Much more art and Spanish artists than its predecessor. Stimulate your production. And give them room to make mistakes. Entry of popular culture, including trap and, why not, artists such as Rosalía, C. Tangana and Arca, to bring new audiences and generations closer. Reach a consensus on the museum's immense collection - 24,000 pieces - that serves as a guideline for any story that is built about it: a minimum common story. Gender parity. The living arts introduced into the rooms with performances that are part of the exhibition itself, especially in the Velázquez Palace. Add to the art of southern America that of the other shore of the Mediterranean, as powerful as it is unknown here. Synchronize the museum's territory of thought with an international thought that both artists and publishers have been quicker to grasp. Above all, articulate a story with many voices. A tentacular museum in which each tentacle has its own brain. A seductive museum.
These are some of the ideas and terms with which Manuel Segade has presented today his project for the next five years in which he will be director of the Reina Sofía National Art Center Museum. Segade (La Coruña, 1977) has explained in depth his program, in which he especially wants to promote the Reina Sofía as a tool for positioning Spanish art and artists, who will now be much more present in the center and whose lesser presence was one of the aspects for which his predecessor was criticized. But all this will not happen immediately: exhibitions in large museums are not improvised, and Segade has inherited two years of programming from Manuel Borja-Villel, "with excellent exhibitions and some very important projects," he stressed.
And he has assured that these two years will in any case provide "the Spanish artists who will join us in 2026 all the necessary production time, peace of mind in starting a project, to be able to get the level of excellence they need." "We are already working on the projects for mid-2025 and on the new presentations of the collection to come. Even so, you will notice symptoms and changes that will indicate that there are things about museography that are beginning to mutate. And a museum is not just its programming , 90% is kitchen work that allows your programming to exist. Thinking that only programming gives us the illusion of work is not true. And legacy programming is wonderful. Furthermore, just because the same projects occur does not mean that they occur in the same way. the same way. And there will be some more exhibition projects if the budget is given, it will be incorporated."
To talk about the work that lies ahead in the next two years, Segade has used a metaphor using corrugated cardboard, that of the boxes that carry so many shipments today. "Corrugated cardboard is a basic structure of the entire logistics of the global distribution of things. A particularly interesting structure, with three identical layers of paper but the middle one is corrugated. Each part alone would be unable to support the weight, but one Once you insert the corrugated sheet, the whole is given resistance. Paradoxically, the zig zag voids are what allow a solid and rigid structure. In biology, structural voids like these are called interstices and are what allow the organs to function. and let's be alive. These two future years my team will focus on the planned program and the future program but also to build these gaps, we will attend to imagining and preparing the future, to the structural, to the improvement of design and architecture, to growth of the collection with parity and the search for national stories still to be rescued. To organize the museum for the program to come and adapt the rooms, more versatile and with different scales, to serve the local scene, Spanish artists with all the variety of projects that these men and women deserve.
The collection, which Borja-Villel organized during these years in an immense project titled Communicating Vessels that includes everything from architecture to workers' magazines or art from the AIDS era or the 15-M banners, for now will remain unscathed. "It seems to me that frankly making patches in the collection right now and starting to introduce names because yes, it is not a collection exhibition, it is quite miserable and does not correspond to the level of quality to which this museum has accustomed us. We are due a little patience and I hope that in mid-2025 there will begin to be changes," Segade stressed.
And he has announced the names that will accompany him on the museum's Advisory Committee, great Spanish curators of contemporary art such as María Corral, Chus Martínez, Vicente Todolí and Gloria Moure, in addition to João Fernades, director of the Moreira Sales Institute in Brazil, Amanda de la Garza, director of the University Museum of Contemporary Art of the UNAM in Mexico, and the Argentine curator Inés Katzenstein. In addition there will be an Architecture and Design Advisory Committee with Juan Herreros, Andrés Jarque and Marina Otero.
Segade is also committed to bringing popular culture into the museum so that it penetrates the present and expands its audiences. He has even mentioned musical genres, such as trap, and names that he would like to see in the center's future. "In trap there are contemporary artists who are already working and have incorporated it into their content, such as Claudia Pagès, and we have fundamental figures of world popular culture living in Spain or directly Spaniards closely related to the contexts of contemporary art, who have collaborated with contemporary artists to make their covers, their videos, a C. Tangana, a Rosalía, an Arca, who live in this country, and it would not be difficult to wrap them in things like we have wrapped the Niño de Elche. There are swathes of public now not "so interested in what happens in the museum and for whom we can look for ways of closeness", be it, he pointed out, through festivals, performances or interdisciplinarity that allow us to develop projects to imagine other forms of participation for this type of agents" .
