bio | María Berríos is a sociologist, writer and independent curator. Her work explores issues traversing art, culture, and politics, focusing on Latin America, with a special interest in collective experiments of “Third World” alliances and their exhibition formats, such as the Solidarity Museum (1971) or the Havana Cultural Congress (1968). She is a PhD candidate in sociology at Goldsmiths’ College, London University and has been teaching as a professor and as a guest tutor in several universities and art academies in Europe and Latin America. Her dissertation is about undocumented rumours and disappearance as form, based on case studies of specific events in Chile between the 1960s and 1980s. She is co-founder of the Chilean editorial collective vaticanochico. Berríos has published extensively on art and politics in Latin America – and beyond – and has been engaged in several collaborative art projects, including the research exhibition The Revolution Must Be a School of Unfettered Thought, together with the artist Jakob Jakobsen for the 31st São Paulo Bienal (which was also exhibited in the Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art 2015 and Peace Treaty, San Sebastian, 2016). As a curator she has been responsible, together with Lisette Lagnado, for Drifts and Derivations, on experimental architectural collectives from Chile (Museo Reina Sofía, 2010), as well as Our Unknown, Our Chaos… on the Valparaíso School collective. Her most recent research exhibition, co-curated by Amalia Cross, was on the radical pedagogy of Alberto Cruz, one of the founders of the Valparaiso collective, and titled The Body of the Architect is Not that of Just One Man (MAVI, Santiago, 2017). Since 2016 she has been a regular collaborator with the Hospital Prison University Archive, a project space and radio station run by the artist and organiser Jakob Jakobsen in a room in the building where they both live. The 2020 Berlin Biennale will be curated by María Berríos, Renata Cervetto, Lisette Lagnado and Agustín Pérez Rubio. She is the mother to a four-year-old son, and believes he is a ninja.
Note: The biography describes the position of the narrator at the time of their participation in the Glossary of Common Knowledge. Given the long duration of the project, the narrator may have changed their respective position.
