“We must help people make the museum their own”

I was ap­pointed in 2021 with a de­mo­c­ra­tic, open and ac­ces­si­ble pro­ject to make a city, state and in­ter­na­tional mu­seum that would also be a neigh­bour­hood mu­seum. It’s very im­por­tant to open up more spaces to the pub­lic to fos­ter greater poros­ity be­tween the local com­mu­nity and sur­round­ings and the in­te­rior of the mu­seum. We want to cre­ate more areas for joint liv­ing, for ex­am­ple, read­ing areas or even a col­lec­tive gar­den.

Today, mu­se­ums should be per­me­able struc­tures that learn from the pub­lic while of­fer­ing their pro­fes­sional knowl­edge. Our pub­lic func­tion is to look after her­itage and dis­sem­i­nate ex­per­tise, but we must also be in tune with what so­ci­ety asks of us. The pub­lic also has a re­spon­si­bil­ity to let the mu­seum know what its needs are. And when I say pub­lic, I un­der­stand that as a plural no­tion, that there’s a mul­ti­plic­ity of publics. I think a lot about the role of li­braries, which are places ded­i­cated to the dis­sem­i­na­tion of cul­ture that users have ap­pro­pri­ated for them­selves.

Added to the idea of a mu­seum as a place that col­lects, pre­serves, stud­ies and archives, is the idea of ap­pro­pri­at­ing the mu­seum, of mak­ing it our own. I want peo­ple to feel Macba is theirs, be­cause it is.

The chance to work di­rectly with the artists and be close to the work is a great asset. The Po­etic In­ten­tion ex­hi­bi­tion is very much about cu­ra­tion. For ex­am­ple, when we swap some art­works for oth­ers, we some­times let peo­ple wit­ness the process of chang­ing them. We want to make the change vis­i­ble to the pub­lic, which, apart from being an op­er­a­tional change, for rea­sons of con­ser­va­tion, pro­motes a con­cep­tual change.

I would like the mu­seum to be free to enter when my time at Macba ends. That would be a way of mak­ing it rad­i­cally pub­lic. We will now change cer­tain en­trance fees with the aim of al­low­ing more peo­ple to grad­u­ally ap­pro­pri­ate it and make it feel that it is theirs. I would like the mu­seum to be­come more per­me­able. It’s very dif­fi­cult for the mu­seum to be fully de­mo­c­ra­tic but it should try to be a de­mo­c­ra­tic space: a place where you can meet peo­ple you recog­nise as your own, but also peo­ple you did not ex­pect to meet there. For years, some mu­se­ums have not counted the num­ber of vis­i­tors, only the num­ber of vis­its. For me, it is not only im­por­tant that peo­ple come to the mu­seum but that they re­turn. And their re­turn­ing will mean that there’s some­thing that at­tracts them be­yond the in­ter­est in spe­cific ex­hi­bi­tions and ac­tiv­i­ties. It will be some­thing that has to do with the mu­seum it­self as a place that they feel is theirs, that they see as a home.