Is there no remedy other than to replace the detached member, bandage it

and immobilize it? Anyone who has dislocated an elbow, a shoulder or a finger knows
The Museum as a Work in Progress
that dislocated also means free and submitting only to its own oscillation, however Bárbara Perea
painful that may be. We need to understand, then, that dislocated spaces are not spaces
of autonomy and absolute rejection: we refer not so much to a secession or a sep-
aration as to the resistance to or sabotage of any functional articulation. However, the I find it highly appropriate to discuss MUCA Roma at a round table on dislocated spaces,
fact that these spaces, these limbs, have not been completely amputated does not mean if we take that to mean a cross between cultural management and art practices designed
that their displacement was a delicate process: it is possible that the reason they are to move away from the notion of the Museum as a repository of objects and also to oblige
out of place involves a memory of incredible violence. But despite the torture that cultural institutions to constantly reinvent themselves insofar as those very art practices,
has been inflicted, a dislocated space still remains close to its original position, though public practices and current theories demand more dynamic positions and strategies.
no longer linked to the rest of the political body. It has been separated from the gen- MUCA Roma itself emerged as a dislocated member of its parent institution,
eral context of its culture, and has ceased to have any connection to general cultur- the University Museum of Sciences and Art (Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Arte,
al politics. But is there anything to be gained from dislocation? or MUCA) on the National Autonomous University of Mexico (Universidad Nacional
The most recent Spanish dictionary has fully incorporated the Anglicism dis- Autónoma de México, or UNAM) campus. Its proposed function was to give the UNAM
locado. In other words, the definition has been expanded to include the following mean- a presence in a culturally significant part of Mexico City, with the idea not only of stay-
ings: “To twist an argument or reasoning, to manipulate it by taking it out of context,” ing in touch with the local art scene and influencing it, but also of enabling it to respond
or “To make someone lose their strength or composure.”3 However, it seems to me more quickly to the demands of art practice and the cultural medium.
that with this solution, we have incurred a terrible loss. In 1999, when I ran indignantly Thus, it is possible to speak of dislocation on a number of levels here: not only
to my Diccionario de la Real Academia Española in its still current nineteenth edition, that of MUCA Roma’s condition as a cell of its parent institution, but also in the sense of
published in 1970, to discover that dislocado was in fact a foreign use of the language, it being oriented toward a more permeable and fluid museum space, like a temporarily
I discovered the following pearl of wisdom: autonomous zone that questions traditional ways of making and interpreting art. As a
laboratory, battlefield and tabula rasa that attempts to erase discursive lines based on
Dislocar: (from the Latin dis, negative, and locare, to place). Tr. To remove a generational, stylistic or historic criteria, MUCA Roma seeks to define itself based on a
thing from its place, usually referring to bones and joints. // 2. fig. To provoke destabilizing, playful and subversive action focused on the constant questioning of what
vehement enthusiasm or desire. is understood by the terms contemporary, public, artist and museum. It may be a not-for-
profit public space, but it is immersed in a world with close ties to the market.
All that remains now is to dislocate ourselves at once. Its openly anticuratorial nature puts artists with dissimilar positions and from dif-
ferent places on equal terms, making this space a redoubt, a safe haven in the Roma
Translated by Michelle Suderman. district, intended as a response to Mexico City’s more officializing spaces of national
and international Art History, and thus providing a counterpointed interpretation of art
practice—a kind of discursive and creative emergency room, based on trial and error.
And with sirens wailing because, let’s face it, the art practices and strategies
outlined in this round table’s synthetic description—collaboration, interdisciplinarity, site-
specificity, works in progress, interventions—turn cultural management into an extreme
sport only suitable for adrenaline addicts. Indeed, as art strategies are expanded to
make room for something besides the traditional finished product that can be exhib-
ited in a gallery, there comes a need to revise current practices among management,
curators—I guess among critics, too—as well as in museum models… Only then may
we speak of intervention and site-specific art—not only as strategies of artistic pro-
3
Real Academia Española, Diccionario de la lengua española, 22nd ed., vol. 4 (Madrid: Real Academia duction, but at an interpretive level where discourses are generated: for example,
Española, 2001): 564.

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curating site-specific art and interventions, as in the case of inSite or the Havana Biennial. The resulting collections are displayed on panels, in rows of sandwich bags
Similarly, we can speak of cultural management in the expanded field, and as a kind containing a wide variety of objects which range from things that represent a customs
of negotiation table that brings together different agents from inside and outside the nightmare, including controlled substances and desiccated animals, to those that pres-
medium depending on the requirements of each project. ent interesting conservation problems—food, for the most part.
As an example, I will refer primarily to a project presented at MUCA Roma two For its presentation at MUCA Roma, the Pedestrian Museum was invited to
and a half years ago, because I see it as symptomatic of the current condition of the create two new collections at the UNAM campus and exhibit all the collections formed
museum we are referring to, and something that directly puts the traditional idea of thus far at MUCA Roma. This implied containing a museum within a museum, a mirror
the museum in a state of crisis. within a mirror. In other words, a museum without a collection joined forces with a
museum without a space, leaving both in equal circumstances, neither of them being
II more real or more of a simulacrum than the other, and both holding the necessary
MUCA Roma’s vocational and mission statements do not mention the formation of credentials to be able to call themselves museums. So, at the same time that there
art collections as one of its objectives, given that it has access to the MUCA Campus has been a shift in art status, there has been an equal shift in the institution’s sta-
collection. We will return to this fact in the examples below, but it is important to clarify tus. In that sense, both are works in progress.
this point from the outset. Parallel to the Pedestrian Museum’s presentation at MUCA Roma, three young
The Pedestrian Museum is a project hovering on the borderline between cultur- artists were invited to present interventions based on the MUCA Campus collection. In
al institution, collection, intervention, work in progress, site-specific curating and action. one case, the result is especially critical to an attack on the institution’s condition and
It fulfills all the necessary requirements for any of the foregoing, but always with a standards. Using the statutes on how the collection is to be formed and the broad def-
wink at the public, urging it to press for a revision of the use and circumstances of those inition of capital assets, Frida Cano proposed that the institution’s employees become
terms, and to adopt a position on how they are defined. part of the collection, with inventory numbers, catalogue entries with corresponding
The strategy is simple but effective: gathering objects donated by people photographs, and the whole documentary apparatus required for any object registered
walking by a particular spot, thus forming anthropometric or indicial collections that in a collection. The piece was presented to the corresponding acquisitions commit-
provide information on the condition of the inhabitants of a place. tee and, ironically, was rejected.
The project spokespersons—as well as custodians, curators, conservators, The next project I would like to speak about is key in terms of exploring the
fundraisers, and above all, architects—are the artists María Alós and Nicolás Dummit limits of the institution and delimiting its nature as a space for the protection and exhi-
Estévez, who began the project in New York, where they formed different collections bition of art objects.
by setting up in different parts of Manhattan, including Ground Zero. The objects col- The intervention Project for MUCA Roma by the Monterrey collective Tercerunquinto
lected are then catalogued and inventoried, and the donor is asked to sign a dona- envisioned the space as a negotiation table for a prearranged occupation in which
tion sheet, of which he or she will be given a copy. the institution agreed to function primarily as storage for objects pertaining to the
Wearing suits and with an oddly executive and official appearance, Alós and informal economy that thrives in this district.
Estévez set up to collect objects in crowded public places with heavy pedestrian traffic. Each room of the museum was fitted with locks and chain-link fences that allowed
With the help of a bilingual recorded message, they invite passersby to donate objects the public to look in and see the objects stored there. The university signed a contract
they are carrying with them. The only requirement is that each object fit into a Ziploc committing to store and protect the goods belonging to a group of street vendors.
sandwich bag. The donor fills out the form and the object is identified with an invento- Negotiating this project was no simple matter. It implied turning the museum into
ry number that includes a letter code corresponding to the place where it was received. a warehouse, held in usufruct by a group of retailers whose activity was not entirely legal.
So the different collections generated by the Pedestrian Museum are an anthropologi- The institution was naturally reticent, and the battling groups of vendors even more so.
cal survey of the places where the samples have been taken. It is a kind of census where To the radicals’ joy and the authorities’ horror, on the opening day of what was
the answers are objects—at Ground Zero in New York, for example, one of the dona- to be a two-and-a-half-month-long exhibition, the museum was empty, its rooms closed,
tions is a handkerchief containing the donor’s tears; the collection gathered at the UNAM its walls peeling.
Faculty of Arts in Mexico City includes a wallet embroidered with a marijuana leaf and The project was only moderately successful, and its results deviated from the
a small Mao paperback; in Havana, it was striking how many people donated money. initial proposal given that the “warehouse/galleries” wound up attracting only antique

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dealers and Sunday painters who sold their wares at the flea market that set up on just an art laboratory to serving as a space for curatorial and discursive experimen-
weekends just a block and a half from the museum. They were overjoyed to have their tation, but it was now necessary to cater to the demands of art practices that required
work displayed in a museum and thus achieve a strange, involuntary and vicarious not only a space for management-negotiation (as well as exhibition), but also clear
legitimization. The owners of stands specializing in pirated goods, for example, were and accessible documentary support that would respond to a growing need for free
not interested in the nearby guarded facilities and installations that the university was access to information. Thus, it went from the model of the museum as work in progress
offering them for free, despite the fact that this would allow some clearly illegal mer- to that of the museum as open source, malleable and user-friendly, a collective creation
chandise to be secured under the same conditions as any work of art. with an unpredictable core of collaboration and interdisciplinarity, rather than a vertical,
In this instance, the university demonstrated more flexibility than we had antic- hegemonic structure intended to establish the bases for official histories of national art.
ipated—even more so than the skeptical groups of street vendors who had rejected So, what was needed was an element favoring reflection, analysis and a closer
what represented a merely symbolic benefit to them, if that. Now I wonder if the attempt study of the aforementioned and other projects, with a view to creating an adequate
to alter the function of the museum space was even partly successful: the museum record of them as an active memoir of our work.
never ceased to be a museum. Rather, it expanded its function to include the storage With that in mind, a strategic plan for the Center for the Documentation of
of objects for contemplation. Some difference! But over and above this mere simpli- Contemporary Art was conceived, requiring—among other things—a change of loca-
fication of a phenomenon with broader implications, what this intervention did achieve tion in order to accommodate the center as the foundation and hub of the work that
was a meeting of suspicious gazes that observed each other as if from behind barriers. was being done. JoAna Morfín and Claudio Hernández—two restorers and conser-
The public we had aspired to attract—pedestrians and people who frequented the vators specializing in contemporary art and digital resources—were hired to carry out
streets near the museum—suddenly found itself with an inverted role, exhibiting its a diagnostics, stabilize the collection and develop the active parameters and policies
objects for the enjoyment of a specialized public, whatever the pretext, and operating regarding the acquisition of materials, as well as to generate specific tools for the col-
outside the legitimizing framework of an institution or artistic collective endorsed by lection’s conservation, storage and digitalization according to international standards
a trade union. The fact was that art specialists were going to look at the mediocre developed for this kind of initiative. In conjunction with the conservation and restoration
paintings and antique junk belonging to a group of street vendors and stored in an team, Víctor Álvarez advanced a proposal for a Cultural Management and Heritage
official and public place that had blocked access to its rooms in order to store these master’s project at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Puebla, Mexico. It involved study-
objects. The only people allowed to enter these rooms over the space of two and a half ing the Center’s public in order to develop a profile of its users, as well as analyzing the
months were the vendors. The work was clearly not about getting tangible results, but condition of the collection that MUCA Roma had amassed thus far and possibilities for
rather about a process in construction, a making-of, behind the scenes, where what strategic connection to other cultural centers in the area so as to improve the dissem-
was constructed and deconstructed was the relationship and exchange among artists, ination, use, significance and effectiveness of the material gathered.
institution, artwork and public, as roles that are inseparable and interchangeable. With this initiative, we were able to move toward a more interdisciplinary and
Was the so frequently cited art status questioned, altered or submitted to any collective focus in the construction of a contemporary art space which on the one hand,
new crisis? Perhaps the question itself is a bit naïve, but it should also be analyzed would accommodate a scientific approach—insofar as science was applied to the
in broader terms, rather than taking the immediacy of said intervention for granted, restoration process, and keeping in mind that MUCA Roma is the University Museum
because the final example I want to discuss provides a more direct response to the of Sciences and Art—and on the other, generate a Documentary Center model that
questions posed here relating to how a shift in art’s modes of production, interpre- would be applicable to other museums. This, in my view, is our clearest response to
tation and circulation has in turn been a factor in the modification of current institu- the need to document, preserve and circulate the projects generated by all the col-
tional models, which are the product of experiments like the ones discussed above. laborators of MUCA Roma. To all of them, our deepest thanks.
The clearest response lies in committing to a slightly different direction than ones
taken before. During its eight years of existence, MUCA Roma had gone from being Translated by Michelle Suderman.

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