It has exceeded a thousand signatures at the bottom of a letter “About the departure of Manuel Borja-Villel from the direction of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía” and the number continues to rise this Monday. It is headed by the prestigious German professor Benjamin Buchloh and is followed by the director of the Center Pompidou, the director of the Tate Modern, the directors of Maca and Es Bluard, the director of the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, the Miró Foundation, the Viceroy or Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza. In addition to artists, critics, managers, researchers and teachers.
Manuel Borja-Villel will not appear in the competition to direct the Reina Sofía Museum
More
“The success and notoriety of the MNCARS in recent years has placed it at the center of a hasty and manipulated ‘culture war’ unleashed deceptively by the irruption of the extreme right in the Spanish political and media landscape,” the document states. “This has turned its director and the institution itself into prey and spoils of that political marketing war that is played out in the media. The extreme virulence of the attacks directed at Manuel Borja-Villel and those around him have made it clear that there was something more at stake than whether or not he remained in office ”, the statement continues.
For the signatories, these “attacks” embodied in the figure of the now ex-director, are part of “a campaign to disqualify the museum model that he embodies and that begins long before the management election process begins” and they focus “the aggression” in “reactionary media”.
Other prominent names who signed the manifesto are Pedro Almodóvar, Rogelio Lopez Cuenca, Paul B. Preciado, Pedro G. Romero, Helga de Alvear or Manuel Rivas.
Almost until the last minute it was unknown if Borja-Villel would appear in the new contest, after the exhaustion of a contract that had been extended twice for five years. The door was open. He finally announced that it would not be so. During the days of his uncertainty regarding the former director’s decision, information and opinions appeared that questioned his leadership and that those around him, such as the Association of Directors of Contemporary Art in Spain, described the situation as “unusual violence generated by some media”, as expressed in a statement on December 13.
This association of managers of centers requested “to promote a climate of serenity and democratic maturity in which the candidates to direct the national museum of modern and contemporary art can compete without fearing a public space contaminated by prejudices or personal disqualifications”. None of these possible candidates has publicly communicated their intention to enter the contest, but elDiario.es has been able to speak with some of the profiles best prepared for this challenge.