Hi, I'm Teresa Cisneros, a Chicana, Mexican American, the daughter of Vicente Cisneros and Lucrecia Puente, both of Mexican lineage. I am from La Frontera, the Mexico Texas border, about five minutes from the Rio Bravo. You may wonder why I opened with this detail. The reason I opened with this is so you don't have to wonder where I am from or what I am. And because I practiced where I am from and not where I am at, I am not at this place, nor do I wish to be. Where I come from, we practice a philosophical way of being, which is if you are ok, then I am ok. We are taught from an early age that each decision we make affects someone outside of our own being. We have to think through collective being. A friend recently said to me, you are like that because you are a desert person, and desert people know they can never act alone, because to survive, you depend on one another. In Northern Mexico, Texas border is very much a desert. I have desert and border ways of thinking about the world and the many spaces and systems I navigate.

So I'm currently working as an inclusive practice lead at the Wellcome Collection. My role is to think about behavior staff changes. I was brought in to specifically look at audiences and our collaborators and partnerships. So we have a five year strategy or a strategic approach to thinking about inclusion. Our focus is to think about deaf, disabled, neurodiversity and racially minoritised communities and in a way center them more in everything that we do and how we do it.

So I think for us, we have access to diversity and inclusion. In terms of the ordering of them, I don't think much of what comes first or what comes second. In terms of terminology, I find them all very problematic. I think of them more as coded terms that allow ways for others to think about the potentiality of being more just or equitable. But in many ways, the term diversity has been used so much, that it almost means nothing anymore. And in many ways, I also think about access, and oftentimes we use or we're talking about disability, so we're focused on neurodiversity, deaf and disabled communities. And I think it's much more complex in that. And in terms of inclusion, it's too soon, we're already exclusive. And also does somebody actually want to be included? I struggle with that one, especially as a person who thinks about systems quite often. And the idea of like, do I want to be part of that system, and on whose terms and under what conditions? So for me, even, I know I have an inclusive practice lead title, but I try to focus much more on what does it mean to modeling the notion or the idea of being equitable or socially just, as opposed to kind of going, we need to be inclusive, because that can also be like a tick box. So I think of it more as behavior, as opposed to a specific target. It's a process, I guess, so when you say which one comes first, I don't actually place any of them before the other.

Well, first, we can think about the self as a system. So I always think about how we each have our own institutions, you start with your family, and then you kind of ripple out of there, which then leads of course to society. But when I think of how I practice, what I have to think about and how I move around the world, I'm constantly thinking about which is the system that's oppressing. So for me systems are really oppressive, because they're so rigid or sometimes they've been created to exclude, actively exclude. So even being at the Wellcome, I often think of their systemic oppression, because that's what we already carry inside ourselves. So this is when I'm talking about systems, it's about practices, behaviors, but it could lead to policies, to guidance, to our code of ethics. Those are all things that are put in place to keep certain kinds of ways of being in place, which are then the systems by which we navigate the world. So when I think of systems, that's what I'm thinking about, how do you flip it? How do you reconstruct it? How do you destroy it from the inside? It's about a systems approach. I hope that makes sense.

I think you have to work with it, what's already there. So I often talk about how I have a, I studied ancient philosophy, and the idea was to become a lawyer. But what happened was that while I was doing it, I was the only brown person and female person in the room. So I studied with a lot, the majority was 12 white men and me. So it left a really bad taste. The reason I went to study ancient philosophy is because it gives you kind of tools and systems of thinking about where the US governance comes from, or is inspired from. So that's what I kind of started with, but I left it, and I left it because - I would say left, I didn't leave philosophy, I finished my degree, but it left a really bad taste, so I decided to change my study because of the way other white men behaved in there, like the amount of ego and the impossibility of just being a brown body in that space, and a female body. So I finished, and I was like, what do I want to do next? I decided to study arts administration. So I consider myself to be a colonial administrator. I often think I've learned the language in the Beingness, and also a command of the notion of administration. So if I know that, it means then I can ask a different set of questions of the systems I encounter. I always think it's, if you really want to think about shifting or changing the system, you have to do it from the inside. But you first have to start with people. It's not like changing a policy is good enough. It's actually the people who embody the policy. So you have to get to the people first.

I think people have been putting, I think like diversity inclusion policies in place. So they think that if they put them in place...

Yeah, that the system is going to change, and then you are gonna illustrate change, but that's not true. So it's a really lazy way to do the work. So I can't say I've seen a drastic change anywhere if I'm really honest. So I get asked to do many radical practices or interesting ways, and I think, from where I'm sitting right now, in the UK, I see very little of that. I see a lot of stuff, which is very much about keeping the status quo in place. So people do diversity work and inclusion work, but the status quo stays there, and it doesn't shift. So I'm interested in, like how do you redefine it or reconstruct it, the status quo. It would mean putting yourself in a super vulnerable position, because a lot of people who work in the sector are careerist, so then therefore, they move in a really different way. I don't move like a lot of these people, because, you know, ultimately, I care so much that I don't give a shit. Like I do. So, you know, I say what I think needs to be said, without thinking fuck, I'm gonna hurt someone's feelings. You know, we are all gonna get hurt at some point, but I would rather say it, and everybody knows where we stand. And you know, you call the wall grey, because it's really grey, even if everybody is saying that it's a light blue. You are like, but no, it is actually grey, and you piss everyone off in the room. I'm like, ok, but let's go, let's do the work, let's figure out why you're still seeing a light blue, as opposed to a grey. And a lot of people are really afraid to do that in this country.

People don't want to give up power. I think there's a real thing around this notion of if I hold my little part of the world, and I can control it, then everything's ok. So for me, I'm not interested in holding power alone. I think I'm interested in the notion of a redistribution of it. But also I know I have power. I'm at the Wellcome and in my job, I'm a lead which means I have extra responsibilities, but I don't do the work alone, I'm always in collaboration with other people. I think there is something about how you are raised to be in this country, or in a very white westernised world, where in my world, you're not necessarily taught to be strategic or careerist, from the world I come from as a border person, because you're always thinking about being with others. So anything you enact, you always have a collective to the collectivity around you. It's not like, just you. So when I make decisions, I'm not thinking about me, I'm thinking about us. I think the liberal way is to think about the self. And I don't practice like that. So when people will say, do you know anyone that's like - I know some individuals, but they're not necessarily museums, you know, they're activists, certainly some of them are on the picket line today, because of the strikes that are happening. Those are the people I'm more interested in learning from, because they have a different way of thinking. So I think museums and collections are really interesting places. But I think for me, they're the places where you can shift people's behavior.

What goes into a museum or cultural site? I think we - I'm going to speak about working inside like at the Wellcome Collection, because that's where I'm at currently. When I used to work in galleries as a curator, it was different. I mean, galleries tend to be much more experimental spaces of reaction, of responsiveness, theoretical critical thinking is different too in galleries, they tend to have a lot more kind of academic, interdisciplinary, behavioral thinking. I think in museums and collections, they feel because of, you know, their histories, they are colonial, they are Imperial, and they're about ownership, and they're about collecting, and they're about what's mine, what I've taken, whether it's on your terms, whether you gave it to me or not. It's still in my house, I'm going to keep it, I'm going to show it the way I want. I think that there are practices that are out there, that could be adapted, but the whole institution would have to change. The whole notion of even collecting or museology would have to change, because it would mean people would have to step aside and go, ok, maybe I am the director, but what does it mean to direct with a group of people? How do we make co-decisions? Yes, I realise I have the name, I am the director, I have that power, but how do I use my power to ensure that there's many voices, and that's not just mine? So I think often of like the work I do, and I was brought in to do a specific piece of art, and I said to them, I need an advisory group, I need people around me who are experts in their fields, because I'm not an expert, I have lots of questions, I don't have solutions. So I need to be able to really listen to people and ask them why do you do these things? Why do you behave this way? Why is it that you keep showing the same artist? Why is it that they are all white? Why is it that you always go to these people? So I can ask all these questions, but then if I want to give them a list of people, I also need other people to tell me who's out there.

So the Wellcome Collection is actually part of the Wellcome Trust, and the Wellcome Trust is a charity. What we do is we mostly give money, funding to science research. So our main focus is global health. Henry Wellcome was the founder of the Wellcome Collection, and he was a pharmacist originally and then he went into pharmaceuticals. Before he died in the 1930s, 40s, in his will, he said that his collection of objects that he had been collecting should go on display. So in his will, he left the idea of a museum. So I think he had display spaces, but we also have a library and an archive. And at one point, we had over 2 million objects in the collection, we have one of the largest collections probably in the world, and we are focused on medical history, and medical objects from around the world. So Henry Wellcome was kind of a pathological collector. He had people sourcing material all over the world while he was alive, to the point where there are still boxes of his that are closed, where they have not been cataloged.

I think at some point, a lot of it was de-accessed, but we still have so much of it. And the actual people who maintain our collection and take care of it is the Science Museum. The Science Museum has recently opened the galleries, and they are called Wellcome Galleries, I can't remember the exact title, but because 70% of what's on display belongs to the Wellcome Collection, so it's like a permanent loan almost. So what we do is, we have contemporary exhibitions, art temporary exhibitions, we commission contemporary artists, we also have two permanent collections, and we say permanent as they are for 10 years. So we have one called Being Human, which we've recently opened, and it's looking at sort of big questions of humanity at this point. So things like climate crisis, things around vaccines are some of the concerns we have. And then we also have Medicine Man Gallery, which is of its time it stated, it's 10 years old. So we're going to go through a process of rethinking that collection in that gallery space, because if you go in there right now, you will be shocked a little bit, because it's really kind of an ethnographic view of art objects of people, but it's all around medical history, and medical objects. We also do programming, so people can come for events, and I guess, how we are different is because we are looking at science, health, medicine, and art. And we kind of look at the lens, the world through these four things.

The bigger questions? I would say that they should be thinking about what is the power of the institution that they're part of. But as part of it, they should really ask themselves who it's for? Who is it for? Yeah, I don't think it's much more complex than that.

But that's what I do, I am very good at asking questions. I don't have lots of solutions. I don't.

We were a pharmaceutical company, and we had shares in our company, we sold those to Metro, I think it was Metro. And then we sold our shares to GlaxoSmithKline in the 90s. And we had money, so we invested the money in different, we have shares in different things. So the money we make we then give it away. So we invest in all sorts of things.

So I'll start with why I work there. I was working for many years in the gallery sector, and then I did freelance work. And I started a project called Agency For Agency. I started becoming much more interested in policies, and the embodiment of policies and policies of care. So this idea that we all have policies in our institutions that are supposed to care for us, and protect us, but often what they do is care for the institution, and exploit the staff or they limit what you can do. And then I think at that time, I started looking at diversity and equality policy. So I was working with seven institutions in different ways, just getting their staff to really think what does it mean to have a policy, and what do you actually do with it? What's the point of having one if you don't embody it, and you don't even know how to embody it? So I started thinking, like, what do I want to do next, and I had no clue. Again, I'm not a careerist, and I'm not strategic about where I put myself, and I met somebody at a talk on Archives and Artists, and I was part of the conversation at the panel. She gave me a ride to the train station. And on the way she's like, so what do you do? So we talked and decided to meet up again and she is from the Wellcome, so I went to go see her. And I remember speaking to her and her colleague, and they were like, well we have this project coming up, we would really like to work with you. And it was really interesting, because we've been, it's around this big piece of work, which is around diversity, inclusion and access. So that sounds really interesting. I remember what really struck me was them saying that they had been to a talk or an event and that the artists who they had seen had said that they were no longer going to be, they were exhausted and no longer talking to white people about the work. And I said to her, I was really, I was like, I said, well, actually, I am not done. I've learned all that I've learned because of white culture and white education systems. Now I'm ready for y'all to pay me to tell you how to do things. So I will educate you, but you're gonna pay me, and so she started laughing. And I was like I'm serious, like pay me, I don't have a problem with it, and I don't get exhausted very easily. So I actually, if you say that's the problem, I am like ok, let's go, and I'm not gonna shy away from that. So then as I was walking out she said, oh, there's these jobs coming up, you know, they are full time, you or someone might be interested, and I said I'm not ready to do full time work. She's like oh, no, Wellcome is really negotiable. I was like, amazing. So I saw the application and just like imposter syndrome, as a brown woman, as an immigrant, as a walking intersection, because there are things I don't disclose about myself, I looked at the job and I was like, oh, it's so corporate, it's the Wellcome. And like, you see it, like, they pay really well. I don't know, I come from the gallery world where we're so underpaid. And I was like, I'm not gonna do it, and then I started doing it, and I was like, oh. And then I realised, in many ways, it was my dream job. It was a job that potentially could be shifting things in a different way, because they were really open. And for me, it was being in the belly of the beast. This is it. It's wealth, it's a private collection, it's historical, it's acquiring things currently. But what I find most interesting is the amount of money they're putting into diversity inclusion, and the number of people. So there's 15 of us that have been appointed.

It's not very public. But we have a budget, they have set aside 10 million pounds over five years, two for staff, for training, for workshops, for research. So for a lot of things. And I thought, fuck, that's a lot. You know, they really are putting their money where their mouth is, or whatever that saying is, I am not great with these things. But I thought, oh, ok, so you really want to change things, or at least you're saying you'll put the money into it. Now, whether people really change is a different question, but I thought, why not? I think this is what for me was really interesting. I'm really fascinated with the notion of healing the colonial wound. Part of my practice as well is I'm a Mexican curandera. My father was one, my great grandmother was one. And it's only recently that I've come into that, because I was told I kind of had to, and I think of why am I in this kind of place as the kind of body than I am, and what I carry with me both, from the Americas, and being here and the systems I've been educated to. So I often think like, fuck, I have an intersection of all this stuff, I can question that. And now I've been given the space and the permission to do that. And I'm like, this is why I do the work there, and why I'm there. But in terms of the Collection, yeah, it's a fucked up collection, but which one isn't? Or, you know, this is where we're now starting to grapple with, what do we do with it? How do we do it? Who's doing that? Why are we interpreting this way? It is up on like reparations, repatriation, and restitution. That's a bunch of bullshit. You know, it's like, really? Pay the people, give them their fucking money back. Like, why do I want this object when that object was probably a piece of fucking trash historically. But yet, people in this country think that piece of trash has to return back. And I'm like, no, give the people money back, buy the object back, sell it to them.

Because I think it's again, another missionary positionality. They're trying to resolve their own fucking guilt and shame. Like, really, I mean, I as a person who is around women, who's, my history is of coloniality, and I'm just like, do I really know that this is really what we, people, like my culture would really want back? Who wants it? Who's asking for it? And a lot of it has been used as diplomacy now. I mean, look at France, look at Italy. Italy gave shitloads of stuff back to China and to Mexico, because they are signing trade deals. So you know, I think lots of people get their, you know, panties in a bunch about like, oh, let's give these things back. It's like, but you are already speaking with the position of power within an institution and the majority of you are white doing this. I am like that's not ok, either. I think there were people legitimately wanting their things back, and I think there is also a presumption of what we think we know what they want back. I think that's already a question of power imbalances. And we're already speaking from a colonial position, that to decolonise us to give back, an object. I'm like, well, for me, I'd be more interested in other things. And in decolonizing, decoloniality, it's all, for me processing. It's individual, it's not about you returning the object and you've done it. I'm just like, no. What does it mean? It would mean taking away all your fucking money. The reason we are here in this room doing this is because of all that history. And at one point, how do you absolve yourself of your guilt? Or how do you heal the colonial wound? It's impossible. So I'd rather sit without that mess and all that discomfort for others. I'm not uncomfortable with this, but I think that's where all the exciting part is, if you can really go, it's a lot of shit. It's so tangled up and it's kind of, it's almost like an impossibility that the fun part of the fact is that it's almost impossible. And I think for me, that's where I get a lot of energy from. It's like, I'm angry about it, but at the same time, it's the absurdity, it's like, I'm not out there like saving lives. What I do is I work in an institution, I'm trying to actually get people to change how they behave. But I'm not a doctor. You know, people talk about this in a way that it's like, no, you need to just remind yourself of what you actually do. You're a curator, or you're an administrator. I love administrating though, I am not gonna have bad mouth administrators.

So we have policies, every institution, every Museum, every gallery, especially if you are a charity, you're under the Commission's, we also have laws that govern people who are protected, because of their characteristics. So in many ways, I think every institution or a museum, when you sign up to work for them, they have policies that you should be delivering through. I think of policies as internal laws. And they're not guidance, they're their laws, so it is how you should behave. So I really do believe that if you're working for an institution, and you sign a contract, and you're on, I would say they kind of own you between nine to five, or whatever your hours are. And if you have a job description, and you have policies that are around diversity and inclusion, then you have to abide by those laws. I think that if that's an objective to be meeting, then it's everyone's objective to be doing that, not just a select few bodies, especially the brown or the disabled, or the black bodies, which is what we often see. So it's about reminding people that they actually should be doing this work, because that's what they're paid to do there. So for instance, at the Wellcome, we have a strategy, we have a policy. So for me, the question was, we have a strategy, we have a policy, but why are you still not inclusive? Why if you are good people, well intentioned, liberal, open minded, educated, and we have some of the most educated people probably at the Wellcome in terms of like gone to some Cambridge, Oxbridge, those types, and I think, well, if you're all of this, then why are we still so exclusive? It's kind of like, I think it's taught to be logically incorrect. If you think about the logic and philosophy, it doesn't make sense, right? So I think, ok, well, if that's the case, then my question is, why are you not practicing inclusively? And you have to kind of work backwards. People often try to come up with solutions. I don't. I'm like, well why aren't you doing it? Wouldn't it be an automatic, you would assume, but it's not. And you're right, it's everything from conditioning. It's about who your friends are. It's about what you see, what you know, what you don't know. But the fact is, is we're all complicit and we're all of those things, we're all racist, we are all homophobic, we're all misogamists, we are all judgmental, we're all those things. But it's who's willing to admit it and go, fuck, yeah, I have some racist views, and maybe I need to learn how to maybe cope with them, deal with them at least between nine to five, because we're paying you, you know. And also I lobby to have, to ensure that our inclusion policy or our strategy is in everyone's job descriptions in some way. So if you're applying to jobs with us, you know that this is something that we're centering. And also with us, we have to meet objectives. Everybody has objectives for the year, that's the thing I've been lobbying for, is that you have it in your objectives to do something to address the policy, the access diversity inclusion policy, or what is that you're gonna do that year to address that in terms of your practice. But the problem is that people are really afraid of accountability. So nobody wants to hold anybody accountable, because everybody's much too fucking nice.

But that's not necessarily true. Like, I want to be held accountable. If I'm doing something that potentially is hurting somebody else, or I'm behaving in a really shitty way, I want to be told. And I do get told, like, you know, if I say something that somebody feels, oh, I'm just like, ok, well, thanks for telling me, I recognise it. You know, it's the thing of like, we're all humans, you know, no one is perfect. So I think that there's a great fear. There is a fear of like, oh, I can't tell you this. And it's like, well you should and I think that's part of the thing, is we're conditioned not to confront or really face the facts in a vulnerable and like, honest way. And if we can't be honest about these things, then that's it, we're fucked. We really are, like what's the point of doing this work then or trying to do this work? If we know what the problem is, why are we so afraid to actually really question how to get to resolving the problem? And a lot has to do with our behavior as humans. I'm not really interested if someone is uncomfortable, I don't actually care anymore. I don't have the same kind of logic as a lot of people, but I know a lot of my friends have been made uncomfortable because they're women, or because they're black, or because they're brown or because they're disabled. Why is that they are always made to feel uncomfortable, but the white able bodied, heteronormative person is super comfortable? It's like, fuck you, it's your turn to be uncomfortable. All my life, I've been made to feel uncomfortable. This goes towards any kind of institution. It's not just museums, but you know, in museums, everybody wants to be polite and nice.

It's exhausting. Being polite and nice, you know, like that kind of extreme of it, it's not - not that it's not functional, but it doesn't get us anywhere. Because, you know, I can sit around the table with a group of people, and I'm saying like, this is happening, and all I get is like smiles and like blank faces. And it's like, but what do you feel? Do you not feel anything? Like, what is it? So it almost becomes counterproductive. So being too nice is counterproductive.

Yes. So the idea is really to work with the person who then is going to be interpreting the objects. So what you do is you give them a reflective practice, that's also critical, where you give them the tools to be able to ask a different set of questions of the object and of themselves, to say, actually, I don't know, so I need to go out and find someone who does. So they admit that they don't know. And then they can do the real work with somebody else. And then they will learn how to do it better. So this, I think that's the other thing that we don't talk about enough, is that we don't all have very good critical reflective practices. We are all afraid to hold ourselves accountable. So my goal is, I have a, I'm not on a permanent role, I have two more years, if by the time I leave, everyone in that institution has 10 questions they ask themselves, before they set up a partnership of collaboration, they curate the design, anything they do, basically before you make a decision, these are the 10 questions you need to ask yourself, things like who's holding the power? Whose expertise? Why this over something else? Where is the money going? I don't know what those questions are, but I think that would help us to move towards more, a different way of working with whether it's objects or whether it's how we curate. I was asked, we're doing an exhibition on happiness for instance, we want to think about our different audiences, like diversify our audiences, basically that's what they were saying. And I said, well, who's the curator? What's the curatorial framework you're using? Who's happiness? Whose definition of happiness? Let's start with that, as opposed to like, how do we get them to the door.

Yeah. It also tends to be very Western. But you know, it's great, you know, the curators have been really thinking about it.

I probably would have told myself to recognise the compassion I had inside myself, and all the time that I had. I work from a place of compassion, as opposed to empathy. But to actually be able to recognise that that's the way I've been, and not feel that I have to defend the notion of empathy, because I think that's what was really big. So I think, just to kind of accept that, I have a lot of compassion.

I would give it away. I don't know, who would ask me? You know, who's gonna ask me for it? How do they know I have it? Who gave it to me? You know, I think these are the questions.

I would have to ask myself all these questions like, why me and not somebody else? I probably set up a group of us to give it away ultimately.

Stop reading theory to start fucking doing things on admit we are all complicit in an oppressive system. And what are you doing about it?

Thank you.