"A museum is not an agreement or a pile of bricks but energy in motion"
"In the absence of a building, a collection or a budget, the museum began its activities on a cruise ship, demonstrating that a museum is not an agreement or a pile of bricks but energy in motion."
"La Ene has always functioned horizontally and organically despite maintaining a traditional museum organization chart. But it overflows all its structures and definitions, questioning them to reconfigure itself continually, and thus avoid the epistemological trap of the modern device we think the museum to be."
"La Ene’s collection works as a whole that reflects on the institution’s history, but mostly it is a set of reflections on the practice of collecting itself and its pitfalls looking towards a situated future. Proper storage is one of the problems we saw in museums and collections around the country, so we concluded that the most suitable storage for us at that time would be a digital memory. The museum’s collection is stored on a hard drive, but that does not mean it consists solely of digital works, but rather of works that can be kept in digital format. For example, we keep the instructions to build a work, so we rebuild it every time we want to exhibit the collection."
Sofia Dourron, Independent Curator and former director of Museo La Ene, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Mobile, Virtual, Ephemeral: Collections of the Future?
In the times of museums being burned down because of war or put at risk because of climate disaster effects – what is a meaning of a public art collection? Could we imagine a different definition of collecting, an alternative circulation of objects, or an art museum without art objects? What if museums start collecting narratives or if the collection is co-owned by the local or international communities? Asking such questions and speculating on possible answers seems to be inevitable on the threshold of profound changes in the surrounding world and at the same time of changes awaiting museums of modern and contemporary art.
The upcoming CIMAM webinar will go a step further by taking a look at four different and radical approaches to the idea and practice of possible museums’ collections. The curators of the four diverse initiatives will share their experience: on virtual museum hosting international collections of Roma art (Timea Junghaus, Executive Director of the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC) will speak on behalf of RomaMoMA), on mobility and establishing a relationship with local communities (Sofia Dourron from Museo La Ene in Buenos Aires), on co-owning the collection of artists’ novels developed by M HKA (Joanna Zielinska and David Maroto from The Book Lovers collective) and on managing artistic heritage and collections in times of war by Piotr Rypson, Adjunct Professor at New Media Department, Polish-Japanese Academy of Computer Technology; Curator at the Jewish Historical Institute and Chair of ICOM Poland.
Panelists:
- Sofia Dourron, Independent Curator and former director of Museo La Ene, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
- Timea Junghaus, Executive Director of the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC), on behalf of RomaMoMA.
- The Book Lovers Collective (Joanna Zielinska & David Maroto) based in Antpern, Beligum.
- Piotr Rypson, Adjunct Professor at New Media Department, Polish-Japanese Academy of Computer Technology. Curator at the Jewish Historical Institute, and Chair of ICOM Poland.
Moderated by CIMAM Board Members:
- Agustín Pérez Rubio, Independent Curator, Madrid, Spain
- Malgorzata Ludwisiak, Chief Curator, Department of Modern Art, National Museum in Gdansk, Poland.
About CIMAM’s Rapid Response Webinars
Started in 2020, CIMAM has taken the new virtual scenario as an opportunity to launch a series of online activities exclusively for our community to, now more than ever, reinforce the sense of connectivity through online meetings in a peer to peer environment to share, learn, and be inspired by the experiences of other CIMAM professionals.
For 2022, we have prepared a series of online sessions that will take place, nearly every month of the year. The next ones are:
- Thursday 26 May: Museums and Well-being
- Thursday 30 June: Three views of digital transformation. Webinar proposed and designed by CIMAM member José-Carlos Mariategui.
- Thursday 5 July: Commemorative webinar for the 60th anniversary of CIMAM's birth.