Roc Laseca: "we already know how to die in museums, now we have to learn how to live in them"

Roc Laseca holds a Doctorate in Art Theory and Cultural Prospecting, graduated from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, the University of La Laguna and the University of Helsinki. His latest book The Imparable Museum. On Genuine and Soft Institutionality (Metales Pesados Editions, 2015), turned into a bestseller of the new museology, has become a reference text for researchers and museum directors. 

In 2013, as a result of a deep institutional crisis in Tenerife, he founded Los Encuentros Denkbilder, an intensive laboratory that imagines a future museum and which he has continued to run semi-annually, with his colleagues Chris Dercon, Director of the Tate Modern, Nicolás Bourriaud, Director of the École Nationale de Paris, or the artists J. Kounellis, and Pablo Helguera, among others. He is also runs the Saludarte Foundation's International Exhibition Program in Miami, where he has commissioned the first projects in the city to Carlos Garaicoa, Marcius Galan or Lydia Okumura, among others, and where he established the international seminar Latin Off Latin: Collecting Latin American Art Outside Latin America, in collaboration with the regional curators of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, El Museo del Barrio and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. His anthological exhibition of Bill Viola at MOCA North Miami received the New Times Best Museum Exhibit Award and earned him his first nomination for the US National AICA Award for curatorial achievement. He is also the Spanish editor of Joseph Kosuth, with whom he has worked during the last year and a half to bring to light his first Spanish anthology in a special co-edition of Metales Pesados (Santiago de Chile) and La Casa Encendida (Madrid), compiling manifestos and foundational texts of conceptual art, in a review and extension of his first book published by the MIT in 1991. In his recent conference as a guest speaker in the Extraordinary Chair of Critical Museology of the British Council and UNAM Mexico, he defended the need for a flickering museum, as the only possible option for reimagining a joint public future, and which he retakes in this conversation.

Jenny Gil Schmitz (JGS): Political and economic crises are undermining the budgets of European and American art museums and forcing them to rethink their functioning, their financing and their relationship with the business sector while China opens about 200 new Museums every year. Do you think that the traditional institution of the museum is being diluted? What do you think of the rise of private collection museums?

Roc Laseca (RL): I have always thought that "museum" is one of those hollow words, like "ideology", that we fill them when we want to use it as a batter to defend ourselves, to protect our identity. But "museum" is also above all, one of those hollow buildings, like a hangar. An empty space that keeps things that serve us to go to other places, to connect with other times and, in this case, other forms of social imagination. In China, as you mention, what grows is not museums, but the museum gap that is expanding because of buildings that suffer at the same time a chronic deficit of programs and contents. Now the country is full of hangars, when they have not yet stopped to think about the flight routes and destinations to go. But do not go to China to observe this. In the West are very few cases in which a museum project is not exhausted when the last brick of its building has been placed. Museums often collapse the very night of its inauguration, as having already accomplished its task: to be built and to remain there like whales stranded on the surface of the urban crust.

In principle, that the museum is in crisis (at least in economic crisis) should not be a problem: what we have traditionally understood as a museum is an institutional concept and a social experience that has always been redefined from unstable historical moments. They were born as revolutionary apparatuses to assert the solidity of the cultural histories of the nations, when those same nations still lacked an institutional and democratic tradition. In fact, since then, these institutional structures have been too exposed to uninformed policy, they are too dependent on the support of the system. And so, it is also true that they do little more than perpetuate a status quo, both the political apparatus and the knowledge and experiences that they articulate. We have to affect these structures from other non-formal experiences ("clandestine strategies" called Lippard), or any other form of social energy that we do not even dare to recognize as art.

The problem of clandestinity is that few things escape the big data. That is why it seems almost impossible to imagine a revolution, and many have resigned themselves to accepting resistance as an apt model. A harmless resistance on the other hand, unless we carry it out in less codified environments, less accessible by the algorithms that govern us. Like the countryside, for example. Some time ago I have been pointing out that the revolution that is to come will not be formal, nor urban. The countryside I think provides an alternative to consider seriously, forces us to think a new idea of experience, vital time, sense of success and failure. It distorts even what we mean by public space, which we traditionally claim for common use, but always within the framework of the urban circuit. A Rural Museum, therefore, seems to be able to redefine certain social problems and institutional rhythms under a new idea of private space and public memory. A flickering and rural museum, which does not have to be always there, available, that connects only intermittently with new forms of mediation. I think it can be the most honest to restore a public sphere that, as we know from Kluge and Habermas, is never stable either.

JGS: The space for restaurants and cafes, bookstores, gift shops are growing in museums and the space dedicated to the art exhibition is being reduced. The redistribution of museum space is related to the creation of new audiences and the role of the museum in the cities. Do you think that the experience of the public with art is changing?

RL: First we should remember that a museum is not an exhibition-making machine. It is here to build new imageries and throw others down. It has come to give a constant pulse to reality. That's why we expect the museum to be functional and at the same time we expect it to be not. It plays an urban role as a service provider and, simultaneously, ignores the inertia with which we usually imagine the world to rethink new collective options. It looks like a museum but it also has a non-museum look, it looks something else, something that may seem like an active and participative social environment. Here the key is not in the ontological dimension of the museum (in knowing whether it is or is not), but in its epidermal dimension. The key is to know if it seems, if it has the appearance of it. And in the game of appearances we have turned all our curatorial efforts, when still what is at stake is the collective imagination of the new social order. In this line, I have always believed that the Museum behaves like a ball in the sense of Michel Serres: it is a quasi-object. Its meaning and its nature happen to not be able to be completely grasped by anyone. Its function is to be able to always be hand in hand: in not being a complete object for anyone in particular, to be an instrument of the us, that works only when shared. And yet, their way of working has been co-opted by consensus engineering and neoliberal participation. Today we do not go to the museum to interrogate ourselves, to find out who we are or who we were. Rather, we only participate in their field of simulated experiences. We are used as bodies that have limited scope of action, without actual level of participation and interpellation with what is addressed in the Museum. In order for this consumption of the Museum to function, the participatory surrender of the citizen must be presupposed.

That is why a new idea of experience is radical and urgent. Beyond what we have so far understood as public. It is necessary that the Museum of the Future begins to grow in asymmetrical forms. As a tentative space, designed with dotted lines (in the manner of Cedric Price) and not with continuous lines. To flee from the solid box, to turn permeability and porosity arrogated by global corporate interests, into effective and affective collective strategies with which we can reimagine our position in the world.

Sometimes they ask me what would be my understanding of this Museum of the Future. And I think it's becoming increasingly clear that it looks quite like one built by Andres Jaque, regurgitated by Chus Martinez, tested by Donna Haraway and possibly based in any city ruled by Leoluca Orlando, which would be safe guarded by the Army of Love by Ingo Niermann and Dora García. On second thought, this museum already exists wherever we want it to be: it depends on an architect who does not build, on a curator who imagines, on a scientist without a laboratory, on a mayor who disobeys the normative and on an Army that only embraces.

That museum already exists as a Temporarily Autonomous Zone. As a space always possible. And it is about that: to create temporarily autonomous zones to promote genuinely unique experiences. Forms of life that can only be found in the museum, apparent antagonisms, revolutionary energies and counterrevolutionary structures, instructive memories and productive forms of forgetfulness, counterintuitive narratives... All this, at the same time, opening new chronologies, and avoiding to synchronize them with the demands of production and consumption systems. To flee from this absolute synchronization that today seeks to align our forms of experience with a continuous autobiographical writing is what will mark the way to the imagination of what is still possible, which opens in times asymmetric, complex and uncertain. I believe that, in part, there is today one of the first tasks of the museum: to reclaim its political potential as a space for transfers. The Museum is strengthened when it acts as a contact zone, as a place of transfers. Transfers of all kinds: between institutionalized and experimental knowledges, between educated and barbarian bodies, between knowledge flows, between memories.

And these constant and necessary transfers mean that museums are not settled on the surface of cities. They are rather suspended somewhere between history and fiction. In this space they coexist with infinitude of experiences, of stories, of forgetfulness and forms of memory. They are not the result of multiple negotiations, which result in the building and planning of a particular museum. They are the negotiation itself, the knot that binds relationships with different human and nonhuman experiences, that allows to construct an architectural space in the trasnmaterial, in which connects objects with ideas, forms with experiences, technologies with affective systems, with social environments, with associated and dissociated memories that are found. They are a cosmopolitical agreement, as fiction is a cooperation agreement. A space for the transitory, contingent, hybrid. One of the few places we have been given to replace density by connectivity. These are the different constitutions we live in, and the museum allows us not to take for granted the agglomeration of humans, it must also work in the grouping of the nonhuman, the animal, the vegetable, everything alive, and also everything which is not alive, the inert, the mineral, the transmateric, the fossil. It must work in these conjunctive and contact spaces.

JGS: Angela Merkel was photographed contemplating a Monet at the Museum Barberini in Potsdam on January 20, 2017 while Donald Trump was taking the oath of Office to become the 45th President of the United States. His act can be read as a challenge to the media attention that rested on Trump that day in the whole world. Is the museum the last refuge of society?

RL: Angela Merkel had the opportunity to experience something for that others lose their lives: a place to escape when things are not going well. But it has been her protectionist policies that have drawn a new redistribution of the world that has caused some 3 million people to be in a state of transition: the interrupted migration has turned people into liminal beings, men and women waiting for a kind of community ritual that will give them identity and destiny... Staying halfway, recognizing in-betweennes as your only homeland, will force to redefine working conditions, forms of progress and development and, among other things, what we have so far understood as life. And here again I can not see the Museum but as the only alternative to reconfigure new ideas, and test other forms of experience. Museums are architectures for life, but not for any sort of life, they are for complex life systems, which have been modified throughout history with the Museum's own function.

Unfortunately, today it is not unusual for people to die in the Museum (we have seen it in the murders of Ankara or in the shootings at the Bardo Museum in Tunisia). The Museum has played a cynical past: it has converted its metaphorical comparisons as a mausoleum, as a temple for death and relics, into an explicit curatorial program. Unfortunately, we already know how to die in museums, now we have to learn how to live in them. And for new ways of life, we need new forms of museums.

By 2050, forecasts predict that the planet will have one billion ultra-poor people. If we hope that this situation does not trigger a new global way of life, massive flows and unimaginable displacements, if we hope that closing the doors of our houses will suffice and that it is enough to strengthen our borders to prevent contact with the barbarians, we are not prepared for what is coming.

The dictatorship of social abstraction versus concrete life forms emerged under the label of models of neoliberal governance. And now that neoliberalism will have to deal with the consequences. We can no longer take for granted the imposition of abstract life on the individual experiences that constantly redraw the current collective project. The new notion of the social can no longer rest on the hypothesis of a contract, but rather on the radical experiment that we perform whenever we ask ourselves for what we are. And above all, for what we are together. I do not know if I would call it a "refuge", but at least it should be a space to "welcome" our new questions. Suspicion about our own group design must be uncovered to give way to a steady stream of experiences that leads to a growing tightening between our forms of life and our institutional models.

The problem is that our democratic institutions were not designed to address issues of interdependence. They were not designed to address issues of coexistence or cohabitability. And here I do believe that the Museum can play a critical role as an institution that finds itself in the middle of everything: between the state and the crowds, between creativity and the market, between phenomena and discourses... to approach a new idea of memory that allows us to test new public options and to disinform certain institutional given structures, linked to the human and the vital.

If the Museum traditionally deals with memory, and memory is what survives, then the Museum deals with something that is not strictly human. A time and a story that surpasses us, and a narration that is greater than the sum of the stories we tell. I think there is something magnificent and over-scaled in all of this, or at least in the way we have understood memory so far. This overflowing, and seemingly unattainable dimension should pick up the function of the Museum of 21st century.... So far the museum has dealt with what we are, articulating narrations  and collective experiences that have shaped disparate lives. But I believe that the Museum has no future, if it is not to treat what we are not, to put to work the imagination of the possible and the impossible, to test new public options and to fabricate joint futures.