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THE MUSEUM YET TO COME. Exercises of institutional imagination

 

Museums understood as agonist spaces are the places for all the never written stories. In two directions: re-writing the past against the grain but also activating new forms of political imagination able to defy the rationality imposed by extractivism, neo-colonialism and semiocapitalism. To do so and in order to exercise the institutional imagination I would like to call for this talk the figure of "the museum yet to come" following the figure of the "yet to come" that Cuban theorist José Esteban Muñoz used in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity when describing the queer as something that has yet to arrive, that is not lived, as a negation of the here and the now and as an appeal towards the potentiality of the concrete possibility of a different world.

Pablo Martínez is educator and researcher. He has worked as head of programmes at the MACBA since 2016. He has been in charge of Education and Public Activities at the CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Móstoles, Madrid (2009–2016) and associate lecturer in the History of Contemporary Art at the Fine Arts faculty of the Complutense University of Madrid (2011–2015). He edits the et al. series of essays (MACBA-Arcàdia). His lines of research include educational work with the body, as well as research into the power of images to produce political subjectivity. He is editorial secretary of the academic research journal Re-visiones and a member of the research and action group on education, art and cultural practices Las Lindes. He has edited published publications including Arte actual. Lecturas para un espectador inquieto ("Art today: readings for a concerned spectator", CA2M, 2011) and No sabíamos lo que hacíamos. Lecturas para una educación situada ("We didn't know what we were doing: readings for a situated education", CA2M, 2016); he has curated exhibitions by Werker (2014) and Adelita Husni-Bey (2016).

Video recorded at Gothenburg City Library, 21 May 2019 as part of Who writes the future?, organised by L'Internationale Online and Valand Art Academy. Video editor: Camilla Topuntoli.

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