2023-06-07 17:57:37
Marrying intellectuality and sensuality, satisfying all kinds of audiences and articulating a plural and choral offer is among the premises of Manuel Segade (La Coruña, 46 years old) in charge of the Reina Sofía Museum. His new director lands at the art gallery with the desire to generate consensus and without questioning the heritage of his predecessor, Manuel Borja-Villel. He believes that the public museum should maintain spaces for the rebellion and strengthen its administrative structure.
–Receives an inheritance between controversial and poisoned.
–The Reina Sofía is, internationally, a fundamental institution of contemporary art in the West. I disagree that it is a poisoned inheritance. It is fabulous and you have to consolidate it, maintain it and take care of it. It’s not a bad time. On the contrary. Despite all the controversies about the departure of Borja-Villel, which have been a bit unfair and even a bit violent in networks.
Will you go around the museum? They will criticize you whether you do it or not.
–We work in the public sector and listening to what society and the press think is fundamental. But one story must be supported by another to confront and discuss it. It is necessary to articulate a collection that no longer dispenses with the present, that allows us to tell the history of contemporary art seen from Spain from the end of the 19th century to today.
–Your main goals in directing?
The structure is crucial. A lot of work has been done based on the Law itself and with the two foundations. There is a relevant structure that makes it possible to combine the public and the private, and a personnel structure in which it is necessary to work intensively. All the administrative part interests me a lot. The how and the what are equally important to me, and here there is much to do. It is the grayest part, the least visible and the hardest for a manager.
In the mud
–You receive a museum at half gas, with a budget of 44 million and 500 employees, perhaps insufficient figures.
–I really want to get into the mud and work with the management and artistic sub-direction to develop all the tools that enhance the museum. But I still haven’t rolled up my sleeves with the team. About the programming I can not advance details. I must confront myself with the reality of the museum and that the team knows the project for me before speaking in public. It is extremely important, necessary, and a very powerful demand in recent years, to expand stories, to include many more voices in the museum, to work more with contemporary art contexts in Spain. Its symbolic capital, the powerful internationalization and the vision that is had from outside the museum must be transferred to the Spanish art scene.
–It is obligatory to generate the most radical experimentation, he says.
-Definitely. Even in the organization. The Spanish contemporary art structures –MACBA, IVAM or MA2M as well as I Reina– are some of the most innovative in the world and great spaces for imagination. Artists innovate and take us to uncertain and unknown places. We must consolidate the story of tradition, maintain a powerful collection with a story that allows the present to be interpreted from the past, but also maintain spaces for experimentation and rebellion, such as Espacio Uno created by Pepe Guirao, where artists have the right to make a mistake. If the public does not do it, the private will invest in the uncertain.
–Politics and art, are they a strange couple forced to live together?
Let’s get rid of the weird. They are an inseparable couple who, like all of them, are sometimes ephemeral and always complicated. It is an inseparable pairing, especially in contemporary art. The heart of this museum is ‘Guernica’, and it is a work that is no longer politicized, directly political. Contemporary art speaks of its present as did the paintings in the Prado. ‘Las Meninas’ is also a political painting.
Plurality
Does art have an ideology?
-Sometimes it does. The fundamental thing in this is the plurality of voices, polyphony or ‘chorality’. As in any democratic process, the museum must have a multitude of voices representing different positions. This creates a space for healthy tension, for debate that public museums are supposed to give to society.
Will you work for majorities and minorities?
-Of course. This is what we did these years at the MA2M in Móstoles. There must be things of great intellectual intensity combined with others that belong to the field of the most direct enjoyment, literally. to sensuality. It is something that we will promote.
What will you do to build consensus?
-It is obligatory. The Reina Sofía has the tools to achieve it with her advisory council, and, above all, listening to the sector. I chair the Association of Contemporary Art Directors (ADAC) which has done extensive work in associations in search of good practices with colleagues such as the Institute of Contemporary Art (IAC), or Women and Visual Arts (MAV). It is essential to work on it with the sector and have a structure.
–It arrives at the most visited museum in Spain. Is it wrong to measure success in visits?
There is a kind of competition. TRUE. But it is not the essential. We have that influx thanks to the Palacio de Cristal, that of Velázquez and ‘Guernica’, of course. It is important to maintain audiences, but just as important as encouraging very diverse projects that generate different audiences. We must attend to the older public, adolescents and the academic community. Everyone must have their spaces and moorings. In architecture it is called ‘transscalar’, working on several scales at the same time. The museum already applies it and we will insist on it.
–Is artificial intelligence a threat to art?
–Whenever a new technology arrives, an apocalyptic terror arises that overwhelms us and scares us. Technologies always have consequences on our lives, but history shows us that we adapt and that we incorporate these tools into human creativity. I guess the same will happen. Or at least that’s what I trust. I am a science fiction reader, so fears come as standard, but I trust that they are tools more than anything else.
– Do you already know who will be your second or second?
-Not yet. I am landing and in contact with the current team. I haven’t calmly met with the Ministry, so it’s too soon.
– Will we see paintings by the relegated Antonio López in the rooms?
–There are 24,000 pieces in the collection. The largest exhibition with its funds has been ‘Communicating vessels’ with the entire history of the museum and has exhibited only 5%. There are lots of funds and names to rescue, of crouching stories that ask to go out to the museum. It’s not just Antonio Lopez. There are many things that want to bring to light again is huge. I don’t think that in five years he will have time to show everything.
–He is proud to reach the periphery and claims his contribution to culture.
–I studied Art History in Santiago de Compostela, the center of the West in the Middle Ages, when the experiments in the Romanesque and that were taken to the cathedrals first occurred in the village churches. The contributions of the minor are paramount. The center is very important but it also serves as a projection of things that are lateral, that history does not remember and points out to us as fundamental in the long run.
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