A Possible Museum

A Possible Museum is a new way of approaching the institution. One of the collateral effects of the growing prominence of curating within the field of art production has been the transformation of the artistic director into an authorial figure, who must leave their signature on the Museum. The arrival of a new leadership is often heralded as that of a new individual vision that will reshape the institution in their image, marking a ‘new era’ that owes little to the past. This way of understanding the function of the director not only legitimises and serves to perpetuate extremely hierarchical and vertical relationships of power, but also dismisses all existing knowledge. The intention is, above all, to generate the necessary time and space to take off in another direction, generating a context of listening and mutual learning among the broad community that makes up the Museum, of which management is only one part.

Conceived from the beginning in the medium term, it aims to put a temporary halt to the productive flux in order to denaturalise habits and norms that have ceased to be questioned and enable the practice of thinking collectively about other forms of doing. Far from starting with a clean slate, it will share existing knowledge and try to identify what is still needed. With the history of the institution in mind, it will revaluate what has already been done, recover unrealised projects that can now be reformulated and give new impetus to good intentions that never materialised. A Possible Museum is not only the Museum that could be but is not, the ideal projection of some unfulfilled desires. A Possible Museum is also what can be done, the framework of possibilities that open up, yet are still restricted by what already exists. It is neither the avant-garde impulse to produce anew while rejecting the past, nor the conservative instinct to perpetuate what is already established, but the affection with which we can take care of something for its own good, and not only, nor always, to make it grow.