Great gray construction of Plaça de les Glòries called him “the stapler”. In 2014, it was about to open and the metaphor was more than relevant. The building’s mission was to sort pages and pages in the history of Barcelona scattered by various museums in a compact block of sheets, structured with a single staple. The design.
The challenge of, was conceptually to unite the heritage of the old museums of the decorative arts, ceramics, textiles and clothing and graphic arts. The speech was as follows: All those pieces could be considered the cultural ancestor of design. Thus, the exhibitions would make visible the aesthetic and temporary links between the “Collection of Collection” of the Design Museum, explaining the role of Barcelona and Catalonia in the history of this discipline.
Now that Pilar Vélez recalls that his proposal did not dodge the controversy: “We received complaints, with a certain reason, because it went from having four monographic centers to a single museum with a wide heritage in a limited space.” Faced with a collection of 82,000 pieces, Vélez had to “distribute play” because “there were many audiences of audiences”. The new direction of José Luís de Vicente has outraged the world of heritage, which has seen helplessly how some pieces of decorative arts were sent to reservations. The debate has been centralized He hadAnd under the baton of journalist Maria Palau and, more than a quarrel between heritage and innovative, the conversation has served to realize that the pendulum among them is more discursive than anything else, and that in these movements the collections are losing.
In December, the Hub Barcelona Design celebrated its tenth anniversary, having rejected its call and the long-awaited new permanent exhibition, curated by Olga Subirós, is already a reality. In the pieces they are not ordered by criteria of chronology or discipline, which the Councilor for Culture Xavier Marcé described as “naims”, but through the materials, the pieces are grouped into sixty-five “micronratives” that speak of colonialism, the climate crisis or globalization. An example: Cobalt takes us from the Renaissance blue tiles to a jar of Artigas to the battery of a cellphone, because we reflect on how a precious material changes meaning as we damage the planet. Of 750 pieces, almost 548 come from the collections of the DHUB and the museography, designed by the same curator. However, except for some exceptions, the pieces that speak of the past do so to problematize it and those that tell us about the present (a jacket made of orange peel, a carpet made of plastic from the Ganges) are optimistic and contrast with the reality of outside the museum that strive to represent. In the end, the exhibition is resolved as a smart and aesthetically worked essay on the relationship between human and matter, more typical of an exhibition center like the one that has no collection, than of a conventional museum. And without the weight of a specific heritage, museums are in danger of losing their ability to tell a story of their own and end up becoming places of passage for generic and interchangeable speeches.
The ballast of heritage
“In the exhibition the pieces are not explained. They are at the service of a speech that could be explained perfectly without the collection, “complains Mireia Freixa. The historian is part of the Commission Save the Design Museum and co-ordered Pilar Vélez the Modernisme show with Pilar Vélez. Towards the culture of design, currently dismantled. Freixa does not protest for this, the sample had to last three years and it was. But from the commission what they claim is that the heritage look will not be lost. “A museum must preserve, show and explain the pieces and make new contributions,” he says. “If this is not done, he is failing his duty,” says Freixa.
Thereby Matter Matters Ask us: What other exhibitions will DHUB’s permanent rooms occupy? The director, José Luís de Vicente, announces one on fashion and another on the notion of design. In the face of the question of whether the collections of the four former museums will be represented unevenly in the rooms, the director charges against the disciplines, which are “starting points, not arrival”, since the design “is a large territory that is not sectoralized”. The unknown fond of the suspicions of a DHUB that moves away from its function as a museum. According to Olga Subirós, Matter Matters invites the public to take objects, cultivating a “radical affection for the existing one”. But what if those who pilot the museum do not hear it, and see heritage like a burden?
“The collections of the museum exist thanks to purchases and donations that have been made since the 19th century,” says Pilar Vélez. “Therefore, we owe not only to the public, but also the collecting of this country.” This is the case of many Catalan museums, Reitera Freixa, who, “due to lack of state policy, have been created based on citizen donations and are inherently civic.” This story does not appear in Matter Matters Because it has been considered to be implicit in the works on display, nor is it talking about the artistic value of the works. These are issues that the new management line considers secondary or outdated. But under the controversy, the DHUB renewal air seems to have more to do with the form than with the content.
Talk about museums
The approach of Matter Matters It’s no different from touching wood! Design, wood and sustainability, which Vélez curated with Martí Boadas and also started from the materials to explain the world. What is innovative is like Xavier Marcé and Vicente talk about the exhibitions. For the director, the 21st century Museum does not retain objects, but “material ecologies”. The decorative arts can be read in the key of “climate devices” and, behind the sample, there is no team but a “ecology of people”. In fact, the Councilor for Culture began a press conference of the exhibition, saying that “the word design, like the word culture, is a magical word that means many things at once”.
Discourse rotation is the shield that allows the DHUB to be presented as a different and updated museum, but for the moment it seems to be built only in opposition to its ten years of history. Yes, museums need to be questioned, but the city has more and more institutions that are obsessed with deconstructing itself to reach an alleged audience that does not connect. The last piece of Matter Matters It is the same city: the exhibition ends with a viewpoint open to the Encants and Les Glòries, which represents “our future as the Great Metropolitan Urb,” says Marcé. But it is difficult to look out the window and not see a city crushed by the contamination and the crisis of housing, where the identity of the citizens is diluted between specialty coffee shops with English letters. The Dhub seems to want to tell us that design will save us and try to flee from elitism, but looks at the world from the second floor of “La Grapadora”. And the new lexical device does not disguise that, no matter how much they want to avoid it, their conflict is the same as that of all contemporary museums: the struggle between the conservation of history and the need to be part of the present conversations.
