MUSEO SITUADO MANIFESTO

Lucia Bianchi, imagen gráfica del manifiesto #unaÉticadeCatástrofe, 2021

Museo Situado is an assembly that involves collectives and neighbors of Lavapiés in which Reina Sofia Museum participates. Its goal is to develope cultural projects, that affect the local territory jointly and in the framework of Museo en Red programs. We understand the cultural institution as a space of construction of the public sphere and of citizenship exploration that allows to reinforce other visions, diversifying agents and creative practices and incorporating other forms of knowledges, experiences and referents to the official spaces of culture. We believe in a museum on the side of the common good, that activates and gives greater visibility to the transformative power of society. Museo Situado opens a hybrid territory that generates alternative coordinates for cultural action, host a network of shared labor between institutions, individuals and citizen collectives; a network based in mutualization of experiences that empower the social and transformative value of culture in the context of deep crisis we inhabit.

We believe in art´s capacity to mobilize hearts, shake consciences, unblock prejudice, assemble wills and detonate images of other possible worlds; an art liked to life, to the life of everyone and to life as a whole.

During its three years of existence this collaborative network has demonstrated its partnership and collective work process capacity in the implementation of projects of social incidence that are inspired in feminist principles, fight against exclusion and respect towards difference.

In our last assembly the will to manifest our deep concern for the impact that the critical health and social contexts are having in the life of many was unanimous. In the face of the current emergency, we want to take a stand for the idea that an ethics of solidarity that arises spontaneously in times of catastrophe is necessary. We think that it happened in different neighborhoods during the first lockdown and that helped to contain the suffering and hunger of many families, some coming from previous difficulties and others confronting a sudden impoverishment. But, nevertheless, the solidarity networks that assumed the huge task of helping their neighbors have met, surprisingly, with unexpected limits, given that the administrations not only have not supported their activities, but made them difficult instead.

The suffering and difficulty that many families and individuals are going through in our neighborhoods, waiting for public support that does not come has turned into a deafening clamor: it´s not possible to ignore and to abandon so much people in such inhuman conditions, surviving with only basics. Lives that seem not to care, disposable lives.

We are talking about many people that face homelessness or marginality conditions for the first time, whose survival codes are still unknown. Of new poverty profiles. Of the sudden impoverishment of a middle class thrown into the abyss, without work, home or resources. Of ill people or people that have survived disease but now navigate the sequels. We also talk about migrants, of asylum seekers, whose administrative procedures are paralyzed and unattended or simply denied. People that, on the other hand, have been standing in the first line to help the community when circumstances have demanded it, distributing food bags or shoveling the snow unaware of their own invisibility, of their irregular situation, of their unattended human rights. We don´t tolerate that our neighbors are cold or hungry or that their children are not able to attend classes because they don´t have internet, that they can´t afford to pay their electricity bills or heat up their homes in the middle of winter. The lack of response and abandonment of authorities cannot be normalized. Volunteering or calling for the good will of neighbors cannot constitute the institutional answer. We need specific and urgent measures to offset this serious situation, which seems to be getting even more complicated and prolonged.

There is no future without culture, but neither culture without future. A cultural institution cannot be unaware or ignore the needs of the people in their immediate surrounds.

FACING A CLAMOR THAT CANNOT BE IGNORED: AN ETHIC OF CATASTROPHE