Pepe Serra on the Sijena paintings: "You can't do a removal project without knowing how you want to place them."

BarcelonaHe The Supreme Court upheld the ruling a month ago. that forces the MNAC to return the murals in the chapter house of the Sijena Monastery. And it wasn't until this Wednesday that the museum's director, Pepe Serra, after informing the board of trustees, publicly addressed the case for the first time. "Complying with the ruling on the Sijena murals means subjecting them to a great risk of irreparable damage," Serra warns. "We are experiencing a very perverse triad," he lamented, because they must execute the Supreme Court ruling that forces them to return the paintings, they must preserve the murals, and they must legally protect the museum team members involved. But, whatever the outcome, Serra is "hopeful" that the court will assess the ruling based on the existing technical reports. And yet, he has never considered resigning, although that rumor circulated at one point. the paintings in the chapter house of the Sijena Monastery They lost their nature as mural paintings when they were torn off, and since Gudiol restored them, they have become part of a 132 m "artifact"² Made of wood and fabric, it includes the remains of burnt paintings, the thickest part of which is one millimeter. Furthermore, the different layers of this structure behave differently and are not cohesive. Nor are the remains of the mural painting cohesive, and the fire turned them into highly chemically reactive materials. Furthermore, the parts that Gudiol himself painted on plaster to complete the ensemble, 35% of the entire structure, are in an even more precarious state of preservation than the remains of the mural painting. "The complexity of this case cannot be addressed with rules, standards, grids, or ordinary questions reflecting other cases; this case is absolutely unique," explains Serra. In recent years, museum technicians have extracted microsamples of the murals and placed them in an office environment to see how they would react, and they were able to observe that they deteriorated much more than similar samples of the paintings from Sant Climent de Taüll.

Regarding the relocation, Serra warns of the "extreme sensitivity" of the complex to the "movements, operations, manipulations, and cuts that would be required to remove them." Serra did not assess the condition of the monastery's chapter house, but warns that it is essential to know its destination, whether it will be the monastery or an Aragonese museum. "A removal project cannot be carried out without knowing how it will be placed," Serra said. "The museum has not received technical accreditation regarding the destination site," he stressed.

The response to the request for compulsory execution

Legally, Serra has explained that they have not yet received theforced execution of the judgment requested by the Aragonese party, which will give them a new opportunity to speak, which will take the form of a written opposition, in which they will be able to provide more documentation and reports. Regarding the possibility of continuing the judicial process in the Constitutional Court, Serra explained that all the lawyers who have asked have warned them of the lack of "viability" of doing so.

Serra began his intervention by claiming the work that Josep Gudiol carried out in 1936 to save the burnt remains of the mural paintings"We can't talk about plunder or anything like that," Serra said. "The operation was a heritage rescue, a heritage rescue in times of war, in difficult circumstances, in a context where decisions cannot be made in an orderly, collegial, or elaborate manner." He also defended the work carried out by the museum, a world reference in medieval art, to make the work "universally accessible," conserve, and restore it, emphasizing that it is a deposit and that the property is not the property of the museum. On an institutional level, he asserts that he is not aware of any political interference, and that it is up to the Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun, to commission a report on the murals from the Spanish Institute of Cultural Heritage.

Serra also responded to statements made by Manuel Borja Villel, who compared the museum's attitude to the British Museum's refusal to return the Parthenon Marbles, calling them "irresponsible and frivolous."