THE FUTURE OF THE MUSEUM

Excerpt of one dialogue out of 28 taken from »The Future of the Museum«
by András Szántó

Museums for Everybody

VICTORIA NOORTHOORN - Director, Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires
(Museo Moderno) - Buenos Aires, Argentina

THE CENTER OF THE WORLD

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What words or phrases would you use to define the term “museum”?

The museum is a meeting place, a place for education, and a platform for the enjoyment of art and culture. The museum is a space for the development of the imagination, which I conceive as the true energizer of a human being and society. The museum is a space for artistic creation. Having artists at the center of any museum is crucial. In Argentina, where politics permeates life so deeply, and where there is so much inequality and strife, what do you see as the museum’s most important contribution to society?

Indeed, there is inequality, strife, and political turmoil in Argentina, probably as much as in the US today....

The museum is a healing agent. It is dignifying. It allows people to understand their past and present and to imagine their future. It provides a sense of opportunity for the true and effective development of freedom; as such, it is a liberating agent for the imagination. It allows you to be someone else in the future, to create that future for yourself.

Argentina is also, as often remarked, the most European, so to speak, of the Latin American countries. European and North American influences are felt profoundly. Yet it is far away from these places. Is there an Argentine approach to museums and art making?

Argentina might seem more European in terms of its cultural heritage, but socially, economically, and politically we are very Museums for Everybody much Latin American. In this regard, we constantly seek to respond to our own reality. One slight symbolic gesture has been to open up windows in our new collection galleries, which enable us to look at the city landscape beyond our walls. Those narrow windows frame the domes of neocolonial churches of Buenos Aires. That image, that presence, anchors our current curatorial narratives. Our exhibitions reflect and contest our colonial history; they are rooted in our specific locality. And simultaneously, these exhibitions intend to transmit the enormous force of the arts produced in this part of the world. This distance from the so-called centers gives us the possibility of enacting different perspectives—it gives us a freedom that is empowering. Much vitality in our artistic community comes from that. It gives us permission to experiment. Artists can develop their imagination in provocative ways.

I relate to that, as someone who grew up in Hungary. You understand the paradigm, yet you are distanced from it. But let’s keep talking about the museum as a super-accessible institution—a museum for everybody, as you call it. How do you create a museum for everybody?

You open it up, very gradually. You undo strict methodologies in order to allow for the creation of a museum as a living organism, one that will be permeable to its context and that will listen to the diverse sounds and voices around it. You identify the key issues—e.g., discrimination—and you tackle them directly; you make them a part, or the script, of your program. You also reconceive the role of our language. How we speak to our audiences needs to change. We are not an institution apart from our audience—we are our audiences ourselves. There is an enormous amount of work to do to construct an institution for a new world. Artists are essential to this process. They help us look at museums and their role in society in different ways.

I want to touch on some facets of this unfolding. How do curatorial practices need to evolve to be more accessible?

We are working toward a more permeable program that involves more and more artists. Our first exhibition in 2021 will include one thousand works. We will invite all the artists who took part in our virtual program during lockdown, to thank them for being part of the museum at this critical time. Artists will inhabit the museum. We wish to create a friendlier space, where artists of all generations and backgrounds are closer to the public.

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Header: Victoria Noorthoorn © Josefina Tommasi, Courtesy Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires