The Newspaper brings together new director of the Museu del Disseny, José Luis de Vicente (Granada, 1973) already the future new director of the Fundació Tàpies, Imma Prieto (Vilafranca del Penedès, 1976). Both embody the generational change that is taking place in Barcelonan culture. The two had each other on the radar: they have several mutual friends from the art scene that they have frequented in the last two decades, both as independent curators. But never until now had they sat down to talk about the city, its challenges, its duties and its potential.
Do they feel protagonists of a generational change?
Imma Prieto: I think what distinguishes us from the previous generation is that we have grown up with an active museum system and curatorial projects, the generation of the 90s created them. There is also an important differential feature: how we have accessed the institution, that is, through public tenders, more democratic mechanisms. Although I have always thought that changes depend more on the person who drives them than on age. Not all directors were the same before, nor are they now.
Jose Luis de Vicente: I come from a space that has not been institutionally legitimized until relatively recently. We are a young institution in that sense. I am the first director of the Museu del Disseny who does not come from the practice of architecture, graphic or product design, but from a context, the digital one, as a space for thought. I have been working at festivals like Sónar for 20 years, used to the fact that what was done did not have an institutional space. It is a change indeed.
“There is a certain perception that cultural institutions create difficult and demanding entry thresholds. I aspire to deactivate that intimidation. I don’t want people to die on a poster”
What weight will the public have in their decisions?
IP. We all want everyone to come to our institutions. But beware, that has nothing to do with the ‘mainstream’. My way of understanding the institution is to be at the service of citizens, to be able to map what interests them most, to be accessible. I believe that we work for the whole of society and that the academic public is not the same as a project with a center for the elderly, for example.
JLDV. I have always liked to find a way to make the most complex subjects accessible. I am interested that there are different scales, that if you want to immerse yourself in the complexity of a conflict you can do it. But I don’t want the entry point to be intimidating. There is a certain perception that cultural institutions generate difficult and demanding entry thresholds. I aspire to defuse that intimidation. I don’t want people to go die on a billboard. We need to translate complex issues into understandable narratives.
“Some things we call museums in this city are more about people coming through the door than generating effective social output”
IP. I don’t believe in the idea that the only function of an institution is to get as many people through as possible. We are a space in which different communities with different needs intersect. Our function is more to build bridges, involve, establish connections, make projects possible.
JLDV. We continue with this logic of continuing to measure the success and failure of institutions according to the people who enter through the doors of a museum, and in reality, this has a very limited social return. I’m going to be a bit controversial: some things we call museums in this city are more about people coming through the door than generating effective social output.
“I am against ‘blockbuster’ exhibitions. They greatly damage the local fabric”
But large show exhibitions are a trend all over the world.
JLDV. But there are nuances. I am not afraid of popular culture, which for me is a perfectly valid tone, voice and register. The problem is to measure the role of an institution by its ability to generate those artifacts that end up being analogous to a great sporting or musical event.
IP. We are public institutions and we have missions that go beyond content production. Barcelona has a peculiarity: it is a city with a fairly developed cultural infrastructure in proportion to its population. It has grown a lot, but it is not a city of mega-publics for cultural consumption. We do not have a cultural tourism model, although there has been that desire. Sometimes we think that we can compete with big capitals like Paris or London. When we have the same resources, we talk.
JLDV. The word spectacular is highly proscribed and I don’t have a problem with it, but rather with its instrumentalization.
IP. I am against ‘blockbuster’ exhibitions. They greatly damage the local tissue. If I have a budget, you have to be aware of what you do with it, because part of it is taxes from the citizens. When you organize an exhibition you have to take into account curators, artists, translators, authors of texts… If I buy an exhibition, my money goes abroad and there is nothing left here.
In recent years, people have heard a lot about Barcelona not being what it used to be, do you agree?
JLDV. Barcelona excites me a lot. Here we can do things that are not so easy elsewhere. I am working with the Supercomputing Center and the Institute of Marine Sciences, for example. What happens to our cultural ecosystem is that there is a chronic gap between its ambition and reality. It will be difficult for you to find a manager of an institution here who will tell you ‘we are reasonably well’. The machine is always tightened at levels that create tension, which sometimes makes us suffer. The state of mind in the cultural space has to do with that kind of fatigue due to a certain structural precariousness.
IP. I have been away for four years as director of Es Baluard, in Palma de Mallorca, and when you are in the periphery you realize the centralism of Madrid. With colleagues who run centers in Valencia or Seville, we often complain about the lack of interest from the media. I don’t like to compare Barcelona and Madrid because each city has a very different ecosystem. The two cities experience the street, public space and leisure in a different way. In relation to the world of art, I think there is a good moment in Barcelona and its surroundings, very suggestive public and independent initiatives, such as Cordova, Cruce or La Infinita.
“For me, talking about the environment or migration is not an option, that dilemma has become obsolete”
JLDV. It is absurd to talk about golden times because the city changes. Just as it is absurd to ignore the period from which Barcelona comes politically speaking.
IP. I am not a political scientist, sociologist or anthropologist, although all of this interests me, but it is clear that what has happened in recent years has had good and bad consequences. People’s attention is not unlimited. We have lived with a spatial tension. The pandemic has generated enormous fatigue. The years between 2017 and 2021 have been long and complex for all institutions. But I think there is a lot of desire to work. The addresses of Macba, Santa Mònica and Fabra i Coats have been renewed.
What role will identity, equality and climate play in your discourse?
IP. For me, talking about the environment or migration is not an option, that dilemma has become obsolete. The problems are there and you have to assume them. Each institution has its own identity, but social responsibility is implicit in any action that comes out of a museum or foundation today. It is not an option, it is a reality.
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JLDV. For me, design today is the development of strategies for the survival and production of worlds. We need new imaginaries, not from a philosophical perspective, but from a practical and real one. We know that the place we are going to is going to be different from where we came from. It is not a talk for the sake of talking: the conflicts over water, energy and the logistics of computing will have a force of wild planetary transformation. You can stretch the rope of those conflicts further, but what you cannot do is say: this is not important, it is not relevant.
Ten years of ‘the stapler’ of Bohigas
The Museu del Disseny will celebrate its tenth anniversary in December 2024 and a few months ago it made its debut as a new director, José Luis de Vicente, the effervescent mind that devised Sónar+D and regular curator of the CCCB, among many other things. The center has among its plans to open a laboratory and a store, and with the end of the works in Plaça de les Glòries it will open a new entrance connected to the metro, like the Louvre. De Vicente wants the center to become a reference for the more than 10,000 design students from the 20 schools in Barcelona and to be much more than a “hotel for entities”. “It has a 21st century building, but it was planned as a 19th century museum and that must be changed & rdquor ;, he specifies.
“The DHUB is one of the most iconic buildings in Barcelona, a 30,000 m² cultural infrastructure that is located in the great new symbolic green center of the city, where three large avenues intersect. Whether we like it or not, we are heading towards a different model of a city”, explains De Vicente about the enormous Bohigas building, which in these hot months joins the network of almost 200 climate refuges in Barcelona.
For De Vicente, talking about design in the 21st century is talking about the great conflicts of our time, which are material. “We’re going to have to change how we move, what we eat, the energy we use.” And he adds: “It is being the year of Artificial Intelligence as a promise and I think that it has still been studied little in the cultural discourse as a transforming force & rdquor ;. That will also be discussed at the Museu del Disseny.
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