CAN THE ARCHIPELAGO ENTER THE MUSEUM? IBEROAMERICA IN THE PROPOSAL OF THE HELGA DE ALVEAR MUSEUM

By Álvaro de Benito

“I imagine the museum as an archipelago. It is not a continent, but an archipelago (...) The idea today is to put the world in contact with the world, to put some parts of the world in contact with other parts of the world... We must multiply the number of worlds inside museums”. Édouard Glissant (Sainte-Marie, Martinique, 1929-Paris, France, 2011) expressed his vision of museum functionality in this metaphorical way in his work Poetics of Relationship (1990).

CAN THE ARCHIPELAGO ENTER THE MUSEUM? IBEROAMERICA IN THE PROPOSAL OF THE HELGA DE ALVEAR MUSEUM

Based on this statement, the Helga de Alvear Museum in Cáceres, Spain, asks in its exhibition Can the Archipelago enter the Museum? #1 if its premises were feasible and had the capacity to materialize in that network of islands that make up the works and artists that use the exhibition space to interrelate and exchange the necessary positions to understand a whole without losing the individual essence.

 

It can be said that this group show is the presentation of a museological project in several stages, all on the same common thread, which are being shaped on the funds of the Helga de Alvear Collection and where it has been intended to isolate the vocation of the single story in favor of an exhibition where the richness and personality and different contexts of each work throws more questions than answers and facilitates, in a way, to understand Glissant's critical starting point.

 

Can the Archipelago enter the Museum? #1 makes use of the production of artists with different trajectories and technical preferences, among which are several reference names in contemporary Ibero-American art that, with their contribution, weave those parts and relational lines between agents to make sense of the curatorial experiment.

 

Among the relations with the production of Thomas Hirschhorn, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Daniel Buren, Haegue Yang, Etel Adnan, Walid Raad, Rosemarie Trockel and Luc Tuymans, among others, we find the islets of Francis Alÿs (Antwerp, Belgium, 1959), Lygia Clark (Belo Horizonte, Brazil, 1920 - Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1988), Cristina Lucas (Jaén, Spain, 1973) or Carlos Bunga (Oporto Portugal, 1976), Ana Mendieta (Havana, Cuba, 1948 - New York, U.S.A., 1988), Ana Mendieta (Havana, Cuba, 1948 - New York, U.S.A., 1988) and Carlos Bunga (Oporto Portugal, 1976), among others. USA, 1985), Aurèlia Muñoz (Barcelona, Spain, 1926 - ibidem 2011) or Lygia Pepe (Nova Friburgo, Brazil, 1927 - Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2004).

 

To bring together the trajectory of these names in a strict sense, despite the little or much representation they may have in the exhibition, seems complicated given the idiosyncrasy of each element of this archipelago. Moreover, the selection of the elements seems to be sifted by that idea, expanding technical islands around each island, capturing the apparently contrasting paper and video works of Alÿs, the different sculptural techniques of Bunga or the collage and structures of Clarke.

 

Precisely for this reason, the presence of elements with a certain discontinuous character becomes important in the construction of that whole that starts from each contribution, from each temporal or structural reflection that provides the necessary material to, at least, question whether the principle formulated by Glissant is, at least, feasible.

Can the Archipelago enter the Museum? #1 until spring 2025 at the Helga de Alvear Museum, Calle Pizarro, 10, Cáceres (Spain).

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