★

A MUSEUMTOPIA, daydreamed since 1983 as a response to the proverbial LACK of a Museum of Modern or Contemporary Art in Lima, almost the only Latin American capital that until recently boasted an ABSENCE of this type. Our grand MUSEUM VOID.

★

A FANTASY built from the incitements of that LACK, that ABYSS. That HOLE: the museum void can at the same time be EROTICALLY perceived as something clamoring to be FILLED. FULLfilled. In a sense that is also social. AND POLITICAL.

★

An AMBULATORY museum, a wheeling museum, conceived not to communicate relations of cultural POWER between the elites of the centre and those of the periphery, but to serve as a vehicle for new, home-grown COMMUNITIES of SENSE, communities of SENTIMENT. An agency for BELONGING.

★

A WHEELING museum, an ambulatory museum, articulated not in terms of alliances defined by the global, but rather as a specific, local, covenant and conflict between the LETTERED-PETIT-BOURGEOISIE and the EMERGENT-POPULAR-EXPERIENCE. A CREATIVE FRICTION in which the SUBALTERN irrupts into —interrupts— any illusion of UNFISSURED continuity between the dominant cultures of the center and the (ULTRA)PERIPHERY. But also disturbs any naïve notion of homogeneity for the CRITICAL culture thus constructed through COUNTERPOINTS that are not always harmonious.

★

An ARTICULATOR of meanings. In plural. MICROMUSEO is not limited to TREASURING and exhibiting collections, although the organization of shows and the formation of a collection are amongst its objectives. This museum does not just accumulate objects: it CIRCULATES them. It does not consecrate or enshrine: it CONTEXTUALIZES. It does not have a single location: it TRAVELS and distributes itself in accordance with the characteristics of each of its projections.

★

A politics of MULTIPLE INSCRIPTIONS whose privileged materialization is not in the object or in the collection or in the physical space, but rather in the CRITICAL PROJECT that articulates each of those elements, even in anticipation of their respective existences. THE MUSEUM BEFORE THE MUSEUM.

★

A MUSEUM PRAXIS that juxtaposes the scattered FRAGMENTS of our many expressions, reciprocally ILLUMINATED by their CONTRASTS as much as by their articulations.

FRICTIONARY STRATEGIES whose dynamizing principle is NOT TO REPRESS BUT TO PRODUCTIVIZE DIFFERENCES, to render difference itself productive. To place on the critical scene the DISCONTINUOUS character of history, and of culture, and of politics, in a Peruvian society made of FRACTURES: a country that is not a country, much less a nation, but an ARCHIPELAGO of DISLOCATED and harshly superimposed temporalities. An UNIMAGINED community where no present cancels out all the UNRESOLVED pasts that pour over us, and over us CRUMBLE. The RUINS of history. And its symbolic INERTIAS.

★

A deliberate MIXTURE of cultures and contexts: the ARTISTIC, the ARTISANAL, the (SEMI)INDUSTRIAL, the DESIGNS. The PREHISPANIC and the MODERN, the VICEREGAL and the CONTEMPORARY. ILLICIT, surprising, associations, although not foreign to those offered by our permanent experience of apparently disconnected SIMULTANEITIES. All pieces of an ever-MUTANT puzzle, disturbed as well with DOCUMENTS of various sorts, perceived not only as referents but as DEBRIS, the material remains of an EXPLODED reality.

Material remains, (non)MATERIAL CULTURE: it is under this broader horizon that MICROMUSEO places its almost entire praxis, turning art into an inevitable but DEHIERARCHIZED portion of a more complex factual and symbolic conglomerate that confronts and subverts and upsets —ALTERS— this much mystified category. High and low? Low and low, in fact. Low and LOWER.

★

A MESTIZO MUSEALITY, a hybrid museality in which the words “artist” and “artisan” will gradually be replaced by that of “ARTIFICER”, seeking in that way to signify the crisis of these and other distinctions in a culture increasingly made up of THE IMPURE AND THE CONTAMINATED. Exchanges of FLUIDS in which the subaltern occupies a new place, no longer as an imaginary re-presentation but instead as an IRRUPTION, a factual INTERRUPTION in the discourse, in the cultural INTERCOURSE.

★

A PROMISCUOUS MUSEALITY, in which works termed artistic coexist with their erudite referents, and at the same time with MASS products or RECYCLED objects of all origins, in addition to remarkable examples of the multifarious popular creativity. All kinds of RELIGIOUS paraphernalia, for example. Or those crude shotguns generally referred to as “HECHIZAS” (handicrafted, homemade, but “spellbound” as well) that played a dramatic role during the uncivil war (1980 – 1992), leaving an also cultural mark in Peruvian (post)modernity. Decisive but precarious remains of our most URGENT (non)material existences.

★

A PLEBEAN MUSEALITY, ready and willing to sustain its autonomy on an ELEMENTARY but sufficient economy, EMANCIPATED from the powers and the Power: from the STATE and the MARKET, from the POLITICIANS and the grand CAPITAL. An AUTONOMOUS museality, in which the initiatives and the decisions remain always in the REFLEXIVE agents, not in the economic SPONSORS or in the circumstantial agenda of the RULERS of the moment

★

A THEORY OF VALUE that displaces that ECONOMIC and aesthetic —not to say aestheticizing— notion towards the CHEMICAL —and political— concept of VALENCY: the capacity to COMBINE AND BLEND AND MIX assumed as one of the principal attributes of each gesture or piece. An incessant game of free associations designed to liberate the REPRESSED potential of meaning in objects thus defamiliarized and returned to their DISQUIETING STRANGENESS, their sometimes uncanny or SINISTER condition.

★

A POLITICO-CULTURAL COPULATION in which the very name and notion of a MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART becomes a CONTRADICTION IN TERMS: to be genuinely contemporary, the museum must RENOUNCE any exclusive vocation for the artistic.

An art to be humbled, devolved to its original HUMILITY. Its ARCHAIC and FUTURE essence: art today is barely one more ingredient in the BURSTING new visuality that governs everything and SUBVERTS all. Even our erudite existences and gazes must now negotiate their ways and means —their very meanings— not with the LETTERED CITY, as Angel Rama posited just a few decades ago, but with the ICONIC PLANET, with the electronic cybersphere even. And, once again, with the symbolic INERTIAS of our many pasts, all of them TRUNCATED, but none quite cancelled.

★

A CATALYZER OF MEMORY, capitalizing even the endless DEFEATS, transforming them into EXPERIENCE by activating as CONSCIOUSNESS the fragments of our history so many times BROKEN. Remainders turned into reminders through their reincorporation into a continuum forever INTERRUPTED yet always RECOMPOSED. With TRANSMUTED meanings.

★

A HISTORICAL RESERVE, preserving and making available objects and documents and concepts —VISIONS, too— that, had it not been for this initiative, would in many cases have disappeared despite their relevance. MICROMUSEO’s attention recovers and values gestures and works at their riskiest, even MOST PERILOUS circumstance. An audacious wager on our HARSHEST CONTEMPORANEITY, despised in its moment and now validated a posteriori by the growing incorporation of its cultural forms into other instances and institutions. A renewed common sense to which MICROMUSEO has contributed since its EARLIEST positions.

★

An ALLEGORICAL STRUCTURE of museum language, born out of the ambivalent STRUCTURE OF SENTIMENT in our LIMINAL, perhaps TERMINAL times. Collections and interventions in which the object becomes an allegorical construct whose elements are articulated through relations not of identity but of ANALOGY and FRICTION. DIALECTICAL IMAGES whose paradoxical strength lies precisely in contradiction: what is staged through them is not an unfissured totality, but a radical consciousness made of harshly superimposed fragments. NOT THE ADAPTATION OF DIFFERENCE BUT ITS EXALTATION.

★

A critical agent of new CITIZENSHIP. Not an end but a MEANS. MICROMUSEO offers itself as part of a broader project, related to our precarious reality. And to the efforts to understand that reality by TRANSFORMING it.

★

A PASSIONAL conception of the museum not as a treasure chamber and a paragon of social or academic prestige, but as a CATALYZER of senses. In every sense of that last term. The purpose of MICROMUSEO is not to accumulate works but to ACTIVATE them. Not to enter art history —that withering category— but to modify history as such. And to LUBRICATE it, wherever it remains driest.

★

A PULSION, a drive. To say it once again: a museum is not a building. A museum is a COLLECTION and a CRITICAL PROJECT. And a VITAL commitment —VITALISTIC, even SENTIMENTAL— with that which is OUR OWN, that which is LOCAL. The LATENT remains of our many cultures, always FRAGMENTED but always RECOMPOSED.

★

A DELIRIUM. Perhaps the greatest FACTUAL achievement of MICROMUSEO lies in its ILLUSION. Its FANCY, its FANTASY, its EXTRAVAGANCE. The resolution of the Peruvian museum void begins with the DISLOCATION, the almost DERANGEMENT, of the very notion of the museum. The MUSEUMTOPIAS. And their altered HEAVENS.

★

A THEODICY, a search for God. In his agonies. And an ORISON, a PRAYER, a space of SILENCE. In its inxiles. Against our contemporary GRAND NOISE, to make INTROSPECTION again possible. To be alone with our own thoughts.

A museum experience conceived to AROUSE THE SLEEPING SOUL (Jorge Manrique).

★

An AWAKENING, an AROUSAL. A MYSTICO-LIBIDINAL lasciviousness that vindicates even the relevance of RELIGION and of THEOLOGY as ineludible experiences for the cultural problematization of our ultimate condition. For the primordial sense of curatorship is the act of CURING. A spiritual and political HEALING.

And the final attitude for final times is to fully, wholly come to terms with the remains of these, our mestizo, mutant, CYBORG bodies of culture. And flesh. And DESIRE. The indispensable, inconceivable, exchange of fluids between BENJAMIN and HEIDEGGER.

Against the DISINTEGRATION OF THE AURA, that awakened such illuminating obsessions in the messianic JEW. Against the DARKENING OF THE WORLD, that the NAZI existentialist glimpsed in THE FLIGHT OF THE GODS, in the modern HOLLOWING OUT OF THE EARTH. Against the false glitter of COMMODITY FETISHISM.

Let difference SHINE.