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Episodes of the South – Museal Episodes I Salvador da Bahia 14.-17. Oktober 2015 Reports

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Episodes of the South – Museal Episodes I

Salvador da Bahia 14.-17. Oktober 2015

Reports

Episodes of the South – Museal Episodes I

Salvador de Bahia. 14. - 17. Oktober 2015 Report – Pablo Lafuente For the Maxakali, an indigenous people who resides in the northeast of Minas Gerais, relatives are those whom you exchange fluids with. So, according to this conception, a period of time in which a group of people exchange fluids, regardless of the duration, creates a family – one that, if the exchange is intense enough, might even outlast the time spent together. During those four days of the first Museal Episode in Salvador, organised by the Goethe Institut, fluids were exchanged. MAM-BA, Salvador The Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia, under the direction of Marcelo Rezende, the meeting host, comes across as a fluid institution. The office space is also the exhibition space, the reception, discussion and presentation space. Other places in the museum have specific functions, but their use and occupation appears, in principle, open. The fluidity of space is meant to allow for a fluidity of relations. Cooking and eating together with the museum staff was a literal exchange of fluids, while conversing with each other and among the staff was perhaps its metaphorical version. It is possible to relate this dynamic to the pedagogical emphasis under which the MAM-BA was created in its current location in 1963, by Lina Bo Bardi, and that Rezende is attempting to bring back. The ‘art institution MAM-BA’ seems to consider its fundamental role one of education – not as dissemination or transmission of information, but through the creation of relations that might have transformative effects, at different scales, with different languages and accents. In that context, the exchange of fluids that took place in the meeting was also a pedagogical process for all involved. And thus, Bruno Marcello’s drawing diary of those days shows the group gathered in ‘culture circles’, one of the now classic notions in Brazilian radical pedagogy. Salvador, Bahia The MAM-BA is right on the bay (‘bahia’) of Salvador. It has its own beach. Its location on the recôncavo baiano immediately relates the institution to the city and region, and their history – a history of Bahia that could perhaps be the history of Brazil, if one narrative had to be chosen. A reflection on that memory, on what is conserved and how, and on how this contributes to Bahia’s and Brazil’s image today, was triggered by the group’s (the family?) visit to the Arquivo Público do Estado, a place that has other memories and presences, prior to the archive itself – as a Jesuit monastery, and as a lepers hospital. Like the bay of Salvador that gives its name to the state of Bahia, ‘forgetting’ that there might be other Bahias, the process of conservation of memory that we call history is selective – programmatically or not. As the intoxication that might be the possible outcome of an exchange of fluids around the table, especially in a foreign place (as it actually happened), the act of conservation that is proper to the museum can also cause malaise. But malaise can also be productive.

Acervo da Laje, Plataforma North of the MAM and the historical centre of Salvador is Plataforma, a neighbourhood that was born, in its current state, in the 19th century, but with an older history as a Tupinambá and later Jesuit village – a history of destruction and invasion, but also of the struggle against slavery. Its lack of infrastructure and the absence of public administration create the opportunity (or force the need) for an internal network of relations – in Plataforma, the fluids are exchanged internally, with very little flow from or towards the outside. The Acervo da Lage, a collection and a museum set up and run by José Eduardo Ferreira Santos, is a node in that network, a proof that the conservation of cultural practice can only happen through the relevance of the connections that are established with people and places. And that there might be a relation between intensity and scale. Bar de Ray e Lucy, Salvador The Museal Episode finished on Saturday evening, for some of us, with arrocha no Bar da Ray e Lucy. Arrocha is a style of music and dance that was born in the interior of Bahia in the 1970s, but that since the 2000s has become popular within the estate and the country. It’s essentially popular music, with words that talk about delusions from love, accompanied by electronic keyboards. Its proliferation, like with other styles of Brazilian popular sound, is the result of informal but highly complex mechanisms of distribution and, importantly, of migration of masses of people for economic reasons, mostly from the north and northeast to the south of the country. And, partly because of these mechanisms, the class relation and the music’s content, it is not appreciated or recognised by the middle and upper classes. But arrocha is culture in movement, and when listening and dancing to it, things flow. They flow in a way that creates temporary relations of an intensity that, perhaps, the museum should aspire to, if it is to learn from the south. Maxakali, Minas Gerais The maxakali used to inhabit the south of Bahia, but were displaced to their current territory by the European invasion. Their land is poor, their resources very few, but their cultural production (language, music, knowledge, worldview…) is deep and complex. There is no maxakali museum, but the maxakali constantly create a museum of sorts: they make wooden versions of objects they cannot acquire because of their lack of resources, such as knifes, radios and mobile phones. These objects ‘cannot’ work, but somehow they do. They cut, they communicate and, importantly, they exchange. And in this exchange they show a way to actually create relations that might make culture relate, be alive, matter.

Episodes of the South – Museal Episodes I

Salvador de Bahia. 14. - 17. Oktober 2015 Report – Zdenka Badovinac I came to Salvador with great anticipation, since the invitation to our first Museological Episode (ME) was formulated in such a challenging spirit that it piqued my interest and spurred me to start looking for comparisons between museum work in Latin America and my own work at the Moderna galerija in Ljubljana. Our very first meeting at the Bahia’s Museum of Modern Art (MAM-BA) triggered a chain of associations between the Latin American and Eastern European contexts. Historically, the 20th century in both spaces was marked by repressive regimes that curtailed the space for freedom and also with numerous, primarily leftist projects that variously involved alternative creative and educational processes, going beyond both mainstream methods and class borders. There is no division between exhibition and office spaces at the MAM-BA. While participating in the ME discussions, we too were seated in the exhibition space, so that every passing museum visitor could stop and listen. This, however, did not bother us in the slightest, we did not feel as though we were on a stage. MAM-BA has abolished the concept of an exhibition space as a neutral container. As a matter of fact, it has done away with representation, and with it, the institution that speaks in the name of art or anyone else. Also our hosts’ suggestion was in line with this: namely, that we, the participants of ME frame the program of our meeting as it progresses. This did occasion some faltering and a few misunderstandings, but it infused more spirit in our meeting. Our work is too rigidly structured and subject to programmed time anyway, which suppresses spontaneous reactions and thus creativity. The consequences of excessively structured life can be seen also in the current aspirations of art and museums for greater interactivity and participatoriness. So, how do we actually work? One of the associations that came to my mind at the MAM-BA was the Brechtian estrangement effect, the incessant disrupting of stage illusion, and at another moment Rodchenko’s Futurist museology which called, immediately after the October Revolution, for replacing the passive visitor that merely contemplates art at the museum with a revolutionary subject. In formulating the concept of the Salvador Museum, Marcelo looked above all to Rudolf Steiner’s ideas, and his integral approach has helped me consider the issues of communities and relations with them, which I am currently deeply involved in in my work in Ljubljana. The Salvador situation is different. The Museum itself is located right in the middle of the community which it tries to integrate in its work. For the most part, European museums are located in the cultural and historical city centers and still have the task of representing the state rather than genuinely connecting with its actual citizens. However, things are also changing in Europe now, due to the massive exodus from the Middle East and Africa. Museums are already developing programs that would enable an easier integration of the new denizens. Despite this, European museums generally still tend to subscribe to the traditional understanding of heritage and invariable values.

Also in Salvador, our views on what can constitute heritage diverged. The differences that surfaced in our debates at least partly derive from the different contexts of the South and the North. The increasingly intense migrations all over the world prove that these differences can no longer be thought merely in terms of distinctions between different geographies. One of the discussions also touched upon the problems of shipping artworks and how such obstacles are changing our understanding of the concept of art. But despite such difficulties we can conclude that it is often far easier for art to travel around the world than for people. In Europe, there is a fear that it will be flooded by people of a different culture, as if culture – and with it, the notion of heritage – were not something that keeps constantly changing, along with our identity. When our discussion turned to how we should formulate our future work, I suggested that we confront our differences in the framework of the notion of heritage. Because regardless of our diverse interpretations of heritage, we all share a concern for history and for preserving memory. I view heritage as something living, something much broader than an art object and dedicated to diverse knowledge, codes, and affects, something that helps us to fully realize individual and collective creativity and emancipation. A lesson that we learned at virtually every step in Salvador was that the South was not something that the Other should understand, but that the South is now trying to activate its own heritage with which it is trying to understand the North. Our visit to the Arquivo Público da Bahia was very instructive. The thing I found most striking and poignant was a North African slave’s document written in Arabic – this proof of the slaves’ literacy at a time when perhaps some of their owners could not read challenges several stereotypes about the South. The lesson of our first ME is that there is no position that would be a priori related to ignorance, that we all know something that others do not know, and that by learning together and cooperating we create common knowledge and, after all, common heritage.

Episodes of the South – Museal Episodes I

Salvador de Bahia. 14. - 17. Oktober 2015 Report – Nydia Gutierrez It might not be what really happened, yet still my honest contribution to a common narrative of the experience. A more reliable account may be shaped by the sum of our different records of it; in building it, we will simply forge one that pleases the most –by its usefulness rather than by its veracity- to most of us. That kind of loose methodology is, after all, my overall impression of the spirit of our meeting. Our first gathering at the encounter with Marzelo and MAM-Bahia set the tone; we didn’t follow his plans but definitely embraced his passion for alternatives to the established (he may like better the establishment). One small detail there was the wish for images in our presentations; we may do that next time (I will repeat mine and enjoy the chance to show a bit of the MDE15). The visits to the Museu da Lage and the Solar Ferrao stressed the dual perspective between conventional and not-so-conventional museum practices that seemed a subtext of the whole visit. It was explicit in the rooftop museum but also in the presentation of Lina Bo Bardi’s collection among those beautifully installed museum galleries. Lina everywhere became a cherished presence of an architect with special understanding and sensibility towards her culture. The Escola Parque’s impressive site and institution, as well as the community engagement with them, provided a rare sensation –totally anew- of inhabiting one of those regularly failed Latin American built modernist utopias, this time exceptionally lively and full of a superb, subtle, dignity. Community engagement; museum-context in difficult neighborhoods; utopian architectural gestures: Latin American conditions. South conditions? How close, or similar, is Marina’s south from ours? Why is Pablo so engaged with ancient southern cultures? How much of South is “Former East”? Back to the memories: One of the most disturbing works I have dealt with lately is Liliana Angulo’s history of slavery; the Public Archive of Bahia was, by far, even more disturbing. The power of archives spread all over the place; they were smart to place those documents at the center of a huge, empty space, for our –museum professionals- visit: the “archive turn” in museums is live and kicking. The notes I made during our last round table under the tree quote all of us talking about the shared perspective of the displaced that stimulates our thoughts; the importance of finding commonalities and differences, the inspiring and the conflictive among us; a common desire to be exposed to new models, to learn from the primary, the ancestors; to shift focus within existing paradigms, to think again of heritage, collections, patrimony, and poetic space, among many other things. The food, the beach, and the breakfast talks didn’t make it to my notes but no doubt they were noteworthy. Our next meeting in Bolivia seems to have a more common ground now.

Episodes of the South – Museal Episodes I Salvador de Bahia. 14. - 17. Oktober 2015 Report– Övül Durmusoglu

Svalbard Global Seed Vault, founded in 2008 by the Norwegian government, the Global Crop Diversity Trust (GCDT) and the Nordic Genetic Resource Center (NordGen) The question of futurity for the art museums asks for different intensities for south and north. State culture policies, priorities, budgets, traditions and epistemologies, that change from context to context, demand a more open, common and equalized way of future museological imagination, much more like a technology of deep time, a collection of blue print ideas, a way of coping with the kinds of events that happen on very broad time and geography scales. How can we transform artistic works into a commons that will reach different audiences and work beyond insurance, humidity conditions and transport, open to future interpretations? What does it mean when important contemporary and art historical artworks cannot be shown outside a very limited circle of the world? The crisis situations appearing on different parts of the world should remind us a deeper understanding of time is required when artworks and patrimonies are perceived in the future. A future art museum can be modelled after Svalbard Global Seed Vault that stores thousands of seeds from all around the world. And it will demand a transformation in the way we understand museology that can be adapted towards different standards. The vault was founded in 2008 and the first seed demand came from Syria this year. A future art museum can host artworks, their material and instructions in the form of blueprints. Anyone can demand the blue prints to interpret when required.

My proposal is inspired by Akram Zaatari's 2012 dated work 'Time Capsule' and Marcelo Rezende's account of his solution for showing Yves Klein in Salvador during our discussions. During Civil War, Beirut Archaeology Museum's director buried some of the very important items of the museum behind a concrete wall so that they wouldn't be damaged by any attack. Zaatari prepared a concrete burial to be discovered in the future in Kassel's Augarten. It is difficult not to be reminded of 'Time Capsule' when ancient city of Palmyra in Syria is destroyed by bombs of a radical Islamic organisation. Artistic thinking shaped by different contexts carry on different functions in them beyond its universal role as we see in this example too. Hopefully it will be easier to find the future art museum than Zaatari's 'Time Capsule'. Marcelo Rezende mentioned how he managed to find the particular Yves Klein blue to apply it in an installation in Salvador. It costed far more less, there wasn't any insurance, transportation, protection money.

Akram Zaatari, Time Capsule, dOCUMENTA (13), 2012 The colour became the part of other lives in a much more unexpected way. A future museum as a blueprint vault can initiate different ways of remembering and interpreting the art work on a macro level. On the other side places like 'Acervo da Laje' initiative (that we visited during our field trip) shows how people can take charge of their museums without depending on a state culture vision and make their museums function. It is an example of how not only the artworks but also the museums can be imagined in various ways. I want to close with our working group and underline the importance of peer-to-peer education in curatorial field. We device programs and tools for our publics. However, we rarely participate in situations where we device tools for ourselves. This working group is a critical opportunity where we can be in charge of our own education, propose exercises to challenge our way of thinking. These exercises can be shaped

by the particular museum that we work with. Or we can even push further with models such as 'Pedagogy of the Oppressed' by Freire. The important thing is to be able to create a common breathing field that can change us in our different ways.

Episodes of the South – Museal Episodes I Salvador de Bahia. 14. - 17. Oktober 2015 Report– Marina Fokidis Contamination as a a possibility for genuine“democracy”

In Latin contamino means to render a “sacred object” ritually unclean profane to pollute to desecrate. The term found its most common use into science. Contamination signifies a collective infection which disturbs the “normative” assumptions of the status quo; the spreading of a “malicious” virus. What thought if these viruses were not necessarily negative ? What if they were consisted of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, rituals, songs , locations , intensities, histories , presents and pasts ? Could then “contamination” also stand for a dynamic scenario of heterogenity? Could it stand for a new way towards a certain kind of impurity that has been deliberately kept out of the process of preserving cultures? How can living cultures be preserved- anyway-without inventing a series of forced endemic and acquired characteristics? And pasts? Is there a way to resist cultural imperialism?

And here we were in Salvador–Bahia, coming from different ends of the world, to discuss the “museum” of the future. A week of co-existence in a symbolic location where we tried to explore new networks and communities, new models of organization, and knowledge, through the fusion of various temporalities. Our overlapping, as well as conflicting tendencies and histories provided the background for our cross-contamination from one person, time, place to another. Rather than articulating a series of presupposed fixations on cultural and historical modes , a further questioning on the issues of time and place, practice and methodology seems more appropriate at present. Let's all hope that by the end of our trajectory contamination will evolve into a state of methexis. In ancient greek theater methexis meant a certain kind of group sharing in which the audience participated, created and in cases improvised the action of the ritual. It seem that our task should be to keep our “mutual ritual” as open as possible so it can generate unforeseen quests about the ever-changing nature of the “museum”. “Philosophy as the desire to attain wisdom,” Alan Joxe argues in his book Empire of Disorder, “continuously offers questions (indefinitely) than offering answers (definitely). if we ask the good question and we put up a good fight, history might take the form we have suggested.” The Academy of Crisis/MAM Bahia /the school museum as imagined by Lina Bo,/the state archives-the former hospital for the leper/the music/ the sea/ the first slave passports /the Esuola Parue- a tropical way to antroposophy / Acrevo de la Laje -a remedy to violence through art / gardeners / curators / priests/artists the collapse of : the private and public / interior and exterior/ land and sea/ the official and the ritualistic/ the tropicalism and the mediterraneanism/ the cosmocracy and site specificity/ good and evil/ right and wrong Do times call for another model of art and cultural mediation? Meanwhile, “South” comes again in the foreground of discussions in terms of an unprescribed topography, sometimes to be blamed as the black sheep or sometimes as a critical factor to the future of the world economy, and luckily sometimes as an abstract entity that eventually can form a separate “third space” within an intellectual context. Through a curated program of visits and interactions, our hosts in Salvador, Marcelo Renderer (the director of MAM Bahia) and the Goethe Institute of Salvador gave us the chance to reflect on the “museum” as the possibility of the creation of “permanent state of discussion” – among others. I felt that for our function, Bahia, was as much as a physical place as a symbolical one. What if south is not a place in the world but a space where people meet to imagine the possibility of other ways of being in the world? What if we render it for our episode into a a ‘little public sphere’, to borrow a term from theoretician Nikos Papastergiadis “Perhaps, at present “the notion of public space” be it a symbolic pole, a public meeting , a exhibition or an institution is revealing itself as a crucial meeting point for cultural and artistic debate, a place 'between places', a correlation of space, form and politics” The purpose is to find ways on becoming the advocates of a new era of political life ( political after polis ) that is yet to be seen. An era that offers a genuine possibility for a democracy which includes the citizen and cosmopolitan city-less, the local and the immigrant , the

expat and the refugee through new associations that are being defined horizontally and not from upside-down or downside up . “Every practice brings a territory into existence… one that superimposes its own geography over the state cartography, scrambling and blurring it: it produces its own secession,” argues the Invisible Committee in the book The Coming Insurrection. They continue, “Current history might be about false communities and calculated absences; however, “art “as a kind of magic operation always offers an exodus from the rigid reality to a more ‘invented’ one. Often it not only captures an actual time and place, but also predicts and even influences the future” In a world where the majority of people oscillate between despair, lack of resources, uncertainty, turbulence, anomie, disbelief, corruption, and chaos, adopting an imaginative distance from daily events can sometimes, perhaps, be more effective than any other gestural form of destruction”. Looking forward to keep imagining - all together - a better world in our next stops.

Episodes of the South – Museal Episodes I Salvador de Bahia. 14. - 17. Oktober 2015 Report– Luiza Proença

Episodes of the South – Museal Episodes I Salvador de Bahia. 14. - 17. Oktober 2015 Report– Marion Ackermann

Bahia da Salvador – the name of the city is like a melody. I returned home with several music instruments used for Capoeira: the Berimbau (you see the sketch from my notebook), Caxixi, Bandeiro etc. I have never been in Bahia before. Bahia is mysterious, - there is so much toughness, poverty, aggression, and at the same time it´s like paradise. I was very impressed by the history, the architecture, the collections and archives we visited. But especially the different concepts of Lina da Bobardi, the strong tradition of social education in Brazil was really inspiring for my own work in Germany.

Since I am back I have to think all the time of all of you. It was so nice to experience the variety of personalities coming from diffrent countries. I have to think of our struggling for understanding each other and for finding a platform with common topics. Especially impressed I was by Marcelos role as museum´s director, curator, phisosopher in Bahia. His decision to place his own desk and his curatorial team inmidst of the exhibition space to be near to the audience, his idea to create an artistic meeting point in the center of the exhibition space for discussions of the visitors from the neighborhood. How wonderful the ideas of participation, the combination of a huge space for pottering and cooking, the location directly at the sea and the concerts on Saturday nights!

I was aware that there exist a very specific tradition of social education in Brazil (and I would suppose in whole Latin America and also in Spain), different from the idealistic tradition in Germany and the pragmatism in England. I found your idea of participation much more radical and outspoken than I used to know it before.

There were some discussions between us participants of the project „Episodes of the South“ which were important for my own thinking, f.e. the idea of „to unlearn“ and the difficulty to realize it. But perhaps „learning“ from each other, from „The South“?, where ist „the South“?... was an interesting process, too. I learned something about the other networks which are existing beyond the power-networks of the big players of the European and North American world. I started to ask myself where our place should be ... and how you could bring works of Yves Klein and Kasimir Malewitsch to all people who would wish to see them ... and if perhaps Alexander Dorner, museum´s director in Hannover in the Twenties, was right when he wrote „The museum of the future will be a museum of reproductions.“

I was noting all the time in my little sketchbook what occurred to me, names, ideas, coming out of something like a „stream of consciousness“. And I liked the idea that on the other hand a local artist got the commission to do sketches and drawings on our meeting in Bahia.

Episodes of the South – Museal Episodes I

Salvador de Bahia. 14. - 17. Oktober 2015

Report– Victoria Noorthoorn

On the Museological Episode, Salvador

Marcelo Rezende and his team together with the Goethe Institut organized a program of visits that were refreshing, thought-provoking and an eye-opener. I found the visits to the Acervo da Laje, Escola Parque and the Archivo Público da Bahia, as well as Lina Bo´s intervention in Casa do Benin and the fantastic musical instruments by Smetak in Solar Ferrao, absolutely fantastic. In each case, the visits triggered thoughts and ideas, and in some cases led me back to previous instances of research that I had left aside – such as Smetak himself, who we had presented at the 7a Bienal do Mercosul back in 2009…!, or I had to remember artists I had visited far back and could recommend them to others for their current research, giving sense to so many collective efforts.

I was also able to understand further, through these visits, Marcelo´s insistence on the question of why it should make sense to go to Bahia, or even to start this program in Bahia. I must confess that I didn´t understand the question at first, yet as time went by I did understand that the decision to start by Bahia will indeed shape up the whole program in most challenging ways.

The choice – to start the meetings in Bahia - determined very strongly that the perspective of the program would be structured from a marginal point of view; a choice that will have all sorts of consequences. I was myself quite frustrated by this very determined point of view (not by the choice of the city), as it implies a “recognition” (un dejarse vencer) of alterity, of difference, of marginality, that I try to fight at every step of my professional life. It situates the South in the South – with no possible Exit. It established a very strong dichotomy between peripheries (such an old expression!) and the Center (indeed another old expression), represented by the German museums in the conversation. It created a dichotomy from which the participants could very hardly escape. This I found very sad, and the sensation was indeed that we were going backwards in the discussions, rather than forward in search of a possible location for utopia.

I was extremely grateful for the opportunity to converse with such a fantastic group of people, all committed professionals to their ideas, institutions or localities. The great question that still remains open is how may the group indeed challenge its own constituency, defined by such contrasting conditions and contexts, and traditions of history or philanthropy (or the lack of the latter).

The program was indeed a beginning of a larger conversation, as it had been announced. Perhaps, I was a little bit frustrated by the general lack of an intellectual

script or program or set of precise questions around museum practices for the present and the future, since the thoughts on museum practices take most of my time these days as I do my best to direct a public museum in South America. Some loose ideas were expressed during the last session.

My question is whether it would be possible for the next step to actually send a very in-depth questionnaire to all participants addressing all sorts of questions and interests and opinions on certain problems related to museum practices and their relevance or necessity or lack of it, whose answers could be circulated beforehand, so as to enrich the conversations, and that there would be more of a provocative and present, active, moderation, either by one of the participants or by the organizers. I feel the group could, perhaps, benefit from further information on specific topics related to the relevance and ways of museums today.

Episodes of the South – Museal Episodes I

Salvador de Bahia. 14. - 17. Oktober 2015 Report - Klaus Görner So verblüffend und offen das Programm zunächst erschienen sein mag, so klug und erfolgreich erscheint es mir im Nachhinein. Tatsächlich gebührt den Organisatoren und Programmplanern ein großes Lob. In der Gelassenheit und dem Vertrauen auf die Kräfte des Ungeplanten ist ein sehr interessanter Start für diese Veranstaltungsreihe gelungen. So besteht jetzt die Möglichkeit, im Fortgang des Programms tatsächlich einen Weg zu beschreiten, der nicht allein zu dem bereits Gewussten und Gehörten führt, sondern offen ist für das Neue und Ungewohnte. Ich möchte jetzt nicht die Erwartungen zu hoch schrauben; es ist keine Revolution nötig. Vielmehr hoffe ich auf Verschiebungen der Perspektiven und Gewohnheiten. Als Beispiel mag die Rolle der Sammlung für ein Museum gelten. Wie ich in unserer Abschlussdiskussion sagte, war diese Frage für mich besonders interessant. Die Sammlung, als der materiale Kern des Museums, spielt in der Geschichte der Institution und in der Diskussion - zumindest in Europa - eine zentrale Rolle. Dabei konzentriert man sich auf die Pflege, die Erforschung der einzelnen Werke und auf ihre Erweiterung. Die einfache Frage: What belongs to a collection?, hat zu einer Verschiebung der Wahrnehmung geführt. Sicherlich gehört dazu eben auch eine Sammlungs- und Ausstellungsgeschichte, die nicht allein chronologisch entworfen werden kann. Es ist zu vermuten, dass dazu das Konzept des spezifischen Museums, an einem bestimmten Ort und zu einer bestimmten Zeit rekonstruiert werden muss. Ziel ist dabei nicht die Rekonstruktion eines Museums für zeitgenössische Kunst, sondern die hoch spezifische Beschreibung dieses Museums. Der Gewinn einer solchen Bemühung liegt in einem komplexeren Bild der Sammlung und im regulativen Verständnis ihrer Fortführung. Dies ist umso wünschenswerter, als die Erweiterung eines bislang westlichen Sammlungshorizontes nicht "irgendwie" geschehen kann. Bereits seit seiner Eröffnung 1991 verfolgt das MMK eine Sammlungspolitik, die sich nicht am Kanon orientiert. Auch die Ausdehnung auf nicht-westliche Kunst ist nicht neu. Interessant und wertvoll ist eine erneute Durchsicht der Sammlung im Hinblick auf ihre Struktur, ihre Brüche und Anknüpfungspunkte. Es ist für mich schwer auszumachen, wodurch die oben beschriebene Verschiebung verursacht wurde. Sicherlich haben sowohl die Erfahrungen des gastgebenden Museums für Moderne Kunst in Salvador, sein Programm und sein Direktor als auch die Gespräche mit den anderen Teilnehmern dazu beigetragen, kurzum das, was man einen klassischen Perspektivwechsel nennt.

Episodes of the South – Museal Episodes I

Salvador de Bahia. 14. - 17. Oktober 2015

Report– Marcelo Rezende