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Manuel Borja-Villel, director of the Reina Sofía: "There is an ideological campaign against what the museum represents"

2023-01-18T11:30:40.294Z


The man who has governed the main contemporary art center in Spain for 15 years refuses to present himself again to the management. He is happy with his new projects and critical of the culture war


Manuel Borja-Villel (Burriana, Castellón, 65 years old) leaves.

He will not present himself again to the direction of the Reina Sofía Museum, after 15 years.

He announced it this Tuesday, but assures that he made the decision "a few months ago."

Since the institution, he has largely marked the destiny of contemporary art in Spain.

He leaves happy for "starting a new stage", but critical of what he defines as "an ideological campaign" against what represents an institution that he has endowed with an identity and its own story with great projection on the national and international scene. Of art.

In recent months, he has experienced "a culture war" behind which, he maintains, is the right and the extreme right who have dismissed his programming as leftist and sectarian.

“I knew it, but my duty was to go to the end”,

This same weekend he will fly to São Paulo where he will be curator of the Art Biennial and will begin his new life.

He will coordinate the exhibitions for the anniversary of Tàpies and an interesting surprise project that he prefers not to give any clue at the moment.

He doesn't want to go back to management.

More information

Manuel Borja-Villel will not stand for re-election to continue at the helm of Reina Sofía

Question.

What feeling do you have?

Next Friday he will no longer go to the museum after 15 years.

Reply.

Triple sensation.

First of all, a certain melancholy for the people with whom I have collaborated intensely.

They are 15 years of work and many efforts.

But also the pride of collective work.

Finally, I am excited about new projects.

My job is to think about artistic practice from the institution.

And that is what I will continue to do from other places.

At the moment I have to join the São Paulo Biennial shortly and I am studying some offers that have come my way.

Q.

What offers?

A.

I have been chosen as a curator at the São Paolo Biennial.

It's all I can say for now.

My work has to do with art, with the institutional vision of cultural practice, with a political vision.

What I am going to try is to do less management, which has taken me a part of my time these years.

Q.

Have you received any pressure to leave from the Ministry of Culture or the Board of the Museum?

A.

No. None.

On the contrary, everything has been support.

I have the best board of trustees you can have, with a president [Ángeles González-Sinde] with whom I have enjoyed great harmony and complicity.

And a ministry that has supported us from the beginning.

And I have to say that this harmony has also existed with the rest of the ministers I have had, both from one political party and from another.

Q.

And the minister has not tried to convince you?

R.

As I say, the support has been complete.

Every time there has been a problem I have had the support of the board of trustees and the ministry.

Q.

But your decision not to appear is due to the campaign against you?

A.

Not at all.

I had been meditating on it for a long time, talking with my team, with the collaborators and groups that participate in the museum.

I made the final decision a few months ago.

It's just that I didn't communicate it until now because there were projects that could fail or transfers of works that could not take place.

One is a director from the first day to the last.

I was aware that there was going to be a smear campaign, but despite that I decided that the best thing for the institution was not to communicate the decision until the end.

There is an orchestrated ideological campaign against what the museum stands for.

It is being done with other colleagues from other countries.

There are patterns.

In high politics there is Lula and Bolsonaro, which is a copy of Trump.

It also happens at our level.

There is an attack on a type of institution that represents a series of values.

Beyond making things better or worse, what bothers is filling the rooms where artistic practice is questioned with freedom.

Manuel Borja-Villel, director of the Reina Sofia in Madrid, photographed this Tuesday at the museum. Jaime Villanueva

Q.

Have you finished your story, your cycle?

P.

Taking a step to the side is a decision that is up to me.

I think that at this moment in the museum and at this political juncture it is important to continue my work from another place.

I leave the museum very strong, with an extraordinary team, with a great international projection.

Q.

Do you have any guarantee that your line will continue, that it won't change, for example, the last reorder of the collection?

R.

Whoever comes will contribute their vision.

The important thing is to add visions and not to lose what has been done.

The guarantee of a certain continuity is the team, the very history of the institution and its position in the world.

It is essential that the museum be supported.

Insults, gratuitous defamations do not help.

The museum must be a place of institutional experimentation, which makes us rethink where we come from and where we are going, and in which those whose voices have been suppressed and who have been removed from history can speak.

One thing that I am very happy about is that I am always accused of personalism, but there is a collective work that is demonstrated when you visit the plant that begins with the 15-M, the tar, the LGTBI movements...

Q.

When did the attacks against you begin?

R.

They started earlier.

Last year, maybe.

The political situation has changed.

Frankly, I think there is a culture war with criticism, for example, from someone who has not even seen the exhibition.

Q.

An ideological campaign?

R.

It is obvious, but why is a contract from five years ago being questioned now [this information has been available all the time], why is the information not compared with the museum itself or with the ministry that could have provided the data before that those lies were published.

We are accused of being an elitist museum, but before the pandemic we had 4.5 million visitors.

Those media outlets that have a hard time selling a newspaper at the kiosk would like to have these numbers.

There is a campaign against everything that is critical culture and not only in Spain.

First to attack those at the top, then those in the middle, like us.

This is an institution that involves the Civil War, the Republic, the Transition... They accuse me of

podemita

because there is a small room of the 15-M, which is not Podemos.

We have a room full of

renaus

[Josep Renau] Why don't they accuse me of being from the PCE?

P.

They accuse you of sectarian and leftist.

R.

Saving the distances, it is exactly the same strategy as when Obama or Lula who is now composing a liberal government in Brazil were called leftist.

They are the same strategies that are repeated with blatant lies.

Q.

Can art not be political?

A.

Everything is political.

The museum can be essential for GDP, attract tourists, gentrify neighborhoods, etc.

It is a national museum, is there anything more political than this?

Artists are of one ideology or another.

But the works themselves and, in general, have always taught us reality as something different.

It is this questioning that I believe is not tolerated.

In the museum there are artists clearly linked to the left and others who were related to the Franco regime such as Dalí or Giménez Caballero.

The good thing about works of art is that they escape the artists themselves.

Q.

Have you missed being tucked in by other colleagues?

R.

There has been a mix.

On the one hand, the attack from the extreme right has influenced and, on the other, the totally legitimate and human desires of many people who can run for office and do not want to position themselves.

And this has caused a certain silence for a while.

They have called me Miguel Zugaza [former director of the Prado Museum], Guillermo Solana [director of the Thyssen], Ana Santos [director of the National Library], Imma Prieto [art curator], Dani Andujar [artist]... Many people has positioned.

Q.

What is the legacy of Manuel Borja-Villel in the museum?

A.

The study center.

Who has left his master's degree.

We were among the first to introduce cinema and architecture, without separating disciplines.

The Lafuente file.

The link with Latin America as equals, not with the helmet of a conqueror.

That is why we have the Aníbal Quijano chair.

There was a time when the Foreign Ministry was concerned that Spain was losing its presence in Latin America.

They know who Cervantes is, but do we know who Quijano or Arguedas is?

Culture is learning together, hospitality.

I have had the freedom of being able to do exhibitions, like the one with [James] Coleman, who I knew nobody was going to visit, as it happened, but he is a well-known artist.

I can do it and also the numbers add up.

This freedom is not enjoyed by other museums.

I have been able to do exhibitions that are not directed by fashions.

Q.

Decolonization is now also present in many of the most important museums.

R.

Even from the point of view of the right we have to learn.

The British Museum is restoring pieces, yes, restitution, that word for which they call me

podemita

.

The Germans already put posters in the museums where it is specified that to get a work of art I don't know how many people had to die.

If we did it in Spain, we would end up with blows.

All this is not left-wing politics, in Germany Angela Merkel did it.

I ask myself, why do it have to be the Germans, for example, who decide what is Semitic or anti-Semitic? Why don't we ask Afro people, for example?

Q.

Does art as the search for beauty have a place in your discourse?

A.

Yes. I am an art historian.

When you assemble, you go with a speech, a story, once the works are hung they speak and tell you the opposite.

This has to do with beauty.

Is the idea of ​​beauty European?

In the Mayan language there is no word to talk about art.

The words equivalent to art have to do with tradition.

This implies that there are other forms of beauty.

In the museum there are three discursive rooms dedicated to Breton, Bataille, Epstein.

The three of them liked María Blanchard, Dalí, Miró… Each one chose different works that are by the same authors.

That is also beauty.

Q.

Beauty is usually associated with painting and specifically with figurative art.

And you have been accused of being refractory to painting, to certain Spanish authors and, on the contrary, they say that you have opted for conceptual art

R.

I come from the Tàpies Foundation, from a painter.

What do we understand by painting?

From the eighties until now there are few painters, the artists use all kinds of media.

That modernist separation that the painter paints and that's it doesn't exist.

The museum has responded to this.

All art needs mediation, especially ancient art because references are lost.

Regarding some or other artists I may have been wrong.

My predecessors in office exposed many authors from the fifties.

I have tried to show artists who were not there before.

I do not see the museum only from exhibitions.

The collection is very Spanish.

The criticisms come from the same people who say that Spain is a country of painters, who see a chronological line of men from Velázquez, Picasso... Goya made engravings, everything is much more varied.

What has been done is a paradigm shift, another way of understanding art, it is not about making mausoleums of illustrious men.

The museum is a place of knowledge and questioning.

Q.

How can you compete with a museum like the MoMA, the Pompidou or the Tate with a collection with much fewer works?

R.

There are not many gaps, depending on the criteria, for example at the market level.

In relation to the Pompidou there is none.

We are in a lower position compared to MoMa.

I think we've been focusing on artists that were off the radar, for money, for market, for historical reasons.

We are doing a series of things that will have a solid foundation in the future.

Manuel Borja-Villel, this Tuesday at the Reina Sofía. Jaime Villanueva

Q.

What has been left undone and what would not have been done?

R.

I will do it elsewhere, but I think it could have promoted decolonization and the issue of the green transition.

It would have taken me seven or eight years and we don't have that much time.

Another thing that has not depended on me although we have our own law, but Montoro did not allow us to get into the labor part.

There are labor inequalities.

I have obtained 136 guard positions, which is a lot.

Q.

You have appeared on several occasions in the lists of the most influential figures in art.

How can prestige be valued and weighed?

R.

Based on basically three things: the story, the content that you ultimately value when you see that another director or museum is beginning to do the same.

The institutional structure, how we are restructuring the museum, that I do believe is really unique and that this is being learned in other places.

Discover artists that nobody knew.

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Source: elparis

All life articles on 2023-01-18

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