Ockham Lecture with Armando Perla

5.30pm doors, 6pm talk begins

What does it mean to curate from the land, from memory, and in resistance? In this Ockham Lecture, curator, educator, and former human rights lawyer Armando Perla will share their evolving practice of Indigenous Transnational Mesoamerican Museology – a framework that emerges from Nahua, Maya, and other Indigenous ways of knowing across El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, and their diasporas.

Rejecting extractive models rooted in colonial museum practice, Perla’s curatorial approach centres land-based relationality, community authority, and ancestral continuity.

Through a series of deeply collaborative and intergenerational projects – including Imborrable: La Tierra de Nuestras Memorias (El Salvador), Beyond the Vanishing Maya: Voices of a Land in Resistance (Guatemala and Canada), and The Museum of the Carnival of Huejotzingo (Mexico) – Perla explores how Indigenous curators, artists, youth, and elders are reclaiming the museum as a site of cultural resurgence, political memory, and ceremonial practice.

Speaking from both lived experience and scholarly research, Perla invites us to reimagine what museums can become when they are rooted in Indigenous sovereignty, transnational kinship, and decolonial imagination.

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Armando Perla (They/Them) is a non-binary queer mestizo (Nahua and Euro-Salvadoran) international curator and museum consultant. Perla is Artistic Director and Chief Curator for the Textile Museum of Canada, where they are currently on leave to complete their PhD. Previously, they were also Vice-President of the board of the Canadian Museums Association (2021 - 2024) and Chief Curator for the Toronto History Museums at the City of Toronto.

From 2019 – 2021, they were a board member of the International Council of Museums’ (ICOM) International Committee on Ethical Dilemmas (IC-Ethics). Between 2021 and 2022, they curated a major children’s exhibition on historic memory and human rights for the United Nations Development Program and the Swiss Agency for International Cooperation in Central America in El Salvador. They hold a Bachelor of Laws from l'Université Laval in Canada and a Master of Laws in International Human Rights Law from Lund University and the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law in Sweden.

Perla is currently a PhD candidate in Art History and Museology at the University of Montreal and in 2025, they received the King Charles III Coronation medal for their contributions to the Canadian and international museum sectors.

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Armando Perla visits Aotearoa as a guest of Objectspace and The Dowse Art Museum.

The Ockham Lecture series is an annual programme of lectures and panel discussions across different themes that critically engage with craft, design and architecture. This programme is supported by Objectspace's Lead Partner Ockham Residential.

Images:

[1] Armando Perla, photograph by Paula Rivera

[2] Santa Crucita by Juan José Guillén pictured in Beyond the Vanishing Maya: Voices of a Land in Resistance, a recent project Perla will discuss in this lecture, photograph by Darren Rigo