When the curatorial concept becomes the object of research, the result usually generates much less pleasure and stimuli than an investigation and presentation of artworks in their own right. The curatorial position in fact, when restricted through voluntary abdication, is turned into something similar to a performance: it enacts the predetermined tasks as though they were a script.

Hoffmann seems to have adopted the institution as a framework limiting his freedom, similar to his previous curatorial games.

The ‘state of exception’ is a tool of power and turns out to be always more than the dominant paradigm of ruling.

Following the attacks in New York and Madrid his book State of Exception makes it possible to envisage a political understanding of how forms of government that suspend the law can be permanently institutionalized.

Europe’s great cities are being transformed into high-security experiments in survival.

Rotterdam
Witte de With
06/11/04 - 09/01/05

In public museums the damage that has been done over the years by nationalist ideoligies van be viewed. They reveal both the blind spots and the gynnastics that are used in attempt to cover them up.

Museums and school textbooks complement each other in the construction of retrospective mythologies on both sides of the border. They compete for the posession of historical truth by equating nation (ethnic group) with state.

The rows of glorified heros and victims follow the logic of propaganda, which blacks out everything that might change the narrative.

This text is an attempt to define the starting point of a consideration of a notional commune environment. This is a revised fiction that suggests a moment when the commune could still have been redirected and relevant.

There is a greater need than ever for a public debate on the function that the museum should fulfil in Spanish society today.

Both left and right have acted cursorily with regard to museum and cultural institutions policy ever since the restoration of democracy in 1975.

As long as Spain remains a banana democracy, there is not much point in talking about museum policy.