Room 206. Guernica and the 1930s. Audio-guide. Valcárcel Medina
This podcast series constitutes a project of audio-guides — interpretations of the Collection — by Valcárcel Medina. Valcárcel was invited to do a retrospective in 2009 but turned down the possibility, thinking instead about building a set of interventions and circumstances, in his words, to disrupt the day-to-day transit of the Museo.
Thus, in a series of calculated minimal actions, from a retrospective merely running for three days to selected pages from books in the Library via an audio-guide on the Collection, he sought to rethink, sceptically, humorously, and with critical distance, the aims and limits of the Museo, that which, as something unclassifiable, came to be called Autumn 2009. Valcárcel Medina confronts institutional critique, reconstructing his position as an artist towards the detached spectator who participates in the action but only to demonstrate its failings and impossibilities; looking again at the museum as vast cultural machinery which, despite everything, conceals flickers of utopia.
Produce © Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (con contenidos musicales licenciados por SGAE)
