Still limping as a result of a femur operation, José Luis de Vicente (Granada, 1973) moves slowly, with the help of crutches, through the immensity of the Design Hub in Plaza de las Glòries, but his head is going a thousand an hour . The expert in digital culture, art and technology joined the management of the Museu del Disseny last February, replacing Pilar Velez, and faces the challenge of launching into the future the largest cultural project in post-Olympic Barcelona -due to its high cost (101 million euros) and dimensions (28,000 square meters) - weighed down from the very moment of its inauguration, in 2014, by a conception and a museographic discourse more typical of the 19th century than of the 21st. Enthusiastic, creative and with an enormous talent for arousing complicity, the former curator of Sónar D or LLum Barcelona thinks big and, although he doesn't say so, his speech sounds very similar to the drums of the revolution. “This museum is like a hinge between a world that we perceive to be ending and the world to come,” he reflects.
Has the time come to reformulate the model?
This is one of the institutions with the greatest potential in a city that is also in a moment of very profound transformation of what it is, of how it operates, and of its relationship with external agents, with communities of knowledge... The photo we have of the city and its reality in many aspects do not match.
What does it mean?
I mean, for example, this city has a permanent influx of digital nomads who come from many parts of the world to settle here working in the knowledge economy thanks to the fact that we have very high connectivity. We are also the city that has the most complex and richest ecosystem of architecture, design and visual arts schools in Europe. One of the largest in the world. There are about 10,000 students each year. It is a photo that the institutional map of the city has not yet reflected. In Poblenou and 22@ there is an explosion of knowledge technologies and what was once called clean industries, which is nothing anecdotal. Then there is that other ecosystem of research institutions, the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, the Biomedical Research Park, the Institute of Marine Sciences..., with a great capacity to blend into spaces of creation. And more and more, from urban planning, we are a public space laboratory where the big questions that we are going to have to solve in the face of the concatenation of crises that are coming upon us and that are already devouring us are tested every day. We also have the great traditions of architecture and design... All that magma needs a space in what for me can be and should be the third great institution of the present along with the Macba and the CCCB. A triangle that covers the space of contemporary thought.
But currently it basically satisfies a patrimonial mission, with collections (decorative arts, textiles and clothing, ceramics...) compartmentalized and they don't even look at each other.
Initially, with Ramon Prat and Marta Marta Montmany, it was thought of as an institution of thought around design, to understand its impact as a transforming force in the world, but due to a series of historical conjunctures it had to assume the patrimonial function. It has already started to move in the last two years, when there began to be a more structural link with the field that some call the creative industries, but with 2024, which celebrates its tenth anniversary, many changes will come. The works on Glòries will be finished (I have always thought that Glòries' problem is Barcelona's problem: this ability to constantly review the way we live), we will inaugurate a store that will be a connector with the industry and we will occupy the annex building, which has never It had been used as a work space, residence, research and content production. In addition, one of the subway exits will give direct access to the museum, something symbolically very beautiful because it means that it becomes a public space, a museum-street through which people will cross and change their relationship with the citizenry.
The museum shares a building with the Design Hub, which has its own programme. How will both projects coexist?
We have found a model that will be fully reflected in the 2024 schedule, in which this entire machine, this entire building, will work in a single direction. It is a complete entity, with the museum and the Design Hub on the one hand and then with residents like the FAD and the BCD, who obviously have a lot to contribute. We will work hand in hand and with Mireia Escobar [director of the Design Hub] the harmony is absolute. The idea is that this sum of things produces a single story, a single voice and a single vision. This center addresses a huge family of communities, which are the communities of design, architecture, urbanism and innovation, which I do not consider different from design in any way. And it's very exciting because I think we have a tool that if we were to produce today would surely be impossible, and now is the right time to project it to its full potential.
Is the presentation of the collections going to be reconsidered?
Collections have to evolve. They were never set to stay as a static photo for a long time. Today museum collections are no longer conceived as jewels in the crown that represent an untouchable legacy that must be kept frozen and always present, but rather as tools that allow us to tell lots of stories. They will help us to talk about identity and identity politics, the construction of gender, the construction of race and the construction of class, materiality and the ecological, environmental and planetary implications of our design cultures. It will enable us to review the stories we have told ourselves. But I also know that we have a series of obligations that today are super interesting. This building is defined as a climate refuge, because in moments of crisis like last summer people will be able to come to be.
A center that responds to emergencies?
I love that notion because it is at the base of what design is for me. And among the infinite definitions that exist, when asked, there are two clear ones: the development of systems for survival and the production of worlds. Production of worlds in the sense of making things possible that we do not know are possible. I have always thought, both from my work at MediaLab Prado, and in the exhibition I did at the CCCB with Olga Subirós, Big Bang Data, or the program I directed at Sònar, that one of the most powerful functions that culture has it is to serve as a laboratory for society. It is a safe space in which we can try other possible ways of life, where nothing is closed or taken for granted. Everything can be rethought again, be it the future of cities or that of food. Cattle meat will gradually disappear from our diet and we will replace the protein with seaweed and mussels, but as the rise in sea temperatures in Catalonia will make it increasingly difficult to produce mussels, we will have to replace them with oysters, so that within Twenty years ago, paellas still look very different. All these are the transformation spaces that design and innovation allow. We have so much to tell and there is such a need to tell these things that we need a powerful instrument. And it turns out that we have it here if we imagine it as something more than a place to preserve heritage.
What threads can be stretched from the collections?
An example: in the 60s, plastic was a liberating material because it allowed us to think of a new material culture of consumption, more democratic and easier. Today, plastic is a problem on a planetary scale that appears in the intestinal tracts of all species, that comes out of drinking water through the taps in our homes and that has generated a new mineral that is the result of the fusion of natural sediments and virtually indistinguishable plastic sediment. We couldn't explain the story of how a material has changed the world if we didn't have a collection that allows us to do it and to do it very well. But there are many others.
There is an object that fascinates me, the Rotkho chair, which was designed by a Catalan for the Rotkho bar, using an experimental material with almond shells as a possible substitute polymer for plastic. His inventor understood that there was a possible future there, but he died in a traffic accident and that interrupted the investigation. There is a kind of false take of the future, of siding, of plastic. he died in a traffic accident and that sort of interrupted the evolution of that material into a series of products and it never really ended to continue. There is a kind of false take on the future, let's say the end of a siding, which connects with what Buckminster Fuller, one of my referents, said, who said that in nature the concept of waste does not exist, waste is only the resources that we don't know how to use All of this is contained in a chair from a Catalan designer who could not complete his project.
Will there be space for exhibitions like the Banksy one that has been presented in the Disseny Hub in recent years?
I'm not afraid of popular culture. And popular culture must be an important element here, one of the tones or registers from which we will operate. My problem is not that it's Banksy, but rather the packaged exhibition model that comes in a box, opens up and is suitable for all audiences. We have enough questions, strength and resources not to have to fall back on the indistinguishable traveling exhibition. They are not rooted in the context and treat viewers as if they were a single viewer.
In other words, the question is not what but how. There is also a notion that these projects are necessary for people to come and I am not convinced that this has to be the case. I have had experiences from which I have learned a lot, like Big Bang Data, which visited thirteen cities and has had a very long life that I would never have imagined. It catalyzed questions that were in the air and the exhibition format served to give many clues. I believe that we have enough questions to ask, enough strength and enough resources not to fall into the traveling exhibition.
What would you most like to see happen in here?
That by the time we reach that tenth anniversary in 2024, the city would see itself reflected in an institution that is a reflection of what Barcelona wants to think it is and how it wants to see itself. There are obviously many Barcelona, but design is something so alive that it is even at the center of electoral debates.
Barcelona will be a city of culture and science, or it will become increasingly uncomfortable or disgusting with its most immediate realities. And this space can be an enormous resource to help the city to recognize itself in that story.
