Museo Blanes/Harto espacio
Country
Uruquay
Profile
The Museo Municipal de Bellas Artes Juan Manuel Blanes (Museo Blanes/Blanes Museum), works close togheter in partnership with the Asociación Amigos del Museo Blanes (Friends of the Blanes Museum Foundation). Each organisation has its own legal structure and each complies with its respective roles in society. The Museo Blanes designs the institutional policy which is at the service of the citizens and the Asociación Amigos del Museo Blanes manages and produces the plan of action for these policies, thus fulfilling the Museum’s mission, objectives and activities.
The Museo Blanes was created in 1935 and has a heritage of three thousand works of art, most of which are by national and Latin American authors (19th, 20th and 21st Centuries), as well as a collection of European engravings from the 15th to the 20th Century.
The Asociación Amigos del Museo Blanes is a non-profit Civil organization, created in 1990 with legal status and statutes approved by the Ministry of Education and Culture in 1994.
Mission
The Museo Blanes and the Amigos del Museo Blanes, in partnership, have the mission to institutionalise the information and the debate on the visual culture. With this aim it resorts to networks of people and organisations, seeking to generate an interdisciplinary dialogue and the generation of specific knowledge.
The mission of the Museo Blanes is to preserve, disseminate, increase and resignify its cultural and artistic heritage at the service of the construction and development of society, expanding its activity through networks in the region and the world.
The Asociación Amigos del Museo Blanes has the mission of decentralising and providing autonomy from public administration to the museum, by managing and producing its plan of action.
The plans are implemented with the joint civil participation of the Aociación Amigos del Museo Blanes. In order to prevent possible interests of the business private sector – one of the sectors with which the Amigos del Museo Blanes aritculates its financial participation in the management of the Museum – from affecting or interfering with the social institutional policies of the Museum, the code of ethics of the Amigos del Museo Blanes states that it is the Museo Blanes – through its final decision – who has to guarantee the institutional strategies with social objectives.
Main activities of the organisation
The main activities of the partnership Museo Blanes/Amigos Museo Blanes seek to develop a cultural policy of the Museum aimed at intensifying the South-South links and networks, with a focus on the South American continent.
These links are traditionally weak and outshone by the stronger North-South and South-North networks carried out at “individually” from institution to institution and from country to country, because the cultural institutional network and its exchange circuits face serious difficulties due to political and economic reasons, in spite of the Mercosur and other agreements. The circulation of cultural goods and services in Latin America has not benefited from the economic agreements.
That is why, some of the most significant projects carried out by the Museo/Amigos del Museo have tended to:
The creation of local and translocal networks with specialists, with the aim of enhancing the participation of artists, curators and analysts in the framework of the diversity of our social and cultural map.
The creation of networks to connect museums and institutions in similar situations to that of the Museo Blanes in order to establish common museological strategies, working in networks with universities to perform curatorial scripts based on academic research.
Relevant institutional activities
Temporary exhibitions with specific curatorial scripts, promoting various forms of dialogue between the Museum's collection and contemporary art, as well as between these and academic research.
Editorial plan to record these exhibitions and research work.
Creation and expansion of the archive on national and Latin American artists.
Selected educational activities for different publics.
Local, regional and internationals conferences, seminars on the role of contemporary art in the development of critical capacity on historiographic problems of art, on aspects debated by current museology, on the political role of the art curator, and other problems associated to these.
As background information, the main network projects of the organisation has its cornerstone on the Regional Art Meetings that have been held since 1993 with the aim of generating “horizontal” links and developing critical thought.
First Regional Art Meeting in the Museo Blanes. November 1993.
With the participation of Uruguayan theorists and artists together with theorists and artists from Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, Brazil and Cuba.
Second Regional Art Meeting. November 1996. Museo Blanes, National Museum of Anthropology, Botanical Museum and Gardens. With the participation of artists, theorists and curators from Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Chile, Paraguay.
Third Regional Art Meeting, Montevideo 2007. August to September 2007 (ERA07).
Museo Blanes, National Museum of Visual Arts, National Historical Museum, Municipal Historical Museum and Archive (el Cabildo) and the Spanish Cultural Centre at Montevideo. and Montevideo, Contemporary Art Foundation. With the participation of emerging artists from de local scene (Harto Espacio) and artists from Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Mexico, Italy, Lebanon/UK, India, Spain and Uruguay. Guest speakers from Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Paraguay, Mexico, Costa Rica, Cuba and Spain.
Supported by Arts Collaboratory for
Regional Meeting of Art . Montevideo 2007 ( ERA07) Harto Espacio emerging artists proposals
The project became a complex and very stimulating curatorial project, essentially binding and controversial in its nature based in Montevideo. Given the dimensions of the event and the quality of its participants, the Regional Art Meeting. Region: Frictions and Fictions. Art in Transit – A dialogue with History is the first and most significant international proposal made in the field of visual arts in this city on the River Plate – “an estuary the size of a sea”.
The project was structured on the idea of contributing to generate active links between people who work in the areas of artistic creativity and thinking, and those who generate knowledge on the basis of research in social sciences, anthropology and political sciences. The selected central theme for all interventions by artists and analysts revolved around the contemporary crisis of the concept of ‘region’. The border policies, the multicultural dynamism created by migration and the stigma – oftentimes – of risk, of clandestinity, and the rupture and pervading effect of urban life on the public and private spheres, the subtle forms of cultural colonialism in the framework of an economically globalised world and, finally, the crisis of place suffered by subjects in this context, were some of the factors that were approached through the view of contemporary art, in a dialogue with the view of XIXth Century “regionalist art”. In addition to this, an interdisciplinary perspective was covered in the conferences, art clinics and the academic panels.
Under the coordination and general curatorship of Gabriel Peluffo Linari, director of the Blanes Museum, the proposal was organised in a project ERA07 historical world region, which included a dialogue of the contemporary artistic practices (La Cuadratura del Cono/Border Jam, curated by the Cuban Gerardo Mosquera) and the historic curatorial script (Besieged Images, curated by the Argentine historian Roberto Amigo), and a project ERA07 city region, that convened artists and institutions form the local scene. The project had an impressive impact and produced an unprecedented mobilization of artists and theorists and the involvement of the major cultural and artistic institutions in the country (Municipal Museum Juan Manuel Blanes, National Museum of Visual Arts, the Municipality of Montevideo and the Spanish Cultural Centre among others), as well as including controversial urban interventions.
In addition to the unprecedented fact in the region of bringing together about one hundred iconographic works (paintings, engravings, allegories, photographs and documents) belonging to the period prior to the constitution of the Nations (1830-1870), which were brought from Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, for the first time 19 contemporary highly qualified artists of international renown from 11 countries in various regions of the world met in Montevideo, such as Monica Bonvicini; Luis Camnitzer; Claudia Casarino; Claudio Correa; Jose Damasceno; Lucia Egaña; Shilpa Gupta; Mona Hatoum; Ricardo Lanzarini; Cristina Lucas; Teresa Margolles; Amalia Pica; Miguel Angel Rios; Osvaldo Salerno; Fernando Sanchez Castillo; Santiago Sierra; Vibeke Tandberg and Pablo Uribe.
The local scene provided an interesting and enriching web connecting the Call for submissions for the Salón Municipal 2007coordinated by Santiago Tavella (which included Eva Grinstein and Cecilia Brunson in its international jury) and the collective and solo projects presented by the artists of Harto_Espacio (Adela Casacuberta y Antar Kuri); Mariana Ures; Marte Upmarket (Mercedes Bustelo y Gustavo Tabares), Enrique Aguerre (Frontera Incierta), Fundación Arte Contemporáneo (Angela López and Juliana Rosales) and Jacqueline Lacasa (Intervalo de Confianza).
During the conference cycle and round tables the specific theme of the crisis of the region in the context of globalization from the perspective of the triangle ‘Art, Anthropology and Politics’ was approached by Uruguayan theorists of international renown (as Hugo Achugar, Teresa Porzecansky, María Inés Torres, Alberto Methol Ferré, Mario Consens, Gerardo Caetano y Constanza Moreira) and prominent intellectuals from Europe and Latin America such as Estrella de Diego; Ticio Escobar; Paulo Herkenhoff; Nelly Richard; Cuauhtémoc Medina; Gustavo Buntinx; Virginia Pérez Ratton; Marcia Sprandel; Laura Malosetti and Ana Tiscornia. The art clinics were coordinated by Tumelo Mosaka (USA), José Luis Brea (Spain) and Rafael Cippolini (Argentina), among others.
Institutional credits: The proyect ERA07 was organized by the Museo Municipal de Bellas Artes (Blanes Museum from) the Municipality of Montevideo and the Friends of the Blanes Museum Foundation and was declared of National Interest by the President of the Republic; it was co produced with SEACEX (State Society for Foreign Cultural Affairs), and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation (Spain) and the Spanish Cultural Centre, Montevideo. It also had the institutional sponsorship of the Prince Claus Fund, Hivos-Stichting Doen (Arts Collaboratory), the Office for Contemporary Art of Norway (OCA); the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection; the British Council, the Interamerican Development Bank and UNESCO; the Embassies of Mexico, Brazil and Cultural Itaú Foundation.
Website
museoblanes@museoblanes.org.uy
Address
Millán 4015
11700 Montevideo Uruguay
Phone and Fax 598 2 336 2248 / 598 2 336 7134