A museum is not a church or a cemetery, nor is it a franchise of a luxury establishment or one duty free Like an airport, it's the place where the collection meets the visitor, and the visitor meets legacies and memory. Thus, the newly arrived visitor leaving the museum can return to the present in a less fragmented, less lifeless and automated way—much more vibrant, more knowledgeable, more indebted, and more collective. When cultural manager András Szántó came to the MNAC last January to talk about the future of museums, he said that they had changed more in two decades than in the previous hundred years. Surely the same has happened with all cultural institutions. His focus was on the shift from museums oriented toward objects to museums directed toward people, with all that this implies: thinking of them as living, social spaces, buildings and stories that explain themselves and become transparent, understandable, and rewarding by using technology, design, and education. In other words, the move from cultural institutions based on exhibition (large exhibitions, festivals, etc.) to institutions based on relationships, knowledge, and experience.
The issue of memory and cultural identities is fundamental. The recent controversies surrounding Catalan museums (the Museu Habitat, the Sijena paintings, etc.) are precisely about this. Should the museum be decolonized, as Borja-Villel called for? Of course, but without evangelists, and each museum should operate according to its own situation and idiosyncrasies. Should the works be returned in an act of political and historical plunder? No, thank you.
If social media platforms are a breeding ground for far-right voices that feed on the fascist tendencies of Spain's recent history, then cultural institutions should be spokespeople for democratic memory. A memory, of course, that doesn't conceal the power relations that have made it possible, since historically the museum has also been the place where the bourgeoisie, the nobility, and the Church have produced class representations, while the people have witnessed their defeat. For example, There was a time in the Catalan capital when architects, urban planners, lawyers, and politicians built the modern city, as well as its cultural institutions. They were Catalan nationalists from political factions that championed the Bourbon restoration and who were just as quick to applaud Primo de Rivera as to make deals with Franco, the "rotten executioner" who was never softened by the "dark hardness of the people," as Brossa recited.
Gilles Deleuze, in What is the act of creation?Quoting Paul Klee, he said: "You know? The people are missing." He was referring, very enigmatically, to the relationship that exists between the struggle of men and works of art:There is no work of art that does not invoke a people that does not yet exist.", Deleuze concludes. I believe that, precisely, many of this country's major cultural institutions have too much heritage and too little memory; that is, they fail to pay attention to this people who "do not yet exist" in the sense that has been developing, for centuries, with artists and citizens, outside of or even against the establishment. A museum can be the place where the signs of this form of resistance to oppression are presented. Therefore, the question of cultural identities and memory is neither trivial nor an issue that political parties should exploit. from the far right, nor from a right wing that courts it and, together with it, gives history lessons while seizing works and repealing democratic memory laws.
So how can we do it? The 2017 Museums Plan of Catalonia, with a horizon of 2030, already emphasized research, memory and the social element as backbones of the museum network, but it focused heavily on governance and necessary technical and management issues. And a country's memory and identity don't live solely on its technocratic bureaucracy, nor on its international symbols or its most celebrated artists, who are just as easily enthroned as geniuses as they are canned as souvenirThese effervescent movements may survive for decades, but not for centuries. Why, then, mortgage the present of culture to big names or major events? Doesn't this cause the market and the institution to overlap in their functions? A country's memory and identity are a living battleground, a conflicted and fertile palimpsest. History will always be a reconstruction based on its shortcomings. That is why, for example, a decolonial narrative is inevitable, not as a mandate but as a natural consequence of opening up and rethinking collections.
According to the writer and thinker Boris Groys, the museum is the place where the arbitrary criteria that separate what is art from what is not are forged, and where the remnants of history are transformed into works of art. Liturgical objects coexist with antique household items in what María Garganté calls "rampoina eclecticism"—so very much ours. Since beginnings elude us, museums must engage in dialogue with gaps and omissions, with legacies and ruptures, with the drifts of language and liturgies, as Garganté herself, Palau, Faxedas, Bonet, Mercadé, Velasco—who has just published a book—Calvo, and others teach us. Reading and interpreting are always deferred acts; choosing is a transaction. The museum is also the place to question inheritances, re-examine traditions, and reconstruct genealogies; This is where the relationship between the pantheon of hegemonic culture and the wasteland of the rejected and the ignored, to whom we also owe a debt, is discussed. Our Catalan culture is rugged, spirited, and austere, sardonic and full of malice; a culture of iron and of strokes, of beautiful and impossible methodologies; of voices of those in hiding, hermits, and exiles of all classes and conditions; a culture of nights of unbridled revelry and of the soul, of palaces without kings and of after-dinner conversations, of cultural centers, social clubs, and large public institutions that do not dare to kill the fathers who used cultural identity as a bargaining chip.
András Szántó advocated for a shift from museums of objects to museums of people, but each work is a unique journey into the material, social, economic, and spiritual circumstances under which it was created. The museum is the artificial space where surviving works meet the visitors who enjoy understanding the conditions of their survival. Some theorists believe that when an object enters a museum, it loses its life. Perhaps it is quite the opposite, since what has been mummified is precisely the individual and their social context: a showcase of bodies conceived as works to be contemplated on platforms and in gyms, ideas derived from all-too-familiar political and commercial formulas, franchise cities, or a... site, profiled, functional, mummified, algorithmized, routine, as if dead, as if it had stepped off the course of history.
That's why museums must be leveraged with great vigor, because they are the place where members of a culture, that is, of a territory, think in real time. The relationship with the collection—both current and future—must reflect this reality. Perhaps it's useful to apply the nexum of Roman law, understanding it as duty and as a bond. What debt has been generated, what crack? What still binds me to this past, what has died or been transformed? What tools, landscapes, and fiefdoms still whisper? From what pain do we come, from what struggle, and from what peoples? What subtle delight precedes us and still escorts us?
