A Model Kit
General view of the exhibition. Courtesy: MUSAC
Since its opening the MUSAC has built up a very varied collection, from several lines of work, and taking into account fundamental aspects of the most recent creative work as well as new trends. Between 2007 and 2010, the Latin American collection was consolidated along these lines, and to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Museum, a selection of works by 46 artists has been used to round out the exhibition Modelos para armar. Pensar Latinoamérica desde la Colección MUSAC, curated by the museum team, its director Agustín Pérez Rubio, María Inés Rodriguez, head curator and Octavio Zaya, external curator of the exhibition department.
It could have been one more of the collection’s exhibitions, thematic this time as it deals with Latin America, just as is done by many museums in times of crisis and budget reductions (the MUSAC, like many others in Spain, has had a drastic budget reduction which has practically paralysed purchase policy in 2010). But what converts this project into something very singular is not only the construction of a thesis exhibition with part of the Latin American collection, but also the fact that during this year and part of 2011 activities such as seminars, courses and debates, as well as subjects of the other spaces, Laboratorio and Vitrina, are going to be dedicated to artists and questions related to Latin America.
Coinciding with the publication by the museum of a monograph on the work of Alexander Apostol, who in recent years, through several series of photographs and videos, has analysed the representation of modernity in Venezuela, from architecture, the museum, heraldry and the symbols, the artist has carried out a project for the Vitrina space, compiling the facsimiles of documents (letters, contracts, bill, etc.) pertaining to that development from the 1940s on, establishing a record that brings to mind the documentary-epistolary style of Vargas-Llosa in Pantaleón y las visitadoras. In the Laboratorio space the exhibition Para ser construidos, analyzes the idea of construction from works by artists like Marcius Galán, Nicolás Robbio, Marcelo Cidade and Carla Zaccagnini, whose work Reacción en cadena con efecto variable, which consists of a children’s playground with swings, has been donated to the museum by the artist and set up in the adjacent gardens.
The title of the collection’s central exhibition was taken not only from the title of Julio Cortázar’s novel, 62 Modelo para armar, one of the most decisive novels in the consolidation of Latin American literature, but also from its narrative structure, formed from fragments which can be read by following different orders. Well, this is how the exhibition works, like autonomous sections that should be interconnected with each other by the spectator himself. The architect Andreas Angelidakis, in dialogue with the curatorial team, was responsible for carrying out the route and the staging of an especially creative route, which tends towards association and dialogue between the various works and which, at the same time, takes care to solve the problem of the countless barriers posed by the not very functional and extremely rigid architecture of the museum.
The walk around the show underlines the importance of this collection, and the diversity of the Latin American panorama. It is very difficult to highlight specific works, but even so, in an international panorama, these works by Carlos Garaicoa, Oscar Muñoz, Meyer Vaisman, Miguel Ángel Rojas, Valeska Soares, Fernando Bryce, Jorge Macchi, María Teresa Hincapié, Rosângela Renno and Teresa Margolles, as well as the mural, in one of the interior patios of the museum, by Federico Herrero, end by becoming indispensable.
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