Interactive and itinerant Exhibition “This is Not a Museum. Portable and Lurking” at the CCEMiami

With case studies from different parts of the globe, for the Miami exhibition it incorporates new local cases and is exhibited as a work-in-progress catalogue and archive presenting more than 70 initiatives or instruments that reformulate the traditional idea of the museum as an exhibition space.

The show was inaugurated in October 2011 at ACVic and has already been exhibited in Ljubljana (Slovenia), Washington D.C. (USA), Mexico and Santiago de Chile before travelling to Miami, where it has grown in number of cases and in experience thanks to new members, venues and the program of parallel activities.

It forms part of the “ Ceci n’est pas une voiture” project jointly promoted by ACVic, Can Xalant and Idensitat. It features different phases of development and research in which the Universidad de Barcelona (Spain) or the Museo Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid –Spain) collaborate or have collaborated, among others.

“This is Not a Museum. Portable and Lurking” is a research on artistic projects that, in the public space and through the interaction with the public, establish themselves as alternatives to the traditional white-cube display model.

This project is approached as an exercise in documentation and reflection on the construction of mobile artifacts as elements for an expanded conception of the Museum or, instead, as an alternative to it.

The quest to subvert the logic of the museum through the construction of mobile devices has a long tradition. Since Marcel Duchamp presented his work Boîte-en-valise (1941), many artists have tried to take the aesthetic experience beyond the limits of the museum. In recent years, museums have co-opted this strategy with devices intended to make art “portable”.

It presents more than 70 panels that document and catalogue mobile devices created in various countries and which, through different approaches and practices, are a good example of the demand for more horizontal formats for the enjoyment of culture.

The mobile devices denominated “artifacts” by the curator Martí Perán are works of art that move around the city in a quest to make contact with the urban reality, with its inhabitants, with the quotidian. This staging in the public space is what Perán calls “activation”.

“The devices of This is Not a Museum allow us to show nomadic exhibitions as a platform for the direct participation of the public instead of extending the lineal meters of the museum walls. With this panel of new expectations, which is capable of providing participative practices with content, portable museums appear to adapt to the needs of a new institutional critique versus the ordinary Museum still anchored in the liturgy of contemplation”, says the curator.

A good example is the Mobile Art Space project of the Miami artist Adalberto Delgado. A Mobile Art Gallery in a monumental and complicated piece. The Mobile Art Gallery moved around Miami, in front of an art gallery in Wynwood, in the Design District, in Coral Gables or in Little Havana, during Art Walks events and went interactive, selling works to clients face to face, interacting with the public, explaining the work within a work, the effort made by live media to allow the news of a new travelling exhibition or a kind of “art on wheels”. Art on board a van, painting on canvas, portraits of strangers taken from a photograph, the total emotional detachment of physical art, the pictures and the materialization of true freedom, freedom from the world of art, from the merchant, the collector, the curator, the feeling of being a whole.

The case of “the end / SPRING BREAK” comprised of the Miami artists Domingo Castillo, Patricia Hernández and Kathryn Marks is a nomadic space, presenting projects managed by the artists, devoted to developing new ways of tackling the issues of contemporary culture and art in the South Florida communities.

Other experiences, such as the Nightclub of the artists Ángela Valella and Odalis Valdivieso, also work on decontextualizing the museum through the re-denomination of any given space, or the Miami Midtown Midway, an ephemeral installation that emerged in parallel to the Miami Art Basel contemporary art event, which is crucial for understanding the Miami art scene and which works, among other issues, with the nomadic nature of the artistic event itself. Lastly, the Fundación Cisneros Fontanals will be collaborating by loaning the video piece Study of the relationships between inner and outer space, (1969) by the Argentine artist David Lamelas, a clear precedent in the research of the curatorship issue.

The goal is to develop a program (conferences, exhibitions, projects created specifically for a location, publications, educational workshops, etc.) that involves the public as participants and to instigate a debate on the thematic concept chosen for the event in question. In collaboration with various artists and community members, the objective is to stimulate dialogue so as to facilitate an event documenting another event in a way that reflects the movement between the different methods of presenting ideas.

The This is Not a Museum Miami phase includes the following experiences:

· . the end/ springbreak. Domingo Castillo, Patricia Hernández and Kathryn Marks

· . Nightclub. Ángela Valella and Odalis Valdivieso (2012-2013)

· . Mobile Art Space. Adalberto Delgado

· . Miami Midtown Midway. George Sánchez Calderón (2003)

· . And the collaboration of CIFO. Study of the relationships between inner and outer space, 1969. David Lamelas.

Centro Cultural Español en Miami, 1490 Biscayne Blvd., Miami, FL 33132, 305/448-9677

Dates: From January 16 to March 7.