Night and Day of Museums Open Houses

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In a double programme, the Meier Auditorium will host the projection of some pieces from the MACBA Collection, selected from the hundred-odd works included in the MACBA Manual, a publication that also addresses key concepts defining the museum’s programming identity. It will be a unique occasion to see works that have not been on display in the Collection rooms for some time, in their original format and on a big screen.

For decades, museums’ present and future have been a permanent subject of public debate, probably as a result of their ability to shape collective narratives and shed light on new worlds to come. However, or precisely for this reason, many of the tensions produced by the cultural wars stemming from the conflict between economic and political interests and feelings are crystallized in museums, traversing them from their very foundations. The pandemic and the crises in health, society and life and their significance have only intensified this debate on museums’ significance, their role, their scale, their evolution and their future. To the point where thinking about their legitimacy has become a matter of survival. On the occasion of International Museum Day, this round table brings together people involved in museum-related institutions that are diverse, specific and situated in different contexts, to share experiences and outlooks.

On the occasion of International Museum Day, we are presenting the MACBA Manual, a publication in which artworks, artists, ideas, places and dates form a conceptual framework that defines the museum’s identity. The entries corresponding to works from the museum’s collection analyse them and put them in a specific context and the particular conditions under which they were produced, and thus go beyond the paradigms of interpretation and representation. The concepts analysed permeate the museum’s programming and are fundamental to the construction of MACBA as a critical space. On the occasion of this presentation, three round tables will be held in which the book’s very purpose, its combination of concepts, artists and works, is put into play. To this end, we have invited artists and thinkers who contributed to the publication and who, through their work and complicity, form an indispensable part of the MACBA, to discuss the concepts of abstraction, performativity and memory/amnesia, as examples of the diverse nature of the concepts that make up the publication and that refer to practices, ways of doing, policies and poetics.

With Ferran Barenblit, Tanya Barson, Pablo Martínez, Melanie Smith, Leonor Antunes, Maite Garbayo, Itziar Okariz, Dora García, Germán Labrador, María Ruido and Marcelo Expósito.