Photo courtesy of Fernando Domínguez Rubio
Activity
Thursday April 3, 2025
Study of Presence with Fernando Domínguez Rubio, in conversation with Nicolas Malevé and Jara Rocha
High Latencies. [contra]panorama
The last Crisis of Presence session is to feature Fernando Domínguez Rubio, who, in line with his book Still Life, will immerse us in the everyday dilemmas faced by the staff responsible for preventive conservation, restoration, registration and setting up in the museum’s daily work.
As part of the High Latencies project, we are concerned with the active composition of presence within the museum institution. We aim to pay attention to the controversies floating within the infrastructural fabric of the museum. Previous sessions of our “studies of presence” concentrated on questions of (remote) access, tensions and atmospheres, always in terms connected with technological mediation. With Fernando Domínguez Rubio, we focus on the ecologies of care put in place by the museum to compensate for the physical fragility of the artworks it possesses, holds, exhibits, contains and produces. Our series of studies of presence leads us to the museum object par excellence, but from the standpoint of its radical instability and its always immanent disappearance.
In his book Still Life: Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum, Domínguez Rubio works on the assumption that storage rather than display is the usual state of a work of art. With him we will be discussing issues associated with the endless task of care and maintenance, and the social/technical consideration that goes into achieving them. This involves identifying figures who are often ignored, such as those responsible for recording, restoring, setting up and transport, as well as everyday objects like cotton buds and paper clips, or technologies like lorry suspension systems or the glass used in display cases. And most provocatively, we will be discussing the question of the sustainability of this ecology, its political economy and, in more general terms, the relationship between museums’ aesthetic régimes and their policies on content and storage.
In collaboration with:
this activity is part of
participants
Fernando Domínguez Rubio 
Nicolas Malevé 
Jara Rocha
artists
3 artists
![[contra]panorama](https://img.macba.cat/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/contrapanorama_iweb.jpg)
In 2021, MACBA launched the triennial Panorama, which aimed to “deepen its collaboration and dialogue with local artists and cultural agents”. [contra]panorama, the second edition of Panorama retains the same aim but works towards it through a year-long series of interventions that take the project’s title literally, in order to question both the continuing relevance of the triennial (or biennial) format and its capacity to offer a panoramic image of the present.
