The board of trustees of the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (MNAC), the highest body of the museum of which the Generalitat, the Barcelona City Council and the Ministry of Culture form part, have given the green light to the signing of Manuel Borja-Villel, who in the For the next three years, he will be in charge of rethinking its expansion, in the Victòria Eugènia pavilion, in close collaboration with its director Pepe Serra. As La Vanguardia announced, the former director of the MACBA and the Reina Sofía will report to the Natàlia Garriga Department of Culture and among his functions, published in DOG, will also include advising and providing an external vision of the entire museum system. Catalan. His incorporation will become effective in September.
"Manolo had to return to the city where he was born as the great director that he is, and it is important that Barcelona also recognize him for how much he did in this city," says Jordi Martí, deputy mayor for Culture and the person who managed operation from its inception. “When I took over the Department of Culture a year ago, one of the many visits I make is to the MNAC and I realize that what is at stake is not an expansion but that the museum must be reinvented. With the Victòria Eugènia it will gain 15,000 square meters [30,000 if one takes into account that the height of the pavilion allows for a second floor]. It will be the great museum project that is going to be launched in Barcelona and Catalonia in many years and it was worth devoting all the resources to imagining that future museum that will no longer have anything to do with the one we know now”.
For Martí, number two for Ada Colau in the upcoming municipal elections, the MNAC "is the museum that explains a country and a culture to us and the opportunity to rethink how that culture is explained and that country arrives at an unbeatable moment." The idea of contacting a figure like Manuel Borja-Villel, who in the latest issue of the international magazine Artforum is consecrated as the best curator-director of a museum of modern and contemporary art in the world by the prestigious theoretician Ive-Alain Bois, comes from precisely from the work carried out at the Macba and especially at the Reina Sofía, “where he carried out a radical transformation, breaking the linear story of art history to contextualize it socially and politically and enrich his story. This, which in the contemporary field is almost a common currency, has not been done in other types of museums, let's say encyclopedic, such as the MNAC, and it was worth taking advantage of this moment of growth to try it”.
Martí and Borja-Villel began the conversations more than a year ago, when the latter still did not know if he would run for re-election at the Madrid museum, “but he immediately expressed his willingness to study it. He was clear that he did not want to run a museum again, on the other hand, a proposal like this fit into his plans and also represented a challenge. And for us it is a shot of self-esteem ”.
Martí puts on the bandage before the wound appears. "Pepe Serra is the director and he has full confidence, both on our part and on the part of the Generalitat, and I think the mix is going to work." Borja-Villel's contract will be attached to the Ministry of Culture to develop the so-called Temporary Program for the development and fit into the art museum system of the expansion and promotion project of the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, which was approved by the Government of the Generalitat on February 21.
Although the document published later by the Official Gazette of the Generalitat de Catalunya details the functions of a director, the note made public by the board of trustees specifies that it will be a task of "accompaniment for reflection and innovation aimed at making contributions to the project prepared by the museum, in the specific issues established by the museum”. For this, it will have a team made up of an administrator and a technician. For this reason, he will receive a salary comparable to that of a general manager, plus ten percent in variable remuneration, with a maximum of 99,000 euros.
In the signing of Borja-Villel, who is currently curator of the São Paulo Biennial, even the president Pere Aragonés himself, who met with him in Madrid, has been involved. His role will not be limited to expanding the MNAC, but he will assume a leadership role in the Catalan museum system. “Manolo is the professional with the greatest intellectual prestige in the contemporary and modern art sector, and I think his relationships and contacts in the international arena will also help us to project ourselves”, concludes Martí.
