Opinion
Pending subjects
I have listened several times to the Minister of Culture explaining her projects for the department she leads. She takes a continuity approach with respect to the previous minister and assures that she will consolidate the line of budgetary growth. She has drive and an enthusiastic team. She calls for more commitment from the other ministries and society in favor of culture.
What is proposed is correct, without any major innovations, but in line with recovering the things that have been pending for a decade or two. In any case, in a country where every new ruler seems obliged to destroy the inheritances received, it is good to listen. From the things I have heard him explain, I deduce, however, that there are a couple of pending issues that I do not quite know if they are among his priorities: one is photography and the other, architecture. There are more, of pending issues, but these two are especially blatant.
In the project of involvement and new functions that in 2011-2012 the team that I was leading at the ministry entrusted to the director of the National Museum of Catalonia —an enthusiastic man and a good professional—, photography and architecture were included. We considered the expansion taking into account the two pavilions located between the Palau Nacional and the Font Màgica. One had to be intended for the museum's own functionality and its collections, which should undoubtedly also include the arts of the period between the post-World War II period of 1945 and the present; therefore, the arts born in the sixties, seventies, eighties and nineties, such as, for example, design, comics and the digital range.
From the ministry, and I personally, we insisted that, in addition, the arts that are not exactly new, such as photography and architecture, forgotten by national public policies, should have at the MNAC the essential professional structure to launch an indispensable National Photography Center and an even more necessary National Architecture Museum-Center, call it what you will. The reason was very simple: photography has been in Catalonia, in historical terms, an extraordinary breeding ground for creative talent; and architecture has been, also in historical terms, an international benchmark of recognized solvency and creativity. It is a discipline that has names, landmark works, global projection, recognized schools and a professional sector of great technique and cultural category. A sector that, on the other hand, is going through difficulties. For now, neither photography nor architecture have a place that constructs a discourse of the past; consequently, neither of the present and even less of the future.
It is good to see, therefore, that finally, after more than a decade of delay, the essential expansion of the MNAC is being considered. It is good that one of the old pavilions of the Fira, the Maria Eugènia pavilion, at the foot of the Palau Nacional, has been chosen to expand it. But it is a shame that the second pavilion has been left out. The MNAC is the great reference point for Catalan museums, even if the general gaze of the country continues to look elsewhere. It would be a magnificent contribution if the pending subjects of architecture and photography had been resolved around the MNAC.
Meanwhile, in Madrid, La Casa de la Arquitectura is being developed, on Paseo de la Castellana, in the Nuevos Ministerios archery, obviously paid for by the Ministry of Transport. It was inaugurated in December 2023, and its objective is to become a national and international reference for the dissemination of architecture, urban planning and landscaping in Spain. The stable collection of La Casa de la Arquitectura is made up of objects, drawings, documents, plans and images related to the Spanish architectural and urban heritage and has a digital platform that offers online access to its collection.
You may be
interested
...
