Conference paper, Saturday, October 20th, 2007, 03:15 p.m.
Rafael Sámano Roo: The Project of the MUAC in Mexico City. Continuing Self-Reflection with Museological Respect
About the Deleuzian concept of multiplicity, more than subjecting ourselves to predisposed spaces such as those that are prepared for specific functions (video hall, multimedia room, etc) special modes of occupation are raised, working on the framework of actions that seek to create problems around different aspects of contemporary art, visual culture, and the university activities and hopes. Starting with:
- Collection
Conceptual selection of the contemporary art collection of the University Museum
- Theme
A thesis that deals with a problem or point of view of contemporary art
- Links
Exhibition proposals, developed within the UNAM, that part from an interdisciplinary and qualified academic paper
- Resonance
Method that generates a network of multiple conceptual
- Relationships
- Specific site
Presentation of a work of art produced ex professo by an individual artist or collectively
- Documentary
Materials that refer to the conceptual approach and/or to the artistic content of some of the exhibitions
- Artistic intervention
Presentation of a work of art produced ex professo by an individual artist or a collective effort that interacts with the Museum’s architecture
The work process for the design of the exhibition programme was brought about through a curatorial seminar among members of the area of public programmes, advisors, and the curator of the collection, all of whom belong to the Visual Arts Management on which the University Museum depends. External curators were also involved in the definition and conceptualization of the museum. This study referred to the point of view of a selection of readings on the collection in order to propose the points of escape and tension among the other curatorial “plateaus” and with mental interconnection and sensitivity created something new, starting with an experiment and encouraging the production of an event. The museum for us is not a space but a spreading out, that is, a site for possibilities, juxtapositions and simultaneities in movement that activate temporality as an aesthetic experience. Parting from this the University Museum proposes a curatorial model that begins with the relationship between the unit, subtraction and differentiation, it refers to the interrelationship between actions, objects, documents, media and public practices (outside the museum) that shape the displacement and complexity of the artistic discourses regarding a device that eases the interaction between the production of experience and the building up of meaning.
In order to avoid foreshadowing in the visit-use-construction of the museum, the criteria for the occupation of spaces is temporary, displacements are proposed from the starting point, and any of the projected spaces that live up to the typology of the curatorial proposition may be used indiscriminately and periodically. In this way the new Museum of Contemporary Art takes on its situation and rhizomatic quality within the interpretive process (hermeneutics) of its users about the surrounding manifestations so that the user builds his own reality within a process of social interaction (constructionism).
This is how the University Museum of Contemporary Art is a space for the crossroads of the construction of knowledge and reflection, where other junctions are generated parting from contemporary art and visual culture in a game of convergences and divergences because the museum is seen as an open, unfinished structure.
