ABSTRACT
In the Spanish State, the global 2008 economic crisis was also a crisis of institutions: the entire architecture of a young democratic system, which had been in place for only thirty years, was profoundly challenged for the first time. Feminist issues erupted within the landscape of civic mobilisation that the 15M movement brought about in 2011, shaping a comprehensive questioning of the logics of governing democratic institutions, including the museum. In this context, the country's largest public institution for contemporary art, Museo Reina Sofia, underwent a comprehensive restructuring of its mission, which considered the commons, decoloniality and new democratic practices as its tenets, and ground-breaking feminist approaches to curatorial practice. Recovering Reina Sofía's history since the transition to democracy and its prevailing role as a patrimonialising State institution, this text will unpack the Museum's recent “feminist turn” alongside its political and curatorial context. Retrieving key historical precedents, the text explores the feminist curatorial translations of 15M, focusing on public programming based on the notion of interdependency: Museo en Red, Voces Situadas and Museo Situado. Departing from the exhibition model, such public programmes aim to transform the Museum into a hosting infrastructure for feminist organising. Critically analysing the newly founded relationship between feminisms and the Museum, which carries a series of historical tensions and unhealed post-dictatorial wounds, this text investigates how feminisms – and the tensions, frictions and potentialities they produce – can stretch the institution, repurposing the Museum as a situated and globally relevant agent of political change.
