The museum as a world map Matt Mullican in the MACBA Collection

Green is for the material world, blue for everyday life and the city, yellow for arts and sciences, black for language and red for spirituality. Matt Mullican builds a large object-based installation containing an image of the world. Having worked with these colours since the 1990s and understanding the chromatic element as a working method, Mullican first presented this work at M.I.T. in Boston in 1990, from which it took its title. Arranged in space with a structure evoking a soccer pitch, a basketball court or board game, we find everything in it: animal skeletons, human machines, photographs, flags, uniforms, artist’s notebooks... and all kinds of elements to explain the signs and mental categories with which we organise the world. As the artist explains: ‘You could say that the M.I.T. Project is a map, a way of organising information.’