Much more Spanish art and artists. Stimulate its production. And give them room to make mistakes. Entry of popular culture, including trap and, why not, artists such as Rosalía, C. Tangana and Arca to bring new audiences and generations together. Reaching a consensus about the museum’s immense collection – 24,000 pieces – that serves as a guideline for any story that is built on the latter: a minimum common story. Gender equality. The living arts introduced into the rooms with performances that are part of the same exhibition. Add the art of South America to the other side of the Mediterranean, as powerful as it is unknown. Synchronize the territory of the museum’s thinking with the international one, adjusted plows. Above all, to articulate a story with many voices. A tentacular museum where each tentacle has its own brain. A seductive museum.
These are some of the ideas and terms with which Manuel Segade presented yesterday his project for the next five years, in which he will be director of the Queen Sofia National Museum. Segade (A Coruña, 1977) explained the program in detail, in which he wants to promote the Reina Sofia as a tool to highlight Spanish art and artists, who will be much more present. In fact, his lack of presence was one of the aspects for which his predecessor was criticized. But all this will not happen immediately: the exhibitions in the great museums are not improvised and Segade has inherited two years of programming from Manuel Borja-Villel, “with excellent exhibitions and some very important projects”, he stressed.
And he assured that these two years, in any case, will provide the Spanish artists “who will accompany us in 2026 all the time necessary for production, for tranquility to start a project, to be able to bring it to the level of excellence. lens they need”. “Nevertheless, you will notice symptoms and changes that will tell you that there are things about museography that are beginning to change. And a museum is not just its programming, 90% is kitchen work that allows its programming to exist. Also, the fact that there are the same projects does not mean that they are the same. And there will be some other exhibition project if there is enough budget”.
“These two years my team will focus on the planned program and the future program, but also on the structural, the improvement of design and architecture, the growth of the collection with parity and the research of national histories still to rescue To order the museum for the program that has to arrive and adapt the rooms, more versatile and with different scales to attend to the local scene, Spanish artists with all the variety of projects they deserve”.
The collection, which Borja-Villel arranged these years in an immense project entitled Communicating Vessels and which includes everything from architecture to workers’ magazines, the art of the AIDS era or the banners of the 15th century, for now it will remain unscathed. “Frankly, to patch the collection right now and start putting in names because it’s pretty miserable and not up to the level of quality that the museum has us used to. It is up to us to be a little patient and I hope that by mid-2025 there will begin to be changes”, he remarked.
And he announced the names that will accompany him to the museum’s advisory committee, great Spanish names in contemporary art such as María Corral, Chus Martínez, Vicente Todolí and Gloria Moure, in addition to João Fernades, director of the Moreira Sales Institute in Brazil; Amanda de la Garza, director of the Contemporary Art University Museum of the UNAM in Mexico, and the Argentinian curator Inés Katzenstein. In addition, there will be an architecture and design advisory committee with Juan Herreros, Andrés Jarque and Marina Otero.
Segade also bets that popular culture enters and the present penetrates the museum and in this way expands the public. He even spelled out genres of music, like trap, and names he’d like to see. “In trap, there are contemporary artists who are working and have incorporated it into their content, such as Claudia Pagès, and we have fundamental figures of world popular culture living in Spain or directly Spanish very related to the contexts of contemporary art that have collaborated with artists to make their covers, the videos, C. Tangana, Rosalía, Arca, whom it would not be difficult to involve in projects like we have involved in the El Niño de Elche”, be it through festivals, performances or interdisciplinarity .
