial practice focusing on difference in the Spanish context in the last two decades. The activity of several art centers, especially the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno (CAAM), which was founded in 1989 in Las Palmas, developed from very early on consistent curatorial and research initiatives seeking to define the position of the Canarian archipelago towards Europe, Africa and America. The Canarian curatorial landscape was thus defined from a triple movement of singularization within the Spanish nation-state and the Iberian context, of detachment from Eurocentric, continental assumptions of European culture, and of approaching Africa and Latin America.
During the 1990s, we find several curatorial initiatives attempting to define critically the social and cultural implications of that cultural mapping. This is already evident in early exhibitions organized by the CAAM: Surrealismo entre Viejo y Nuevo Mundo  37 A second body of exhibitions stresses the role of insular territories in the dissemination and decentering of continental identities and ideas within a postcolonial temporality, for example, Desplazamientos. Aspectos de la Identidad y las Culturas (1991, Octavio Zaya), Otro país. Escalas africanas, Islas (1997, curated by Orlando Britto), Transatlántico. Diseminación, Cruce y Desterritorialización (1998, curated by Octavio Zaya) and more recently Horizontes Insulares (2010, curated by Orlando Britto and Nilo Palenzuela). Several features characterize this production: a shared concern with mapping the consequences of globalization in local contexts; the insertion of Canarian artistic production within transnational and intercultural fluxes; an interest in exploring the consequences of cultural miscegenation within the Atlantic space; and, finally, an interest in introducing key names in the debates on postcolonial visual culture to the Iberian horizon. 38

Self-Reflexive Experiences
The practices grouped in this third block are concerned with questioning in a direct way how curating has been historically used to describe and categorize the Other. Emerging from different angles and dealing with heterogeneous contexts, they constitute a direct challenge to the most negative elements of the previous group, and evidence an interest in self-reflexively addressing the potential, but also the inherent limitations, of challenging the authorial voice of curatorial practice when representing otherness.
In the Spanish context, we find several initiatives informed by that intent. In the first years of the present decade, for example, there were three exhibitions that challenged the way Latin American art was displayed. D_efecto Barroco. Políticas de la imagen hispana (2010, MACBA) was a collaboration between Jorge Luis Marzo and Tere Badia. In the same year, another great revisionary project was presented at the Reina Sofía: Principio Potosí was an exhibition curated by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Max Hinderer, Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann that travelled between Berlin, Madrid and La Paz (Bolivia). Finally, La idea de América Latina was curated in 2012 by Berta Sichel and Juan Antonio Álvarez Reyes at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo. 39 The exhibition borrowed from Walter Mignolo's book to remap Latin American art from the point of view of coloniality and recent neocolonial violences. 40 Those three exhibitions arise from a same realization of the limitations of regional art shows. Attempting to defy any authorial voice about the other, they refuse the contention of the problematic aspects of approaching the consequences of colonialism in the present from a sanitized and isolated time-space. Furthermore, all three projects stress the importance of outlining hidden continuities between colonial past and neocolonial present, challenging the idea of a straightforward historic linearity. In Principio Potosí, for example, this is achieved through the juxtaposition of objects from different temporalities and the diversification of the ways the exhibition can be engaged.
The work of the Spanish curator Juan Guardiola sought to translate this critical approach to the coloniality of Spanish curatorial practice in itself through two major exhibitions-Filipiniana (2006, Centro Conde Duque, Madrid) and Colonia Apócrifa (2014, MUSAC, León). 41 The first project implied, in its very title, a displacement from representational modes of curating. Filipiniana alludes to all the knowledge existing on Philippines, "toda la documentación, tanto autóctona como extranjera, que habla sobre las islas," emphasizing how that body of knowledge is produced, and therefore refusing the possibility of sanctioning a specific view on that context. 42 Although a forgotten presence in the Spanish postcolonial imaginary, the ties connecting Philippines and Spain are present in elements as emblematic as the Palacio de Cristal in Madrid, a central building of the Retiro Park designed in 1887 to contain the botanical specimens brought from the Philippines on the occasion of a colonial exhibition, in which Naturales were displayed. Filipiniana arose in 2006, a year dedicated by the Spanish cultural center Casa Asia to the Philippines. The curator attempted to counter that official tone in several ways: by recovering the memory of the 1887 ethnographic exhibition (an entire section is dedicated to the analysis of that process) and by inserting it into a critical narrative. A second point of interest has to do with the exhibition's chronological range. Filipiniana dealt with a multiplicity of topics across a temporal frame of five centuries, including the modernization of the islands, the U.S. influence in the territory, the legacies of Spanish colonialism both in Philippines and in Spain, the emergence of anti-colonial voices and the relevance of current-day cases of corruption. The materials gathered to that end that purpose include historic documents and photographs, paintings, military objects, contemporary installations and films or site-specific produced artworks. The presence of an array of objects coming from nonartistic museums-a symbolically-charged collection that does not usually merge with contemporary curating and artistic practice-implied a difficult series of cunning negotiations on the part of the curator. 43 A group of Spanish artists were commissioned to develop a creative residence in the islands and to produce work from their experience, attempting to dismantle any idea of exhibiting an objective view on Philippine reality. Finally, the project was intended to travel to Manila, where it was displayed in 2007. For its part, Colonial Apócrifa displayed a vast set of images which spoke eloquently to the way in which the Spanish colonialist expansion in America, Africa and Asia was visually constructed. Three elements are worth outlining in relation to the exhibition: the show attempted to counter the idea of Spain as a supposedly benevolent intervenor compared to Britain and France; the displayed objects included a similar mix of resources as that of Filipiniana; this collection, finally, was presented in a nonchronological, Warburgean way, establishing suggestive relations between objects not straightforwardly connected. 44 Guardiola's exhibitions are significant because they redeploy the authority of the curator, question the selection process and experiment with the capacity of curating to redefine the meaning of existing archives and materials. In Portugal, we also find interesting exercises in that sense. Here it is worth mentioning Jurgen Bock's curatorial collaborations with Ângela Ferreira (

Contemporary Art and Coloniality beyond Exhibition-Making
Although it is not the main object of this article, it is worth considering a set of practices that challenged the primacy and the temporality of exhibition-making as main locus of criticism. Around the last years of the 2000s, several artistic networks and long-term initiatives were created, both within and outside the realm of official art institutions. On the Portuguese side, we can outline four main initiatives: the Próximo Futuro program, Africa.Cont, ArtAfrica and Buala. 46 Curated by António Pinto Ribeiro, Próximo Futuro has been the cornerstone of the Gulbenkian Foundation's cultural programming in the late 2000s. Taking place in two successive editions from 2009 to 2011 and from 2011 to 2014, Próximo Futuro addressed issues of multiculturalism, globalization, diasporas and transnationalism, which were already targeted by The State of the World and Distance and Proximity programs. In this case, a particular focus on the triangular relation between Africa, Latin America (and the Caribbean) and Europe was privileged. The appropriateness of Portugal as a center for those debates is justified through its insertion into contemporary migratory fluxes; the centrality of Portugal in those fluxes, however, is also questioned. 47 This vision unfolded through art exhibitions, conferences, screenings, performances and seminars. 48 On its part, the Africa.Cont project involved the construction in Lisbon of a contemporary art center focusing on contemporary African art, under the leadership of Fernandes Dias. 49 The planning of that center began in 2007, including the design of a building by David Adjaye, the reurbanization of the zone between the Rua das Janelas Verdes and the Avenida 24 de Julho, and the constitution of an art collection; however, the architectural side of the project was abandoned in 2011. The foundation itself survived, developing exhibitions and conferences. Both initiatives shared some characteristics: the magnitude of aspirations, intervention in cultural policies (and not just contemporary art), and engagement with broader geographical areas. Concretely, comparing Próximo Futuro and Africa. Cont, Maria Restivo argues: Por outro lado, em nenhum dos projetos se encontra uma vontade de reformulação ou de reescrever a história colonial portuguesa, o que para alguns autores é uma característica fundamental das correntes pós-coloniais. De facto, ambos os projetos se esquivam às questões ligadas particularmente ao passado colonial português e mesmo ao tema da "Lusofonia," um tema recorrente nas ligações Portugal-África. Não há, nestes programas, uma relação privilegiada com os países lusófonos. 50 It was this point that ArtAfrica and Buala attempted to confront. ArtAfrica is an online platform founded in 2001 also by Fernandes Dias and supported by the Gulbenkian Foundation and now based in the Centro de Estudos Comparatistas of Lisbon University. Its main objective is to map the artistic production of Lusophone African countries, gathering personal information and visual material of all the artists of the region and critical material on contemporary African art. Such criteria would lead to a great disparity in terms of quality among the artists represented. Despite that fact, ArtAfrica developed the first exhaustive exploration of those contexts, presenting an amount of visual creativity to a great degree unknown in Portugal.
Finally, one of the most interesting examples, considering the way it redefines the centrality of Portugal within the critical debates on Lusophone and South spaces, is Buala. Launched in 2010 in the São Paulo Biennale by Marta Lança after her cultural work in several Portuguese-speaking countries, Buala is the first and only existing archive that has systematically covered Lusophone contemporary art initiatives dealing with coloniality in the last decade. It has also provided a forum of discussion among authors from Africa, Europe and Latin America. It is worth noting that Buala is the only platform in the Portuguese context detached from any official dependence. While that situation has threatened the continuity of the initiative at times, it has allowed Lança great operational freedom. That openness to multiple voices and registers, along with the horizontality of the contents and the free and online availability of all the materials, places Buala at the forefront of the critical renegotiations of the Portuguese postcolonial reality.
On the Spanish side, we can also mention some initiatives working in a similar way.

Conclusions
This article's main intention was to show how curating emerges as a fertile operational field from which the postcolonial condition of the Iberian territories is redefined. That field has been useful in order to define and reterritorialize ideas of cultural nationalism and regionalism. Curatorial practices defined how visual creations were shaped and displayed by museums and public institutions, having a decisive impact on the definition of modern identities within the Iberian context, and arising in this sense as a privileged standpoint from which to analyze the contradictions of Iberian postcolonial aspirations. Although strongly conditioned by the weight of institutionalism and official cultural policies, curating also encouraged creative and active responses to those pressures. The transitions and dislocations introduced by Iberian curatorial practices can be seen as developing (not without contradictions, as we have seen) a cultural mapping from where the consequences of colonialism in the present emerge both as an object of enquiry and as an unavoidable presence. In that sense, curatorial practices have evolved from displaying a supposedly neutral and objective knowledge of the Other to challenging its own position as creative initiatives immersed in the contradictions of institutional politics and the geopolitical shifting landscape of Iberian territories, therefore arising as a crucial practice in the evolution of the region's cultural landscape.
We have seen how many of the discourses emerging in the Iberian curatorial fields are still burdened by a neutralization of the colonial gaze that still determines many cultural policies. This is achieved through privileging discursivity over any other cultural dynamic concerning the ex-colonies. Referring to the Portuguese case, Miguel Vale de Almeida mentions "o acantonamento dos aspectos africanos no campo da cultura expressiva," something that fully applies to postcolonial artistic and curatorial practices taking place in the Iberian context. 51 Although there are notable exceptions, supposedly postcolonial curatorial initiatives have created a great number of discourses about the other. However, self-reflection on how those discourses are created, whose power they conceal, and what responses they trigger are a much less addressed issue. The concatenation of colonialism, decolonization and migration is still hardly addressed (with the exception of some of the practices included in the third and fourth groups of our categorization), still being predominant thematic approaches to regional artistic contexts. Moreover, the supposed otherness of Iberian societies (the consequences of postcolonialism within the colonizer's territory, a central concern with understanding the Portuguese postcolonial condition) is frequently detached from regional art exhibitions. 52 In a similar way, when globalization and transnationalism are addressed, that happens through recourse to distant exchanges and processes of mobility, leaving aside the complexity of the migratory fluxes taking place within the Iberian space.
A second major objective of this essay had to do with comparing contexts a priori developing unrelated images of their own postcolonial present. An idea of exceptionalism has somehow remained at play when dealing with that present in the case of Portugal. While there are good reasons behind that idea, this article has sought to show how a comparative approach is not just possible but also productive. The idea of Portugal's supposed postcolonial exceptionalism is not the only topic this article intends to distance from. The interpretation of the Portuguese artistic context as a space still bounded by a silence on postcolonial practices and initiatives is just as pervasive. In 1998, the curator Isabel Carlos argued that "Portugal [. . .] pouco têm reflectido sobre estas questões. [. . .] Falar de colonização e descolonização em Portugal parece ser, basicamente, pura e simplesmente não falar. Passadas mais de duas décadas após o fim do colonialismo português, pouco, ou muito pouco (ou quase nada) se disse." 53 In the essay form which I quoted at the start of this article, António Fernandes Dias wonders in a similar way whether or not can we talk of a postcolonial interest in the Portuguese curatorial landscape. 54 Finally, Inês Costa Dias argues that the exhibitions dealing with the postcolonial present of Lusophone spaces imply not just a celebratory approach to the concept but "the contraglorification of that discourse." 55 She counterposes the critical potential of such practices to the reactionary and refractory attitude of Portuguese society and its postcolonial amnesia towards its imperial past.
The problem is that an image based on the silence and disinterest of the Portuguese cultural context towards its postcolonial present does not allow a comparison with any other model, while at the same time it somehow naturalizes the relation between Portugal and the territories formerly colonized by it. Despite those remarkable critical efforts, the logic continues to be that of displaying so-called marginal art within a Portuguese curatorial landscape to counter the indifference of Portuguese society concerning its postcolonial situation. That marginality, furthermore, remains a symbol of authenticity tied not unproblematically to the artists' African origin. The problem, again, is that this assumes that art and cultural institutions exert their power only through discursive means, by showcasing art of a relative nationality or context, as if those strategies were not, or could not be, compatible with multicultural curiosity and the commodification of the Other.
To conclude, I wish to stress a number of elements. In this article I attempted to prove that curatorial practices that emerged out of the context marked by the integration into the EU of the Iberian territories are comparable. A central point of comparison between them has to do with how they function as arbiters of the political economy of national and regional identities towards an imperial past, a globalized present (present also physically in the former metropolitan territories), and a subaltern and semi-peripheric position concerning Europe but also other mainstream cultural arenas and curatorial representations. This means that curatorial practices dealing with otherness and coloniality must be understood as operating in the cultural field of this complex sociopolitical conundrum, and not just as straightforward presentations of the margins and the periphery. Relatedly, their impact cannot be measured as if they were binary oppositions to a racially and culturally-homogeneous idea of national and regional identity, even when they do also operate in that way.
What has been just outlined does not mean necessarily that because those practices address otherness and globalization they are more sensitive to the complex power relations determining the geocultural fields in which Iberian cultural industries operate. Consequently, some of the curatorial examples presented here illustrate the potential of curating to deal with difference and inequality beyond the acantonamento (to bring back Vale de Almeida's apt term) of exotic otherness into the field of discursiveness.