2023-05-10 10:33:05
The Ministry of Culture has appointed Andrés Gutiérrez (Gijón, 1967) to take over the management of the Museo de América. In the last days of 2022, Miquel Iceta’s portfolio made the decision to dismiss Encarnación Hidalgo, after four years in charge and few results in the management of one of the 16 most problematic state museums. It is an institution rarely visited, with few resources, with hardly any guards, open half the day and, the most delicate issue, pending a deep remedial review with the represented peoples and with the museographic discourse that the center inaugurated in 1941 by the dictator Francisco Franco, to become an inexhaustible source of national legends about Hispanicity.
The difficulties of a museum to end the morbidity and the exhibitions of pygmies
Further
On paper, the academic profile of Andrés Gutiérrez makes him the director willing to turn the museum around to open the doors to the 21st century. This newspaper has tried to find out about the plans of the new head, but the Ministry of Culture has preferred to postpone the explanations of the future museum that Gutiérrez may have in mind. What we know of his trajectory can guide his actions. He has been part of the teams at the Museo Nacional del Prado and the Museo del Ejército, was appointed deputy general director of State Museums in the General Directorate of Fine Arts of the Ministry of Culture in 2008 and was until 2010, when he joined the Museo de America. He knows perfectly the shortcomings of the institution that he will have to direct by free appointment.
In a recent report on the decolonization and repair of Spanish museums, published by this newspaper, the new director of the Museum of America pointed out his vision of the process of decolonization of museums, which reveals his possible intentions: “Decolonization implies reviewing the way of thinking about those objects. It is about encouraging a change in the way of understanding the collections and their contexts, of facing their study, their exhibition, of revaluing the role of invisible groups, of understanding the function in its original context of production and this implies learning from the others, work in a more empathetic way”, maintained Andrés Gutiérrez Usillos.
decolonization has arrived
For Gutiérrez, the decolonization of museums exists “whether we like it or not”. “It is unstoppable, because it is part of a necessary contemporary process”, he added then. In addition, he indicated the fear caused in the most conservative Spanish society by the announcement of the creation of a ministerial commission for decolonization, at the end of last October. Weeks after the announcement, the Minister of Culture, Miquel Iceta, in the Culture Commission of the Congress of Deputies, annulled any possibility of a museum review with a rhetorical question that will mark its passage through the portfolio: “How is a museum decolonized?”
The curator and new director of the Museum of America is aligned with Fernando Sáez, director of the National Museum of Anthropology, in the treatment of human remains. The Museum of America preserves two mummies that appeal to living communities and heirs: “What do we do with these human remains?” Gutiérrez wondered in this newspaper. Gutiérrez was in favor of the creation of the commission that was to review the museums and that the Ministry of Culture stopped. “That a commission is created for this, as to deal with any important issue, does not cause me any fear. On the contrary. If I deny the problem, or I don’t want to see it, does the problem cease to exist?
Throughout these years, Gutiérrez has not hidden his claims about the need to review the collections of the Museum of America from scratch, to understand them from today. He has also not hidden his disappointment with the classifications the museum maintains, based on “stereotypes.” “If women have not had a presence in museums, imagine the trans woman”, explained in 2017 the new director, a doctor in Geography and History, a specialty in American Anthropology from the Complutense University of Madrid and, above all, a professional in the faculty of museum curators since 1999.
A museum from the present
That year, 2017, he set up what has been up to now his great exhibition milestone: Trans*. Diversity of identities and Gender Roles, at the Museum of America, with which he annoyed the transphobic groups that complained in writing to the then director. It was one of the most interesting narratives of the exhibition season, which showed how the presence of transsexual people is universal and common in anthropological and artistic representations since 500 years before our era. “Our society does not want to talk about this,” Andrés Gutiérrez explained to this journalist at the time to comment on how several members of the Friends of the Museum of America resigned after the inauguration of Trans*.
The intention of the curator and current director was to “show naturally” how we have all lived together for centuries. It was a reality that could not be denied and to prove it he traced the traces of transsexuals back to the pre-Hispanic world, where the human figure with attributes of both genders or genders altered by choice was experienced without conflict. “Until the arrival of the Spanish and the Catholic culture,” Gutiérrez said at the time. “In the 16th century, the Spanish were scandalized by these people who were integrated into their societies and ended up displaced and marginalized. The greatest Christian persecution was against men, who were not allowed to be women. With the women who became men there was a little more tolerance, as long as they did not have sexual relations”, explained one of the most prepared scientists of the optional body of curators to face the new challenges of the museum of the future.
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