David Ayala-Alfonso on Never Spoken Again

By A. Rayne Bacchus
On Jan 12, 2026

David Ayala-Alfonso (Curatorial Intensive alum, New York 2010) is a Colombian independent curator, artist, writer/editor, and researcher. He is also the curator of the ICI traveling exhibition Never Spoken Again: Rogue Stories of Science and Collections, which was selected in 2018 during ICI’s first-ever open call for exhibition proposals from alumni of our Curatorial Intensive. Never Spoken Again reflects on and critiques institutional collections and the contingent origin stories they often reproduce. Ayala-Alfonso expands outward from Humboldt’s Parrot, a stuffed bird in the private study collection of the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin narrativized as, among other things, the last “speaker” of a dead Indigenous language from colonial Venezuela. The exhibition brings together 16 contemporary artists whose works open up a critique of material culture, iconography, and political ecologies.

Never Spoken Again has toured to five locations since 2020, and in that time, alumni-curated exhibitions have also become a central part of ICI’s traveling exhibitions program. Here, David Ayala-Alfonso speaks to ICI intern A. Rayne Bacchus about his experiences in the Curatorial Intensive, how they informed the practice that led to Never Spoken Again, and how the exhibition (and Ayala-Alfonso’s own approach) changed through the experience of touring.

David Ayala-Alfonso: I originally trained as an artist, so I was interested in programs that were focused on the conceptual aspects of art that had heavy art theory, history, and art appreciation components to them. I had an art collective; however, I was interested in writing as much as I was interested in practice.

After [the collective’s] practice took off and got interest, we ended up needing to organize our own exhibitions. I started putting together shows, and writing pieces for the shows, trying to make sense of the interventions and contextualize the projects for an audience. I got really excited about the idea of curatorial practice, and I think a friend told me about the Curatorial Intensive. I thought this was a program for people who were more on the institutional side or who had some curatorial training, but I decided to give it a shot nonetheless, because I thought it was extremely exciting. Then I [was accepted into the program], and I couldn't believe [my evolving] interest that I had to continue creating shows.

ARB: You didn't know that that was something that you could be doing, but your writing coupled well with your passion for exhibitions, which is amazing. What impact did the program have on you or your career from that point on? What went on during the program for you?

DAA: I think there were many aspects that were quite impactful for my work. I didn't have direct access to people, objects, museums, or institutions in the way that others have, so I found myself in a very intimate experience, listening to people who I had only been reading before. I noticed that many people came from institutional contexts, so I was quite unsure. I had a lot of experience as a cultural organizer at that point, but I didn't make the connection immediately that those experiences were going to fit into a future career practice.

I was too much in my head, trying to think about what I can bring to this conversation. How can I be meaningful? How can I aid a collective effort of being together and discussing these topics? That, alongside having the access that the Intensive gives you to institutions—a lot of visits, a lot of people, a lot of mentoring, and then beginning to develop a method—that I think can feel very obscure if you're trying to get into curating on your own. Now, I think, there's a lot of literature on curating, but at the time, 15 years ago, there was not as much. These methodological parts and access to mentoring were extraordinarily meaningful for me, because I didn't really know where to start.

ARB: What propelled you into thinking about curation, or this industry, as a career choice or something that you wanted to pursue long-term?

DAA: I think the possibility of tying things together by means not only of my work, but also the work of others, extended the possibilities of the practice for me. Throughout my entire career, I've always thought of myself as an artist, championing artistic thought—in a way that's kind of my methodology, my ethos. I was also very interested in education, and I thought that if you combine this idea of being able to articulate artworks, but also put them into context with the language and the skills of education, then that's a very powerful practice. Then, curating became a way for me to keep connecting to other people, regardless of the spaces they were in.

ARB: You’ve moved around since then [from Bogotá to Chicago to Mexico City], so have you noticed differences in your practice or thought processes when you're in different places?

DAA: Oh, absolutely so. I think one of the first differences is in how contexts are organized. I wouldn't say that curatorial practice in Colombia was rudimentary; rather, there were very few formal educational programs for curatorial training [in Colombia itself]. As a result, some people studied abroad and had their own curatorial practice, or kind of built their practice up by themselves.

It was very difficult to find places or communities to have these discussions about curating. I think it was something where we all kind of crossed borders—from artistic practice or research or education into curating—going back and forth as a necessity of the context, more than something that was organized or methodological. Then shifting into the world of ICI, bringing in all these people who are working with public art and talking about methodology and literature, about curating and kind of creating a forum precisely for that, that was quite a different experience.

It felt different in that way, but when I moved around, I started thinking about, again, what can I contribute? What is important? What is something that I can bring here that can amplify, that can multiply, that can diversify the conversation? I thought of many ideas back home, that are displacing, transforming, from my cultural ethos, and seeing that we’re talking about all of these topics from an entirely different perspective. Mobilizing those subjectivities, from one place to the other, was already a very welcome condition.

David Ayala-Alfonso (center) installing Never Spoken Again with MSU Broad curators and staff, Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, 2020.

ARB: I know it was after the intensive, but at what point did you find yourself wanting to make Never Spoken Again?

DAA: It was an experience that I had in 2015. I was actually in a different curatorial program organized by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, and that was very exciting in reconnecting with curatorial peers. One of the visits that we did was to the Museum of Natural History in Berlin. There was an exhibition at the time that was dealing with the connection between art and science and these, I want to call it clumsy, discoveries in science of the nineteenth century. I saw many of the works as violent at the time. Everybody around me was super excited about it, they were like, "Wow, that's so interesting," and I was like, "This is extremely problematic."

Installation view, Never Spoken Again, Telfair Museums, Jepson Center, Savannah, 2021.

I started thinking about narrating concepts and re-narrating histories by means of their omissions, and I think that sparked my curiosity about these processes. Naturally, I met some practices that were related to these ideas, but they weren’t critical in the way that I was seeking…eventually, I had the germ of a curatorial project, and I started seeking platforms to rehearse it. I started studying a couple of practices that were seminal for my ideas, curating as a way—well, heritage as a way of creating and destroying. I rehearsed that through artistic practices that I was interested in at the time, and then that developed into the ideas that eventually became Never Spoken Again.

Greater Vasa parrot (Coracopsis vasa) ("Jacob“), in the collection of the museum fuer naturkunde, Berlin.

Most of my peers were European, and I was looking around to find somebody who would agree with me, like, "Are you seeing this?" I was shocked at the amount of complexity that was erased from those narratives about the transference of heritage and material cultures, the violence embedded in it, and those narratives that they were championing at the time. They were showing us very proudly, and I was like, "I can't wrap my head around the omissions," and I feel that this narrative that they're giving us about the parrot is perfect to twist the whole thing around.

David Peña Lopera, Ave Nocturna (Nocturnal Bird), 2019, Cinefoil and temperature control system, Variable dimensions. Photo: Eat Pomegranate Photography. Courtesy of MSU Broad and ICI.

ARB: Yeah, especially in the context of being in museums and seeing works that are, as you said, championed by the discoverers, it's hard for underrepresented voices to shine through. I think it also lends itself to one of the main themes of the show, where you have younger or lesser-known artists taking the front stage. We’re talking about lots of themes in Never Spoken Again, so how do you connect many themes together in a show?

DAA: When I thought about the concept for Never Spoken Again, there were a few practices that were very important for me to understand. As a curator, as you start making additions to a show, you start understanding the connections and the threads that are needed through the processes of articulating one work with the next. I'm trying to push, more and more, this idea of interconnectedness as a means of meaningful scholarly or thought contributions, what your work does for the world. I feel that the more I developed a concept for the show, the more I leaned into different literature about non-canonical knowledge. I thought, "These ideas are very important for me, to rethink the possibility of doing a show that is not just exemplifying and showcasing topics," because I felt that Never Spoken Again is trying to do something different and not just saying, "Let's just rehearse this new topic with the same tools." I think the concept of weaving, not mixing, the individuality or the subjectivity of those ideas and concepts became very important for me when approaching the show.

ARB: There's so many threads that can be interwoven with just two or three pieces, and that's another great feature of the exhibition. Many of the pieces in Never Spoken Again have external allusions, like the jinn in Morehshin Allahyari’s video, for example. Can you talk a little bit more about those external allusions and connections, and their importance to the show?

DAA: I think one good way to think about Never Spoken Again is as a big thinking artifact or thought apparatus. Because of the nature of doing Never Spoken Again—being produced as a traveling show, working with these fantastic artists—this can be a pretty dense effort in terms of the number of artists and concepts, so this initial idea becomes the idea that has a lot of ideas within.

As the show has evolved and as time has passed, my understanding has diversified, but I also specialized in different ways. I would probably go at a show like that differently right now. That's why some of the artists, as you mentioned, might not feel as connected to others. I had this idea that this critical museology component was very important for many of the pieces, but some of them are absolutely not connected to that. I'm thinking about Felipe Steinberg’s piece, In God We Trust, for example. The way that he's using the device of transforming something into something museum-worthy by means of language and processes—made me think about the same ideas. I think some threads are very obvious and well-developed, and some are like the germs or something that deserves a longer future.

Between the time that I started thinking about Never Spoken Again ten years ago and now, we’ve witnessed a number of practices about ecologies. There are a lot of artists that are, like, impromptu ecologists or mycologists or archeologists, or whatnot. They are not engaging with the crux of the thing, which for me is an epistemic displacement that is required—to understand why these collective practices and transferences of material culture need to be criticized in a different light. And without that displacement, that different light does not show up.

Morehshin Allahyari, She Who Sees the Unknown (still). Video. Courtesy of Upfor Gallery and the artist.

Felipe Steinberg, In God We Trust, 2013, Gold dies of a five dinar coin, 1 3/4 x 1 1/2 x 1 1/2 inches each. Courtesy of the artist.

ARB: Never Spoken Again takes an anti-colonial approach, critiquing museum structure, acquisition of knowledge, and presentation of knowledge. Being an independent curator, how has that refined your work or redefined the way that you work as an individual, critiquing larger institutions like museums?

DAA: I think the possibility of being in an institution allows you to engage in deep thought about something that's very specific, and that's fantastic, that kind of deep thought is extremely important. But when you move around different spaces, you get an understanding of how diverse display practices can depend on the resources, geographical spaces, or mandates of these institutions. A natural history museum in the UK has a very different mandate and resources than one in South America.

[As an independent curator] you can create connections between those spaces, their realities and the politics that shape them, then you can go across disciplines. Because I'm not in an institution, I don't have a mission to advance a specific knowledge: If I get interested in gardens, I just study gardens. If I get interested in mineralogy, then I go for it. All of those things I can see, because I move around. I can understand that beyond the institutional mandate, people have interests in these topics that are not related to how much they fulfill that mandate, or how much they're aligned with an institutional language. I think that possibility of connecting different worlds is important for me as an independent.

ARB: And you get, I can imagine, more freedom from doing so.

DAA: But there's a price, right? And the price is instability. I think that's what was very important for me about working with ICI on Never Spoken Again. They would create those connections, so I could amplify my idea into something that travels around for a number of years.

ARB: Never Spoken Again will be wrapping up its tour in spring 2026. Since the tour started in 2020, almost six years ago, have you noticed anything changing in the landscape of museum practices, collections, or anything like that?

DAA: Very much. When the show was originally conceived, if you think of the conversations that were taking place at the time, [the theme of this exhibition] was probably something interesting and fresh. And then, COVID-19 happened, and many of these ideas sifted into the institutional conversations, and I think they're very normal now, right? I think there's a danger to that normalization, which is taking something very present about the nature of an institution and its collecting practice, and just transforming it simply into a topic. If you see the topic of Never Spoken Again, and you think about it and you're like, "Oh yeah, I've seen a few exhibitions about the same things." I think it's important that those exist, but the underpinnings, the shift still needs some work, and that’s what I’m trying to achieve. It’s also important to think about the aftermath of the show, how it's going to be written about, how it will be rated as an experience, as a process, as a project, but also what these last public programs and educational programs will be. So I think my ideas have evolved as I see the show iterating once again.

I'm thinking a lot about this word “discomfort” lately. It is true that some of these topics have been integrated into institutions’ conversations lately, but I think they have been integrated in a way that doesn’t take away the comfort or change the status quo of the institutional frameworks and peoples. In essence, the institutions have not changed, and I think for these institutions to even be relevant in the coming years, there is an urgency around these questions demanding a meaningful change that is obscured by the prevalence of the topic. That’s why I want to do more, push it further, and why I want to create a very meaningful educational program for this last iteration in Minnesota.

ARB: Especially having gone through its first presentation under COVID, the institution's reactions may have been stifled by their response to COVID or their practices in conformity to governmental standards or other institutions. What are some things you've taken into your own practice from its time on view?

DAA: One thing that’s very important for my work now is this idea of iteration, of a recurring practice. Being able to see an exhibition, to witness the reality of your thinking in five, six different institutional settings installed differently, seeing how beautifully it happened in some places, really makes you think about museum design, curatorial practice, and the exhibition practice itself. Now, because of Never Spoken Again, I think a lot about display technologies. It really became that thinking artifact that I was envisioning, it sparked a number of future practices and present practices for me.

ARB: I like how you speak about it as a thinking artifact, how it’s going to live and breathe now and long after it closes. In its essence as a traveling show, how would you maybe envision the show differently if it was a single-venue installation?

DAA: When you have a traveling show, it means you might pick and choose some works over others that might be more complicated to install. That is true for works like Carlos Motta’s Corpo Fechado-The Devils Work,—I originally wanted a different piece by Carlos, but it was very complicated to travel. Instead of imagining the ideal show as they might exist at a major institution, I'm now thinking about the possibility of many people experiencing it in many spaces.

ARB: Where does this leave you once Never Spoken Again is finished? You've mentioned doing the programming for this show and how you have lots of thoughts about that, but what else is on your radar?

DAA: One of the projects that I’m working on now, sparked out of Never Spoken Again, is called Multiple Material Metonyms, which studies display practices themselves in terms of their political aspects of narrative and transparency. Another idea that I am developing, for hopefully another traveling show, is based on how certain urban design, rural design, and geological practices and events create the possibilities for certain forms of light technologies to develop and prosper. From there, I'm thinking about specific materialities, like industrial waste and this idea of industrial sacrifice zones.

As for Never Spoken Again, I want to compile all the memories and the efforts into outputs. I want to do a publication out of it for sure. My idea: because it's dealing with these ideas of museum design and engagement in institutional contexts, I want to develop artistic and non-artistic collaborations so I can create critical practices by means of these technologies, and invite other disciplines to engage with the problems that I see in current museum display practices and museum narratives.

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