Marco Baravalle in conversation with Manuel Borja Villel Episode #3 of the podcast series No Land Ahoy! Drifting Conversations on Radical Art within the framework of The School of Mutation
Marco Baravalle talks to artists, curators and activists. From the phantom archive of activist art to the museo situado, from Afrofutirism to decolonisation of neoliberal museums, these constellations of radical art may help us trace possible routes through the drift of the present.
EPISODE #3 with MANUEL BORJA VILLEL
Borja Villel addresses his critical practice as a museum director. How to transform from within the neoliberal structure and functions of an art institutions? How to work with concepts such as “Museo situado”? How to create alliances with the subalterns instead of the wealthy? How to break the cause-effect relationship between museums and gentrification? How to dialogue with examples of radical art from the Global South avoiding cultural extractivism? How to work on an epistemological revolution of collections?
Profile
Manuel Borja-Villel is Director of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS) in Madrid and is one of the institutional agents of Spanish culture. Borja-Villel has directed three of the major art institutions in Spain: Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona (1990–1998); Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA, 1998–2008); and Museo Reina Sofía (2008–present). He has curated solo exhibitions of some of the most important artists of the last century: Marcel Broodthaers, Lygia Clark, James Coleman, Óyvind Fahlström, Luis Gordillo, Hans Haacke, Lygia Pape, Antoni Muntadas, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Nancy Spero, Antoni Tàpies, Krzysztof Wodiczko, amongst others. His most recent book is titled Campos magnéticos: Escritos de arte y política (Arcadia, 2020).