María Berríos is a mother, sociologist, editor, and curator. She is currently the curatorial programmes and research director at MACBA (Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art), Barcelona. Her work focuses on contemporary art, politics, and culture in Latin America and beyond, with a special interest in collective cultural experiments linked to internationalist solidarities and the “Third World” movement of the 1960s and 70s. She was a cofounder of the Vaticano Chico collective in Chile. Among her curatorial projects are Song for Many Movements (2024) at MACBA in Barcelona, In the Jungle There is Much to Do: 50 years of the Solidarity Museum (2022–23) at Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende in Santiago de Chile, The Crack Begins Within (2020) at the 11th Berlin Biennale, and Drifts and Derivations (2010) at the Museo Centro Nacional de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid.

Can artists be in solidarity through their work? Can donating a work of art be an act of solidarity? Can solidarity be curated? What could a Museum of Solidarity look like?

All these questions were posed as instituting acts by the MSSA (Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende) born in solidarity with the 1970 Revolution in Chile and in support of the struggles of the “oppressed people of the world”. After the 1973 military coup, it turned into a museum in exile, a vessel of resistance inhabiting the homes and movements of the political refugees fleeing the military dictatorships of the south. Art is – and always has been – situated and committed to the world's materiality: art is always political. This is the premise of the solidarity museum, whose history of instituting became a method of political action. Not through the weaponisation of art, but by understanding art as a weapon.