BARCELONA.- After open processes of selection, the Museum’s team has been completed with the appointments of a new Chief Curator, Tanya Barson, previously Curator of International Art at Tate Modern; a new Head of Programming, Pablo Martínez, previously responsible for Education and Public Activities at CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid; and a new Chief Executive Officer, Josep M. Carreté, who will contribute his wide experience in the heritage and museum sector, as well as strategic planning.

At the same time, MACBA has appointed a new Assessing Committee formed by Catherine David, Chris Dercon, Estrella de Diego and Cuauhtémoc Medina, internationally recognised professionals who will contribute the experience of their long-established institutional careers and comprehensive knowledge of contemporary art to MACBA’s long-term planning. Besides creating a forum for debate on the Museum’s general working guidelines, the Committee will assess and approve future acquisitions for the Collection, which, at the present time, contains 5,452 works and 120,700 items of Archive, documentary and bibliographic material. MACBA’s heritage conception is based primarily on the artworks and their study, but also on its documentary Fonds, archives of artists and creators, the library and bibliographic Fonds, whose contents are constantly reappraised through ongoing research.

NEW INDEPENDENT STUDY PROGRAMME – PEI
The Independent Study Programme – PEI begins a new cycle with its sixth edition. The post of director has been replaced by a new academic team formed by Lucía Egaña, Marcelo Expósito, Marina Garcés, Dora García, Emilio Santiago Muíño, Jaime Vindel and MACBA’s Head of Programming, Pablo Martínez. PEI is a learning laboratory that takes place inside and outside the museum institution, and whose main aim is to develop critical thought from the intersection of artistic practices, social sciences and political and institutional interventions.

The programme’s contents have been developed around a cross section of areas dealing with critical discourse, feminist studies, queer theory and decolonial critique. In the current edition, a new working area has been added to address the energy crisis caused by the shortage of fossil fuels and the subsequent crisis of civilisations and ecological collapse. In this way, PEI wants to reflect on limited growth, climatic activism and possible scenarios of new ways of life in a new world order. These contents relate to the tradition of radical, feminist and experimental education, not only as an area of study but as a practice capable of configuring new spaces of knowledge. The changes in PEI reject all preconceived ideas on ‘high education’ in favour of a learning programme that goes beyond the mere acquisition of qualifications.

PEI takes place at the Study and Documentation Centre CED, a space that will celebrate its tenth anniversary in 2017 by reactivating itself as a specific place for research. The recent changes in MACBA’s organisational structure have allowed greater transversality in the Museum’s public programmes, archive and library, and will strengthen its current work of conservation and acquisition of Fonds by giving them greater visibility and activating them through research, not only academic, but artistic and experimental.

EXHIBITIONS, COLLECTION AND PUBLICATIONS
Throughout its twenty years of existence, MACBA has made it its priority to establish new genealogies in contemporary art, paying special attention to historical moments of radical experimentation and generating non-canonical readings that work as counter-stories against the hegemonic interpretations imposed by the centres of power. The Museum’s long trajectory in this direction has not obviated the need to continue examining these readings. Following this line of work, the exhibition Hard Gelatin is a critical appraisal of our recent past that wants to replace the official account of the 1980s by one that arose on the margins – constantly reformulating cultural practices, taking notice of the irruption of a drug culture and uncovering the gradual process of de-ideologisation of the working class –, and by the subsequent development of the need to analyse this period.

Added to these areas of study, long since favoured by the Museum, others have arisen proposing an analysis of institutional practices, a productive relationship between visual art and contemporary visual culture, and the centrality of the human body, rendered visible through performance and performativity. MIRALDA MADEINUSA focuses on the fifteen projects made by Antoni Miralda during his long and frequent stays in the United States. In them, the artist challenged the established canon with works that encouraged participation, a dialogue with popular culture, direct experience and a questioning of the norms of artistic practice. Equally, in the second half of the year Poesia Brossa will offer a new view of this artist based on his poetry, contextualising his work within his own time and, above all, bringing to the fore the work done thanks to the extraordinary Fonds that the Fundació Joan Brossa deposited at MACBA five years ago.

Through its programme of exhibitions, Collection and publications, MACBA wants to offer an in-depth analysis of our recent past and the present by concentrating on the geographies that have been the Museum’s main areas of interest from the beginning: Catalonia and Spain, Europe, North-America, Latin America, the Mediterranean and the Middle East. To this aim, it wishes to continue the dialogue south-south, as the indispensable horizon for a critical thought seeking to directly influence reality. The exhibition Akram Zaatari. Against Photography. An Annotated History of the Arab Image Foundation opens the debate on the use of the image, its value as document and as individual and collective memory, through the work of the Arab Image Foundation. Based on this material, the artist reflects on the meaning of photography and offers a deep understanding of the contexts in which it was generated: the Middle East, North Africa and their diaspora.

The visibilisation of conflict is one of today’s main challenges, since the over-visibilisation of human tragedies seems to have made us immune to them. In this sense, architecture can be seen as an example of the forms through which to face the specific crisis of the present, and rethink ways of achieving the dreams of modernity while showing its legacy and failures. Forensic Architecture analyses humanity’s biggest disappointment: war and the destruction of the planet. The group uses architecture as a methodological device with which to investigate armed conflicts and environmental destruction. Through the use of scientific techniques and detection, together with witness testimonies, they bring to public attention specific cases of human rights violations and crimes against nature as a direct way of resolving them. In doing so, they show how positive attitudes can become active transformations.

PROGRAMMING
In today’s context, marked by the advent of cognitive capitalism, in which knowledge is constantly threatened by marketing and privatisation and is adrift in the spectacularisation of culture, seen here as a tourist attraction and an economic resource rather than a space of encounter and configuration of subjectivities, it is imperative to rethink the way in which museums produce their activities and educational programmes. For this reason, MACBA has begun a process of reflection toward a pedagogical practice and public programming centred on experience and beyond an understanding of knowledge as the individual accumulation of ideas.
The Museum’s programming aims to eliminate the traditional division of the population into different ‘publics’, seen as consumers of culture and objects of education, in favour of a transversal work with the different communities and agents in their environment. Therefore, one of MACBA’s main objectives is to become relevant to the lives of people, and this can only be done through working networks that are flexible, long-lasting and horizontal, and can offer the institution the possibility of generating spaces of research, experimentation and permanent collaborations. With this premise in mind, rather than seeing itself as a body with a fixed identity, the Museum intends to create a space traversed by all the surrounding forces, since only from this inter-relationality and vulnerability can it become a place from which to revert the imposed patterns of behaviour and produce micro-political stories capable of resisting the grand established narratives. It is interesting to think, in accordance with J. Halberstam, about how spaces, although normatively articulated, are never completely determined and can therefore be subverted by their users. Hence the Museum never sees its programmes as ‘products’ for the outside world, but is aware of the manner in which they are produced and the way the Museum is transformed through each action and encounter with the public.

BUDGET
On 28 September, MACBA’s General Council approved the budget for 2017. This approval foresees the complete settlement of the deficit accrued in 2012 as a result of the non-payment by the Spanish Government of 1,640,000 euros. For the last four years MACBA has had to deal with this deficit in its working budget. In 2017, the respective administrations hope to clear the Museum’s deficit, subject to budget approval. The total income budget is 11,747, 122 €, while expenses total 10,902,714 €, thus generating the necessary surplus (844,408 €) to settle the deficit.

The Ajuntament de Barcelona’s funding amounts to 4,408,442 €, with an increase of 3%; the Generalitat de Catalunya’s amounts to 3,090,172 €, an increase of 4%; while the Ministry of Culture’s stays at 1,042,900 €. As in every previous year, the MACBA Foundation will contribute with works of art. These quantities do not include the extraordinary funding of 241,260 € that the Ajuntament de Barcelona, the Generalitat de Catalunya and the MACBA Foundation respectively will contribute toward the deficit, and which, in order to settle in its entirety, the Museum will deduct from its working budget.

In this way MACBA can begin a new era with a healthy budget, so it can continue to grow in the future.