Manuel Segade (A Coruña, 1977) has just been appointed director of the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, the ocean liner of Spanish contemporary art. Until now responsible for CA2M in Móstoles, the current art center of the Community of Madrid, he arrives at the Reina Sofía to succeed a global reference such as Manuel Borja-Villel, who after 15 years did not run for re-election after a harsh media campaign.
Why did you decide to take the plunge, what is the Reina Sofía for you?
It is a responsibility in which my generation has to be involved. That was the bottom line. Talking with many of my project colleagues in recent years, it seemed essential to transfer much of the knowledge and experiences of this generation of mine, which in the end is the one vaunted in its day as the most prepared generation of democracy. We have been trained abroad and we have been able to accumulate experiences that other generations have sometimes not had. And after directing a museum like CA2M and knowing that I could face it on that scale, it seemed important to me to present myself now that I could articulate a project. It literally happened during the contest, on a walk through the museum. I told myself: I imagine a project, I think I have something to contribute.
What project do you have?
It is essential that I first explain it to the people with whom I want to do it. But I can tell you one thing that seems important to me. In recent months there has been a lot of talk that we are going to a transition period in the museum. I would like to make it clear that there is a museum that is truly marvelous, one of the most important public institutions of European contemporary art, if not the most, and it is fundamental to understand this more as a process of almost consolidation of the project itself. Not a transition to something else, because I think the wickerwork is there, and it is essential to understand the height and the gigantic symbolic capital that the Queen has. The fundamental thing is to collectivize it, so that it reaches and permeates many other layers that have to do with contemporary Spanish art. That these processes of internationalization and that visibility generate more wealth in the very context of Spanish art.
How do you assess the task that Borja-Villel has carried out?
We must applaud the work of these years, the situation in which the museum has left. The line of work and its method of institutionalization are imitated throughout the world. Regarding the controversial departure, there has been a very violent reaction that has sometimes bordered on offense and is very unfair to Manolo and nothing positive for the museum, it ends up hurting institutions and people. What we have to do is raise the museum project based on the great advantages that the position in which the institution leaves the institution gives us.
Is it a bad time to arrive?
On the contrary, I believe that no moment is good or bad, what matters is the vital moment in the energy of the people who join an institution. And the museum is at a truly impressive level.
In the controversy against Borja-Villel, he has been criticized for missing Spanish artists. Will he make a bigger bet?
When people complain, you have to listen. In public, any critical voice that reaches us is important to take seriously. What I would like is to generate a much more plural narrative and much more consensus. I think it is very important, and I am not referring so much to the previous story itself. The collection presentation has been extensive, it is very difficult to articulate another story so complex and so large. But I think that it is important that fluidity, the need for polyphony of stories, reach the collection and above all establish a consensus criterion. A dialogue with the advisory committee, with the scene itself, even a public dialogue that allows us to understand what kind of story or names should never be missing. That could put us at a juncture of a new canon, but it's not so much that as the continuing need to understand that that canon is absolutely revisable. It is important to make people identify with a much larger story.
