Collaboration Programmes

Through its Public Programmes, the MACBA Study Centre and the Independent Studies Programme (PEI), MACBA works alongside other entities, institutions and individuals who play a part in enriching a new kind of cultural patrimony. These three platforms set up vital and necessary links between heritage preservation and the dissemination of the knowledge that stems from it. Significant additions to its documentary collection mean that MACBA is now one of the most important archives in terms of the writing of contemporary art history. In this sense, the Museum also takes on the role of research centre.

MACBA combines the production of its own content, exhibitions and publications with co-productions with other museums around the world. It also regularly collaborates with institutions that request loans of works from the MACBA Collection. The Museum’s commitment to research and diffusion allows its different areas of activities to open out and become part of a network with the complicity of external entities, positioning MACBA within a sphere of national and international scope.

"MeLa – Museums in an Age of Migrations. Reinterpreting Europe’s Cultural Heritage in the 21st Century" is a research project that aims to reflect on the role of museums – with a special focus on specific areas such as museum libraries – in the construction and dissemination of European cultural heritage, and to identify the new paths that are opening up to museums and libraries in today’s context of mobility and change.

This four-year project funded by the European Commission brings together a consortium of academic institutions and museums from five European countries, coordinated by the Department of Architectural Design at Politecnico di Milano.

MACBA’s collaboration in the project, channelled through the MACBA Study Centre, is based on the idea of exhibitions as discursive artefacts. From this point of departure, it explores different aspects such as thinking about and analysing relevant case studies from the history of exhibitions; using its own experience in managing the MACBA historical archive to develop a series of guidelines for archives and documentation, and a formal review of traditional presentation formats, in collaboration with several postgraduate programmes in architecture, interior design, etc.

Founded in 2009, L’Internationale is an ongoing collaborative project comprised of five museums and art-related archives and based on the shared use of the collections of the member institutions. The founding members of ’Internationale are the Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana; the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA); the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; the Museum Van Hedendaagse Kunst, Antwerp (M HKA), and the Július Koller Society, Bratislava (SJK).

Its aim is to collectively challenge the dominant narratives of art history and the reference cannon of Western art, and to study the inclusion and exclusion dynamics that take place in a unified European territory.

The first stage in this collaboration is entitled 1957-1986. Art from the Decline of Modernity to the Rise of Globalisation, a project supported by the European Union’s Culture Programme. It includes exhibitions, lectures and seminars for students and professionals.