Sijena: medieval paintings and national resistance

Comparing the art of Sijena with that of Taüll helps us understand what a nation is. In both situations, mural paintings that adorned the walls of Pyrenean churches at the beginning of the 20th century were removed using the technique ofstrappo and taken to a museum for safekeeping. Unlike the treasures of the British Museum or the Louvre, which come from former plundered colonies, everything here would have been lost were it not for the Catalan institutions. But now Aragon is demanding the paintings be returned despite the risk of irreparable damage, while the inhabitants of the Taüll Valley are perfectly content with the interplay established between the replicas they have in their churches and the exhibition in the Romanesque galleries of the MNAC (where, incidentally, they have free admission). Why is no one from Taüll asking for the return of the originals?

I don't want to waste this page explaining what we all know, which is that Spain is a constitutively anti-Catalan state, including a region like Aragon, where the PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party) has had thirty years of government to implement its famous plurinational pedagogy. Instead, I'm taking advantage of this latest defeat to talk a little about the relevance of the MNAC in contemporary Catalonia, and how a relationship of national trust helps transcend the cliché that works of art only have meaning in their original location and multiplies the emancipatory potential of heritage.

The museum is the institution that allows modern states to define their identity. As philosopher Boris Groys explains, when we stop believing that everything is guaranteed by God, we have no choice but to ground our essence in material and publicly observable actions. In the past, identity was something of the spirit, left in the hands of oral myths and the infallible memory of the gods, but with secularization, the only way we have to define who we are is to dedicate public resources to preserving the books, monuments, and works of art of the past. If you look inside yourself for the content of Catalan culture, you will find nothing but references to stories that have come to you thanks to being found in archives like the MNAC (for digital natives: yes, the internet is a type of archive).

Now, the beauty of today's archives is that they never stand still. Although the classics remain a strong protagonist, museums (or large museumized monuments, such as those of Gaudí or the monastery of Montserrat) increasingly promote more temporary exhibitions, reorganize their collections, incorporate recent works, change discourses, study the past from new perspectives, host events video mappings, they cede space to contemporary artists for interventions, and so on. It's the same game established between publishers and libraries: each new book engages in dialogue with the preserved past and questions the official narrative in some way, and ultimately, the best critiques end up incorporated into the collective archive, strengthening it.

This vitality of archives is the result of the emancipatory project of modernity as expressed in culture. The idea is that, without archives, we would be so hooked on the dictates of the powerful and their propaganda media that, like illiterate serfs, we would have no room to compare the present with other realities, to distance ourselves critically, and to imagine another world to fight for. When a people have no memory, or when they only store it without engaging it in dialogue with the present, they are defenseless. And the other way around: Picasso was able to innovate radically because just a few months before creating his first Cubist painting, he was looking at the Romanesque carvings at the MNAC. More than any concrete content of history, our identity depends on the ability to tell this story and discuss it together.

The beauty of the Taüll case is that the mutual trust between the valley's inhabitants and the MNAC allows us to go beyond the zero-sum struggle for ownership and reap the benefits of this modern form of conservation. In the context of the Barcelona museum, Taüll's art is not only better protected, but the institution uses its size to make it accessible to many more people and keep it alive precisely where power is greatest and where the most decisive public conversations are held. At the same time, the replicas of the Taüll Valley allow the stories to be told in their own right without any difficulty. Contrary to the idea of the original for the original's sake, the true power of art in modernity does not depend on any transcendental ownership of the works, but on the stories we are able to tell with them.

With all this we can also understand that if the museums of Madrid, which have hundreds of times more budget than the Catalan ones, are filled with works by Catalan masters that we would want in museums here, or they can keep pieces like the Guernica Without anyone claiming them, it's because having rich and robust archives is no small feat. In a free nation, culture gives you immense power to tell and reinvent yourself whenever and however you want, while in a subjugated and pacified community, that power gradually diminishes.