The Museum of Contemporary Art fo the Basque Country, Artium Museoa, organises a series of encounters that offer different visions on the futures of the museum and its social responsability with regard to the safeguard of heritage and knowledge production.

Anne Dressen: Out of the storage! Or how to think a museum for the plural arts?

Following the COVID-19 pandemic, Dressen embarked on a PhD research at the Ecole normale Supérieure in Paris, in order to temporarily take some distance from her own curatorial practice, and to investigate further, both theoretically and practically, the notion of "plural arts" (encompassing the so-called fine arts and the decorative and folk arts, and including non-western arts, beyond the usual hierarchies or the problematic encyclopedic paradigm). Her belief is that the notion of plurality could be instrumental in thinking the possibility of an institution of a new kind, one that would be more inclusive and transversal but also increasingly self-reflexive. In this conference, Dressen will address how her research developed, and taking the title of the series "the future of the museum" in a very direct manner, she will reflect on why such a museum does not exist yet, and how it could actually happen. What could be its conceptual and political potential?

In her view, the museum storage space can serve as a stimulating new methodological model : in these saturated crypts - that one could consider as the subconscious left-overs’ basement of canonical art history -- various unclassifiable, misfits objects coexist in surreal arrangements that do not follow the usual classifications (i.e. by masterpieces, artistic schools, chronology, geography, or even mediums). She will share some thoughts about pioneer figures (thinkers, architects and artists) who helped reforming the museum normative conventions and will reflect on how scenography and mediation could be reinvented in more open,polyvocal and creative ways. 

Anne Dressen is a curator of contemporary art at the Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris where she curated several group exhibitions dealing with undervalued artistic mediums, such as textile and tapestries (Decorum), ceramics (The Flames), jewelry (Medusa), but also music video (Playback), or fakes, forgeries and copies (Seconde main). Through these research projects, she questioned and problematized through an anthropological lens their relationships with the more legitimate "fine" or "noble" arts.

Anne Dressen: Out of the storage! Or how to think a museum for the plural arts?
7 November, Tuesday, 6.30 pm
Free entrance

The Museum of Contemporary Art fo the Basque Country, Artium Museoa, organises a series of encounters that offer different visions on the futures of the museum and its social responsability with regard to the safeguard of heritage and knowledge production.

Michael Marder: Notes for a vegetal museum

In this talk, I invite audience members to imagine what I call vegetal museum as a possible dynamic form of the institution’s future existence. By vegetal museum, I mean neither the contents of a collection nor the architectural and material configuration of museum buildings nor, even, the relation between these buildings and the garden (among other vegetal environments). Rather, I propose to bring the goals, modes of relating to time, as well as social and political relations that define the museum in line with the being of plants. What could the collection—both the process of collecting and the collected works themselves—look like in a museum that grows, decays, and metamorphoses like a plant? How would the ideal of conservation mutate in such an institution? What could be the sense of exhibitions, or displays, in light of the plants' tendency to maximize the exposure of their aboveground organs, while keeping the roots in the dark and moist reserves of the soil? These are but the initial questions, which will guide us through the process of vegetalizing the future of the museum.

Michael Marder is IKERBASQUE Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU), Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain. His writings span the fields of ecological theory, phenomenology, and political thought. He is the author of numerous scientific articles and monographs, including Plant-Thinking (2013); Phenomena—Critique—Logos (2014); The Philosopher’s Plant (2014); Dust (2016), Energy Dreams (2017), Heidegger (2018), Political Categories (2019), Pyropolitics (2015, 2020); Dump Philosophy (2020); Hegel's Energy (2021); Green Mass (2021), Philosophy for Passengers (2022), and The Phoenix Complex (2023), among others. For more information, consult his website michaelmarder.org.

Michael Marder: Notes for a vegetal museum
6 June, Tuesday, 6.30 pm
Free entrance

The Museum of Contemporary art of the Basque Country, Artium Museoa, is programming a series of meetings with agents from the field of art in order to provide a variety of perspectives on the future prospects of museums and their social and heritage responsibility, as well as on the creation of knowledge.

Filipa Ramos: A wild and sylvan North

What constitutes a territory and shapes its identity?
Is it its textures, temperatures, variations and chromatic combinations: what we are used to call landscape but which in this case is a landscape so close and interiorized that it resists such classification?
Is it the moods and ways of life of its inhabitants: the ways of being polite and rude to others, to relate to the environment and materials? Is it their expressions, ways of seeing and speaking?
Or a certain appreciation for rain, a genetic resistance to wind and heat, an interiorization of humidity?
Are borders wise lines that know how to distinguish lands or are they arbitrary separations that ignore similarities, blood and wind affinities, genetic patterns and seasonal movements?
And what role should art museums play in this complex questioning process that brings together nature and culture?

With these and other questions in mind, at the Galeria Municipal do Porto, I have been searching for the essence of Iberian Northwest, trying to find the places where it could reside. This talk shares some of the questions that I have been asking myself and others about the modes, rituals, textures and expressive modes that people, animals, plants, elements and minerals adopt when shaping a territory. 

Filipa Ramos is a Lisbon born writer and curator. She holds a PhD from the School of Critical Studies, Kingston University, London and is currently Director of the Contemporary Art Department of the city of Porto.

Her field of research in both her critical and theoretical texts, in addition to her lectures, workshops and publications, focuses on how culture addresses ecology, with a special interest in how contemporary art fosters relationships between nature and technology.

Filipa Ramos: A wild ans sylvan North
8 February, Wednesday, at 7 pm
Free admission until full capacity is reached

A collection of Final Degree Projects completed in the Basque Country on contemporary art

Artium Museoa and the Department of Art and Music History at UPV-EHU are organising the third edition of this event to present Final Degree Projects (TFG), Final Year Projects (TFE) or Master’s Degree Projects (TFM) related to contemporary art and culture that have been completed in recent years in the various universities and higher education institutions of the Basque Autonomous Community, Navarre and Aquitaine (France).

The event will include 15 projects from a wide range of specialities (various artistic disciplines, Art History, Philosophy and Aesthetics, Music, Anthropology, Sociology, Artistic Education, Audiovisual Communication, and so on) that all share a relationship with contemporary artistic proposals and languages.

In addition to disseminating these contributions developed in the classroom, the seminar aims to create a meeting place for graduates from various disciplines and areas of knowledge with regard to contemporary artistic creation.

From classrooms to public space III
26 October, from 9 am
Free access with registration at 945 20 90 20

As part of its 20th anniversary celebration, Artium Museoa has programmed a series of meetings with agents from the field of art in order to provide a variety of perspectives on the future prospects of museums and their social and heritage responsibility, as well as on the creation of knowledge.

Asier Mendizabal: Dejar para luego (Leave for later)

In this talk, the artist will discuss some of the moments in which his work has intersected with the museographic, the collection and the canon. Through three of his projects, Mendizabal will suggest that any collection is necessarily a contingent accumulation of materials. The readings that are symptomatically made in the future of our present choices are what will turn that contingency into a signifier and a collection into a story.

Asier Mendizabal (Ordizia, 1973) is a visual artist involved in several educational projects in addition to his current position as professor of sculpture at KKH, Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm.

Asier Mendizabal: Dejar para luego (Leave for later)
2 December, 6:30 pm
Free entrance

The Museum of Contemporary Art fo the Basque Country, Artium Museoa, organises a series of encounters that offer different visions on the futures of the museum and its social responsability with regard to the safeguard of heritage and knowledge production.

Elvira Dyangani Ose and Yaiza Hernández

In this conversation, Elvira Dyangani Ose and Yaiza Hernández will talk about their ideas on the role of the museum, as well as its future projections. While Dyangani Ose will talk about her experiences in various institutions at an international level, and now as director of MACBA, Hernández will highlight theoretical considerations that can help us to rethink the museum’s future.

Elvira Dyangani Ose is director of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (MACBA).

Yaiza Hernández Velázquez is a philosopher and lecturer in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London.

A conversation between Elvira Dyangani Ose and Yaiza Hernández
10 March, Friday, 6.30 pm
Free entrance

On the occasion of its 20th anniversary, the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Basque Country, Artium Museoa, organises a series of encounters that offer different visions on the futures of the museum and its social responsability with regard to the safeguard of heritage and knowledge production.

Nuria Enguita: The museum, between the fine arts and the mass media

What can a museum do now? The contemporary art museum is torn between the many histories of art it examines, its decolonial imperative and a precise social, systemic function. The museum as a place of concealed revisions and potentialities of the arts, a driver of civil dialogue and a privileged mechanism for encounters between art, social movements and academia. 

Nuria Enguita has been director of the Valencian Institute of Modern Art (IVAM) since 2020. She was director of the Bombas Gens art centre in Valencia between 2015 and 2020 and artistic director of the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona between 1998 and 2008. She was editor of the magazine Concreta between 2012 and 2020 and a member of the management team of the arteypensamiento programme at the International University of Andalusia (UNIA) from 2000 to 2014, as well as co-editor of the journal Afterall between 2007 and 2014. She was co-curator of the 31st São Paulo Biennial in 2014, Medellin International Encounter in 2011 and Manifesta 4 in Frankfurt in 2002. She also held the post of curator at the Valencian Institute of Modern Art (IVAM) between 1991 and 1998.

Nuria Enguita: The museum, between the fine arts and the mass media
September 14, 6:30 pm
Auditorium of Artium Museoa. Free entrance

July 22, 12 pm
Free entrance

On the occasion of the inauguration of the exhibition Clamor by Edurne Rubio, framed in the Sala Z program, the author will present the film that gives its name to the exhibition.

About the exhibition 

From Casino to Lazarett - Exercises for Remediating the Museum

Con motivo de la apertura de la exposición Gold 20. Fundir y parar, de Ainara Elgoibar, la artista, junto con la comisaria del programa Sala Z de Artium Museoa, Garbiñe Ortega, y el crítico y comisario Peio Aguirre, mantendrán una conversación sobre las películas que se presentan en la muestra -Gold 20 (2014) y Glas Marte Cut (2016)- y sobre la trayectoria de Elgoibar. Antes de la charla se proyectará otra pieza de Ainara Elgoibar, Rotor (2021).

En sus instalaciones, textos y películas, Ainara Elgoibar explora su interés por la actividad industrial, tanto en entornos productivos como de ocio. La fábrica, el motor, el vidrio, la música y el entretenimiento son temas recurrentes en sus trabajos.

Conversación: Ainara Elgoibar, Garbiñe Ortega, Peio Aguirre
Sábado 9 de abril, 12:00 horas
Auditorio de Artium Museoa. Entrada libre. Aforo limitado

Imagen: fotograma de 'Rotor' (fragmento)