Museo moderno, desandar el camino

12 mar 2022 > 26 mar 2023

Museo moderno, desandar el camino

Colecciones TEA

The Modern Museum, Retracing Our Steps

Modernity, inasmuch as an enlightened project of radical transformation, appeared to hold out the promise of a brilliant future that would overcome tradition, class, race, gender... but its engine, driven by a history narrated in linear progression, has never stopped seizing up because it is unable to process the impurities of collective life. The museum is like the exhaust fumes, the result of the combustion of this spluttering engine which ends up covering everything with an irritating coat of oily grime. The museum device is a structure turned into a science through its practice of museology and archivism. Accordingly, as part of its metabolic process, it tends to homogenize images and replace the political charge of each object with veneration. This is partly due to the fact that, as an institution, we look for a universalist consensus and it is difficult for us to show art as an individual or collective expression of a consciously adopted political position. For this reason, as a temple of a new order—and probably also of another time-—we replace a theologically conceived system for another in which the artist ends up taking the place of God.

The idea behind this exhibition is to bring us closer, through five different areas, to a series of works that, in one way or another, refute or evince the impossibility of presenting history as a homogeneous succession each new generation is invited to prolong. To be perfectly honest, the exhibition is also spurred by a need to manifest an institutional conflict. Are we a Modern Museum or a Contemporary Museum? The question, at least for those of us who make the museum, and therefore its collections, is crucial because the term ‘modern’—in itself highly fraught: modernity, modernism and its manifold historiographic variants-somehow forecloses the possibility of questioning as a structure and paves the way towards a grand archive that, as a repository, would be charged with making us understand a shared past. In the term ‘contemporary’, conversely, we are faced with the impossibility of this common past, replacing it with the certainty that we all arrive to the present with our own different baggage, making any shared ground highly unlikely, but, and this is critical, no matter whether we opt for one or the other we still have to ask ourselves which social order the museum serves and what space each person occupies in it.

The thread running through this presentation of the collection are images from the archive of Francisco Lora (ca. 1925-2000) bequeathed to CFIT-TEA. More specifically, the images span from the late-seventies to the early-eighties, just before many of the grand plans for new infrastructure and the economic modernization brought about by the influx of European Funds. Lora documented the city of Santa Cruz, paying special attention to the neighbourhood of San Andrés, caught between the developmental processes of late-Francoism and the difficult early years of democracy. For the most part, the images are portraits of everyday life, both on the street and in domestic settings, in which many of us will readily recognize ourselves. But it is in these overlapping stories where the images question us more than any of the works that have entered the museum as part of the grand narrative of art and, nevertheless, they ask us the same questions: who were we then and who are we now.