Lluís Nacenta: "We cannot make a mix without criteria of the Design Museum's collections"

BarcelonaCurator, writer, musician and researcher Lluís Nacenta (1976) took over the direction of the Design Museum in March, after José Luis de Vicente left the position prematurely. Nacenta was the director of Hangar, has collaborated with the Mies van der Rohe Foundation since 2012 and is a trustee of the COAC Foundation. In the field of teaching, he has been a professor at several design and architecture schools in Barcelona, among which are Eina and Bau. Before arriving at the Design Museum, he was head of events and exhibition experiences at the production company La Manchester. And among the exhibitions he has curated, AI: artificial intelligence, at the CCCB.

His selection process was surrounded by controversy. The Visual Arts Platform and the Association of Museology Professionals requested that it be stopped immediately because it did not meet the minimum conditions required "of transparency and free competition". They denounced fifteen flaws in the rules. How did you experience it?

— I was focused on doing my job well, and this criticism was off base. Obviously, it worries me. I know that Icub is committed and has an open dialogue so that these selection processes are more in tune with what professional organizations are demanding. And what I hope is that this dialogue takes place and is fruitful.

Your project is still quite unknown. A few weeks ago, during the presentation of the next season, you announced that you will put "material culture" at the center. What more can you say about it?

— Now I can present a project with much more knowledge of how it can actually be executed. My initial proposal was already leaning a bit in this direction. That is to say, I have some ideas, but the most important thing is to carry out an initial process in which you investigate, dialogue, reach a consensus, and organize a real implementation of these ideas in the museum space and within the timeline.

José Luis de Vicente left two years after taking on the position of director because he could not carry out his project. The more conservative sector attacked him very harshly, especially for the exhibition Matter matters, by architect Olga Subirós, which brought into dialogue objects from the collection from different eras. During the season's presentation, he questioned the personal stamp on the projects. But you were chosen for a specific project. What did you mean by that?

— I understand that it makes sense that it was understood this way, but I was not thinking about José Luis's case, but rather about the fact that often an identification occurs between the curatorial task and the management task. That is to say, we have all seen many cases, for example, in which the director of a museum is the curator of some projects at the same museum. This is not my commitment and it is not the model that I like the most. I will not curate any program at the Dhub in the next five years. It seems to me, and even more so with such a multifaceted facility as the Dhub, that your task should be that of a director, a little more meta, with a bit more abstraction. My concern must be to make it possible for curators with very different expertise to contribute each season to making a program that is coherent and balanced. On the contrary, what happens, is the exhibition curated by the management more important than the others?

What did you think of Matter matters?

— I liked it a lot. Obviously, it is a complex exhibition, because there are still many difficult topics. But to me it seems like a very good project, which gives us a great opportunity to work, to establish conversations. We will work on it a lot, I already have the conversation open with Olga Subirós to carry out an ambitious program of conversations around the exhibition.

Why is it important to focus on material culture?

— The idea of material culture is nothing more than a broad conception of what culture is, of how we relate to objects and how we relate to the material basis of objects. And I like it as a common thread, because it gives us the opportunity to have one very important leg in the field of design and another in the museum's collection, that is to say, in all its heritage dimension.

Should the collection's narratives be focused on design, or can the objects be used to address contemporary world issues?

— No cultural project is truly relevant in its environment if it does not contribute to the debate on contemporary crises. This, it seems to me, any historian would tell you. Within our heritage, the case of clothing is very clear; that is, our fashion collection takes on a most interesting meaning when we look at it to gain knowledge about current fashion. The programmatic line I propose takes the idea of material culture as a common thread, and with all the expertise, all the stories, all the techniques, all the knowledge that material culture brings us, to ask ourselves how we can best address the crises of contemporaneity in exhibitions, in debate programs, in school programs, in festivals.

Does the disciplinary division of collections into decorative arts, clothing, and industrial design make sense today?

— The thing is that it is an inherited distinction. The Dhub collection was built by incorporating collections that had different origins. There are technical reasons; the conditions required for the preservation of a historical garment are not the same as those for graphic material or a contemporary design object. In storage, we must maintain subdivisions that are technical, for reasons of material preservation. And then there are areas of expertise that it is very important to maintain, personified by the expert historians in the different cultural traditions that are consigned in the different collections. We have people who are experts in ceramics, fashion, graphic design, decorative arts... and we cannot lose all this expertise. In other words, we cannot create a jumble without criteria. Now, this does not mean that later, when we do research, outreach work, and present the collection in exhibitions, we have to strictly adhere to these disciplinary divisions of the collection, because then we would be telling partial stories. For example, the first project we have already started working on, which is the new exhibition of our fashion collection, in which we are working with Sílvia Rosés as curator. It will not only have garments, but will also feature graphic material and furniture. The main focus will be our fashion collection, but in order to explain it well, we will have to contextualize it with other elements from the collection.

During the presentation he pointed out that his job is for the museum to run "like a lightning bolt". Five years from now, with which milestones will he be satisfied?

— The challenges I set for myself for this term can be summarized in three main lines. The first is that the Dhub program should be more ambitious, that is, of even higher quality, and more coherent as a whole. The second is that more people should come, but this is necessarily linked to broadening the spectrum of people who come, that is, not only having the professional public, which I believe we have, but also a more civic public, a more, let's say, cultural public. And the last one is to strengthen our role on the European and international scene. A design museum in Barcelona, which is a city that has such a powerful history and such a powerful present in the discipline of design, seems to me to have the potential to play a more relevant role on the international scene.

So, for you, does Barcelona continue to be a design capital?

— If we hold on to the image of the design city of the 80s or 90s, we are wrong. But if we look at the current professional context of design, it seems to me that it remains a capital of design.

What does Barcelona currently stand out for?

— Clearly, in the dimension most related to the digital industry, such as the case of video games, and in the context of digital arts; this year we are celebrating the first edition of the Digital Arts Biennial. The effervescence of creators in the digital sphere in Barcelona and Catalonia is very important. And I see totally cutting-edge proposals in the fields of graphic and industrial design, architecture, and interior design. What is happening is that the sector and the city have transformed, and now the discourses are different. For example, architecture has moved from a more monumental approach to a more sustainable one. Now, leading architecture projects are presented and developed in a way that is much more discreet, which has much more to do with the neighborhood, with the relationship with the street. That is to say, an entire dimension of the spectacular nature of architecture has been deactivated. But this is not a crisis of architecture, it is an advance.

In the previous stage, it was planned that the Dhub would be the home of architecture and urban planning. Now that the Barcelona Architecture House exists, is this function maintained?

— The Casa de l'Arquitectura must lead it, obviously. But it seems to me that it would make no sense for us to dissociate ourselves from architecture, which is a discipline that in many ways is inseparable from design. It makes no sense for us to work with our backs to it or to create absurd coincidences. We have a fluid, constant, collaborative relationship with the Casa de l'Arquitectura and the Mies van der Rohe Foundation, with the Chief Architect of the City Council, and we work in coordination with this context. For example, we are working on the exhibition that we will hold for the Bohigas Year. Obviously, this only makes sense in coordination with all the institutions dedicated to architecture. And, obviously, our exhibition on Bohigas will have a special emphasis on his side as a designer, which is not particularly well-known, but is very important. It would be a big mistake for the Dhub to stop being interested in and working in the field of architecture.

What is the European role of the Design Museum?

— We are already working on our exhibition projects for the coming seasons in coordination with various European museums. We are doing what I believe an ambitious Barcelona museum should do, which is to contribute to the European conversation. And this can be done in several ways: through co-productions, that is, projects that we work on from the beginning with a museum in Germany or Belgium, and which is an exhibition that will already have an itinerary conceived from its first edition, or by receiving projects from other museums as traveling exhibitions. We place the international dimension at the center of our exhibition program. Last week, we attended the Museum Network Conference meeting in Rotterdam with our head of exhibitions, Àngela Cuenca. We are very well positioned for our projects in the coming years to have this dimension. This is the role we play today in Europe, and even beyond, because we have also initiated conversations for a possible collaboration with Hong Kong, because it is also important to look a little beyond our immediate European context.

And does the museum have enough muscle to do it? José Luis de Vicente requested that the museum not be only municipal.

— We are doing well. I found the Dhub up and running, with an ambitious program, but it is an institution that has room to increase its program, its team, and to collateralize its budget [this year's budget is 6.18 million euros]. That is to say, the budget in itself means nothing, the budget must be accompanied by your capacity to execute it, to be more ambitious with the program. You can only ask for more budget if you can say that you can do better exhibitions, debate, dialogue, training, and mediation programs. We are in a position to be even more ambitious with the program and, therefore, to be able to spend more public money on what we do.

You were the curator of the CCCB exhibition AI: artificial intelligence. How do you see the impact it has on creativity?

— We will develop some programs in this regard, because obviously in working with the collection there are now AI systems that are very useful for everything from inventory to more research-based projects in the collection. We are thinking about and launching programs that will address this problem. My position is very clear: AI must be regulated, but it must be regulated courageously, because there is no technology or sector that is not regulated. Can you imagine if the automotive sector were not regulated? It would be inconceivable. All technologies that affect daily life and the labor market must be strongly regulated to preserve the common good. Regarding the professional sectors of designers, artists, and creatives, I am also very clear about this, and we will try to implement it in all the museum's programs: the professional rights of the creative sectors must be defended. Beware of the discourse that says that generative ideas are creative; I am convinced that they are not. They are generative, that is, they produce things that did not exist before. In this sense, they have produced an image, a text, a melody. But creativity is not that. You must have a very poor idea of what creativity is to consider that generative AI systems are creative. We need to care for and protect human professional creative sectors from a professional point of view.

The urban and city role of the Dhub is also considered.

— It is a project that I have very clearly on the table. For example, I was just thinking about a project for Sant Jordi, and we still find that it is hard for us to get people to come to Glòries for Sant Jordi. Now that the construction work is finished, that the Dhub will have the opening with the metro and that it will be a very busy place, I would like to contribute a little to this extension of the city towards the Meridiana. That is to say, to reverse the idea that Glòries is far away, because it is not far from Plaça Catalunya. If you look from the Pompeu Fabra University Ciutadella campus, there is L'Auditori, the National Theatre, the Encants, the Dhub and projects like the Farinera del Clot. It seems to me that there are many arguments to invite the public to come. The Parc de les Glòries, with the clearing, is an extraordinary and well-lived space. It seems to me that there is a very good opportunity to create culture in the day-to-day sense, that is to say, a place that neighbors frequent. I want people to come to see the exhibitions, but it is also good that a facility is a place where people spend the afternoon, that people come to hang around Glòries or the Farinera. This is a dimension that I would like to work on, because it is a challenge that is by no means easy.