The decolonization of Spanish museums is going to have a new and paradigmatic episode starting on April 29 at the Venice Art Biennale. For the first time in a century, an artist who was not born in our country and who emigrated to it, Sandra Gamarra (Lima, 1972), will represent Spain in this global artistic meeting. A painter and researcher who is going to build a large imaginary museum on the walls of the Spanish pavilion. An entire baroque museum that is based on real works from Spanish museums, from the Prado to the Thyssen or the MNAC, from the time of the Empire to the Enlightenment, recreated and modified by herself.
Fifty pieces in which she intervenes with texts by thinkers such as Rita Segato or Paul Preciado or highlighting the details of these works that act as a metaphor for the open colonial wound: in them there are traces of exotic landscapes, but also of the resources extracted from them, from the caste system of viceregal society and attitudes towards miscegenation and, directly, from what he calls “enlightened racism”: how anthropology and science were used to justify Western power.
It will be the Pinacoteca migrante, a Gamarra project curated by the former director of the Musac of León and the Malba of Buenos Aires, Agustín Pérez Rubio, and which he has used as sources from the Portrait of Juan de Pareja by Velázquez, the painter of Moorish origin who He was his slave and apprentice, a Family Group in front of a Landscape, by Frans Hals showing a prosperous 17th century Dutch family… including a black slave child. There are also among the base paintings portraits of virgin lands by Frederic Edwin Church or a sober still life by Zurbarán in which only one piece shines: a Mexican búcaro.
Gamarra recalled yesterday in the presentation at the headquarters of the Spanish Agency for International Cooperation, Aecid – which together with Acción Cultural Española finances the 400,000 euros of the project – that when he arrived in Spain and visited the National Museum of Anthropology, after passing through rooms from almost every continent went to a worker to ask where the one in Europe was. “He was more surprised than I was and he told me that he wasn’t there, that that was history and was in other museums,” he recalled.
And he acknowledged that his training “has been Western and I grew up with the idea that there is a hierarchy in cultures and Western culture is the path towards where the others should end up developing, but as the climate crisis is developing we realize that our culture was not the best or most developed and we have to look at others not only to learn but to understand that we are one great community.”
For Pérez Rubio, “this pavilion is going to represent a maturity in understanding the plurality and diversity of a society like the Spanish one” and he stressed that people will enter a fictitious institution that can be in any European city, “which can be any of those art galleries that have told us history”, and that the project “more than teaching, reveals, removes the blindfold: Eurocentrism has given us glasses that hide or bias what we see in certain historical representations.”
