The creation of the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, officially inaugurated in 1995, was one of a series of actions carried out in Barcelona during the eighties and the first half of the nineties, the purpose of which was the urban restructuring of the city and its orientation toward an outward-looking economy centred fundamentally on the tertiary sector and in particular on tourism.
The changes experienced by Barcelona during these years coincide with similar movements in other cities around the world, and are part of the transformations our society has undergone in a wake of the globalization of capital, production and the market. More than in any other period, financial flows have assumed a universal dimension, determining our perception of the world and how we organize ourselves within it. We are not, of course, dealing with a new phenomenon here: the globalization of the late 20th century is, after all, a direct continuation of the colonialisms of the 19th century. The voracity of capital's conquest of new sites of production and consumption is as boundless today as it was a hundred years ago. However, the territories being captured now are no longer those far-off, little-known places so superbly described in the novels of Conrad or Kipling, but the space of our own privacy, our ambits of freedom and creation. Having swallowed up the horizons of geographical expansion, rich new seams are now being explored and mined in life itself. In the last ten or twenty years the extracting of formulations for producing and consuming vital experiences in their various manifestations has been one of the fundamental objectives of capitalism, and also the reason for its inevitable ambiguity: the modes of singular subjectivization are promoted, but only in order to reproduce these, severing them from their connection with life and converting them into commodities, into a kind of pret-à-porter identity, as Suely Rolnik has observed elsewhere.
In this context, the museum runs the risk of being confused with the theme park, and the history it may be intended to narrate is located in a continuous present, disguised as false memory, in which relationships between individuals are based solely on consumption, and the political subject is supplanted by the consumer. If the museum is to have any real significance in these circumstances, it is necessary for us to redefine our notion of memory: this needs to be, more than a strict recording of the past, an opening toward the future, making visible what society hides and excludes. What defines the individual memory is its richness, its capacity for mobilization, for permitting sudden associations and facilitating almost unforeseen evocations. It thus constitutes an immense reserve, polymorphous and open, and an authentic source of liberation and critique.
Certainly, we live in a time in which the dissemination of art is increasingly institutionalized, and in which museified art is first and foremost a rhetorical paradigm, in opposition to what is perceived as social chaos. The museum and the city are converted a kind of republic of letters, and the artist into a national patriarch. In a world in which the dominant discourse is multiculturalism, and cultural policy that of the politically correct, we are inclined to imagine an artistic construct in which the other can speak with us, when in reality this is not the case, and, in the long run, we tend to annul any sort of difference and antagonism.
In its current configuration, the MACBA Collection is centred on the art produced in the last fifty years, and is articulated from a critical perspective that takes account of the historical reality and the local context. This premiss entails understanding the history of art as a construct, not as a single narrative. At the same time, recognizing the significance of the local perspective implies a recognition that historical narratives are grounded in the conflicts between hegemonic and subordinate positions. Our identification with our community, with our society, with our political tradition and even with our intellectual inheritance is intensified when we embrace this history as our own, not as a product of nature, something fashioned rather than found, as one among the several histories that human beings have created. What is important is our responsibility towards other human beings, united against the darkness, and not our desire that things should look well. This results in an aesthetic strategy that picks up on previously unarticulated connections between the public and the private, restructures the past and the present and, through the action of the work of art, and is conducive to unperceived relationships between biographical or historical events, artistic innovations and a wider sense of cultural community.