Manuel Segade (La Coruña, 1977) spent the last five years at CA2M have served to experiment with the idea of a museum. To renew the ideology of institution and understand that the most important heritage of the same is its public. Now he faces the challenge of reinventing the Reina Sofía Museum, one of the most important cultural spaces in the world. Without breaking with the trajectory of the former director Manuel Borja-Villel in relation to theoretical or ideological positions, which can take further, even, it is expected that the form and attitude of the museum will change. Making it more porous to what happens in society.

As you have said on some other occasions, curating is the art of selective tradition, what is going to enter the Reina Sofía that you had not entered before? I hope that many stories will come in. I think part of the role of contemporary art museums is to focus on a future that we don't know what it's going to be, so I don't even know the kind of stories that artists are providing us and that will have to go into the museum. Not only does it depend on the decision of a direction, but it depends on listening to what artistic production itself is proposing to us. I hope that even those moments surprise me. Something that is present throughout her career and that gives her a lot of importance are aspects such as postcolonialism, feminism, gender theses, although she has always done so in a very transversal or tangential way. Do you fear being categorized as a political agent if you do not propose an open and direct form? You are talking about the importance of gender issues in my career, but 80% have absolutely nothing to do with gender issues. But on a conceptual level, yes. Of course, that's what I'm going to, the other side: what I do believe is that contemporary art for me is defined in a tradition or has a genetics connected to the 60s, which is when the regime of the contemporary was born and that has to do with class revolts, gender and ethnicity revolts. the decolonization of the countries of the South that were still under the yoke of European empires, Stonewall in 1969, the second wave of feminism that reaches art and that art in turn produces, literally, -through the new artistic genre of performance- from the body of women; Or May 68 and all its international echoes, which are a class revolt, a wake-up call. All of that is in the DNA of contemporary art and we are in that regime of the contemporary still because those issues, what we call intersectionality, are still the hottest topics. Let's say that identity and the processes of subjectivity are central in contemporary art and for me they remain so because the number of voices, the polyphony that is in that is elementary. As you said, that matters a lot to me but I don't think it's the only thing that actually has to enter the museum. For example, the ecological interdependence in which we currently live, in which we need to live in order to survive, seems to me also to be a central issue. Those stories will be, but I hope there will be many other stories as well. He has said: "Since the origin of museums, exhibitions are the material discourse of a political institution with ethical and legal responsibilities." Indeed, that is the definition literally almost from the Enlightenment itself, from the beginning of museums. I would add that really like any other public institution the museum has to contribute to the material conditions of equality. And that part to which the parity law of 2007 obliges us. The imaginaries that a museum creates are something fundamental, I trust in the power of art. You go from a space of low "institutionality" such as CA2M to another of very high "institutionality", are you worried that the loss of freedom to move from the margin to absolute centrality, do you fear an external conditioning? No, the bigger the place the more need to establish listening tools. There are a lot ofThere are many different social layers and many different layers in the cultural world and I think that is the most important thing. In Móstoles I can still dialogue with the users of the museum in the elevator when I go up to the office or walk through the building, that will hardly happen in the Reina Sofía, but precisely thanks to a huge team and the work capacities of the networks and communities that work with the museum it can be done. I think it is very necessary to listen a lot and attend to these listens to translate them into activities and projects that allow the museum to be a really open choir of voices. But if you want a phrase, yes of course: I think it is very important to lower the institutionality of the Reina Sofia. I also think that if we want to provoke communities around that co-participate in the things that the museum thinks, it is very important that those forms, let's say, of being of the museum are concretized. Look, this is another part of the definition of the nineteenth-century museum: a monumental space for the community of the domestic. That domesticity that allows people to make it their own is very important. And it can also be achieved although, on another scale, in the Reina Sofia. The museum has a very high level of security, it is an almost hostile context to the visitor. Yes, indeed. There are many ways of working there and I think the idea of hospitality is very important. The Reina Sofía was a hospital, but a hospital is also a place that is transformed in each pandemic throughout history, that becomes a place of crisis and that is also a place of exclusion because there are bodies that are decided that they do not deserve to be saved throughout history. Or bodies that do not even access care. Here is something very important that will have to do precisely with that ability to generate access. The experience of entering a museum like this should not be the same as in an airport, and this experience is fundamental, but the measures and details in future chapters... I mean, I think it's very important to understand that I still haven't been able to talk to the museum's own team about the project, etc. Starting to tell details that I have not yet contrasted with reality is like adjusting a desire to reality.How do you make him understand all the concepts that are handled in contemporary art, sometimes they are so demanding, to the general public? I believe that the management team in which I work at CA2M shows that this is possible. That the museum becomes a space of access to contemporary art in which people have the possibility to approach all these issues is something that is possible to do, it is not so rare. If not, it would not be in so many museums so important today. The amount of public that CA2M has proves it. And do you think you can scale the recipes you have practiced at CA2M to the Reina Sofia? The experience, for example, of radical imagination... One thing I've learned from contemporary activity over the years is this notion of "trans-scalativity," of "trans-scalar" that implies that we need to work at several scales at the same time to solve the problems that lie ahead, to participate at several scales, at the same time as the major, is something that has been done in CA2M. but also throughout my professional life in other projects and I think it is elementary to do it, I think I will be able to put it into practice because I have the proof that It is possible to apply these possibilities. He has always asserted the idea of representation. It is very important even on a personal level, in your image. She often wears a skirt. I think we are all aware today, more since there are social networks, that every person from the moment they go out on the street is doing a performance, building an image, an identity. As social animals, we use the costumes and other tools we have to project our own images. In my case as curator of exhibitions. When someone does an educational activity in the background he is accepting that he is in a performative action and that is something that I have worked a lot all my life. I believe that this awareness of the body is elementary and I believe that this is not only transmitted in image but also in the exhibitions I do. Returning to the theme of postcolonialism, gender, feminism and race have become a central field of contemporary conflict in the so-called culture wars. There are people who think that they are aspects that affect minorities, but these issues have become hegemonic in contemporary art centers. I do not think they are things that have become conflict: they have been conflict for centuries but, since the representation in the fine arts and perhaps more in a more evident way of his 60s that I commented before. I think that what exists in society is what exists in art, what exists in the press is what happens in everyday life, this is something inevitable and I think that as long as these are important issues they will be demanded within contemporary art. In recent years, for example, the climate emergency is central to the agendas. That simply has to be understood that what we are facing is the strength of the present and even our responsibility for the future. And that's where I think public institutions have to be part of that social dynamic and be part of giving voice to everything that happens around. Democracy is the constant sum of minorities, politics under construction. Is it important for you to pay attention to the local artistic fabric that Manolo Borja-Villel neglected, as well as the internationalization of Spanish art? Regarding internationalization, I think we are in an amazing moment of the internationalization of the Reina Sofía. There is attention abroad not only to the Reina Sofía but also to the forms of institutionalization generated by the Spanish context. It's wrong for me to say that, but CA2M is an example of that. Also the MACBA or the IVAM or Artium in Vitoria, is looking from many different places to the forms. Not so much contemporary art is being exported and I think that is fundamental to do so, to see how to permeate that symbolic capital generated by our institutions in the context of art itself is the fundamental task and I think what I have been seeing with my team at CA2M in recent years.

  • art
  • Reina Sofia Museum

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