Perhaps this is also true of others, but to visit the Museum CA2M is to discover the avant-garde of artistic practice in the complex of contemporary art in our country. This is evidenced by the exhibitions that have opened in its galleries during the month of February. The following is an exchange of impressions with Manuel Segade, director of the mentioned museum.

I

ALBERTO AGUILAR: Nowadays, a museum is expected to design unique experiences and/or events mediated by culture for a wide audience, and even to promote the participation or collaboration of all audiences as cultural actors in the spaces, processes and formats of the institution. How do you and your team approach this within the Museum CA2M?

MANUEL SEGADE: It is naïve to think that participation and co-design can really take place in a public institution with its administrative mechanisms and hierarchical structural ways of functioning, but there are ways of opening up spaces for participation. On the one hand, contemporary art itself expects the public's complicity in the production of meaning. On the other, it is a matter of permeating the institution to different social collectives and of it becoming a space for new community formations.

II

AA: In your opinion, is there an ongoing process where both political and artistic practices converge? If so, how would you characterise it? In such a scenario, do you think that the product of artistic practice is not so important in the short term since it is cumulative and we will see its fruits over time?

MS: For me, artistic practice, representation and politics are indivisible. Santiago Sierra is as political in his denunciations of the subjugation of bodies to the labour forces of capitalism as a seemingly abstract black-on-white cube by Malevitch.

The present of art does not exist: it is part of a narrative chain that does not begin before and end after, but occurs in spiralling forward and backward movements. That is to say: the future and our cultural representation of it affects the forms of creation in the present, and the past is always unpredictable.

III

AA: Do artistic practices or movements feed on the policies represented by institutionalism, or do artistic movements or practices become the standard-bearers of institutional practice?

MS: Undoubtedly the latter. The works of art that we exhibit in a contemporary art museum or that we keep in our storerooms are not objects, but subjects that question us directly and force the institution itself to absorb and apply its methodologies and ways of doing things.

IV

AA: In the face of new identity demands, for example, or the ecological crisis, of course, to what extent is an art centre interested in offering models of thought and action to different audiences in such a way that those who make them their own achieve their goals?

MS: This is something we do in each of our educational, performance or exhibition actions. Everything that happens here questions identity fixation and a sense of a single way of thinking. Contemporary art contributes to maintaining the complexity of the world.

AA: Does it seem appropriate to pursue more modest objectives in a more institutionalised way but which are more effective in advancing them?

MS: The minor is our focus. Audiences are not transformed by the artistic experience. But people are, maybe they are.

V

AA: Let's pay attention to the culture war and ideological campaigns that - it seems - are being deployed in the art complex in general and in its institutional framework in particular? 

Today, it is not uncommon for an artistic practice to be rooted in some social problem. We believe, however, that denouncing alone does not have an intrinsic artistic dimension or value.

Don't you think that art should not be the prior discursive element to which the artist tries to adapt? Are we witnessing a decline in the capacity to translate emotion, affections, contradictions through artistic practice and also through the aesthetic processes that operate in our time? Or to put it another way: in the present, everything is narrative and we don't know how to construct poetics with an associated beauty? Could you shed some light on these questions?

MS: It seems to me that we all are living in a moment of great narrative anxiety. Entertainment platforms, fiction series, have replaced the conclusiveness of the traditional narrative. I believe that emotion and affectivity are at the forefront in this new phase of neoliberal capitalism. It is up to culture and art itself to develop socially transformative experiences that repair the collective from reduced listening communities. We mustn't forget that democracies are originally a sum of minorities.

VI

AA: We would like you to refute the belief that we don't know how to construct poetics in today's art world. To this end, could you present the work of artists included in the CA2M Museum's programme? Thank you very much for your attention!

MS: There I refer to our website, I refer to the entire programme we carried out: the questioning of the norms applied to the normative bodies in the radical functional diversity of Costa Badía, the deployment of sculptural materialisations by June Crespo, the questioning of the stone infrastructure of the capital of the empire by Xabier Salaberria, the science fiction and time travel of Karlos Gil, the new materialities of bioplastics in Esther Gatón and the correction of bad architecture through a projectual sculpture by Jon Mikel Euba. Without a doubt, each one of them a fascinating journey and a succession of poetics that show how fit today's art is.

MANUEL SEGADE (A Coruña, 1977) currently lives in Madrid where he directs the Museum Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo of the Community of Madrid.

He holds a degree in Art History from the University of Santiago de Compostela. Since 1998 he has been working on fragments of a cultural history of the aesthetic practices of the late nineteenth century, around the production of a somatic and sexualised subjectivity, on which he published the essay Narciso fin de siglo (Melusina, 2008).

In 2005 and 2006, he coordinated the contents of Metrònom Fundació Rafael Tous d'Art Contemporani in Barcelona. Between 2007 and 2009 he was curator at the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea in Santiago de Compostela. From 2009 he resumed his work as an independent curator, carrying out projects for the Fundació Joan Miró, La Casa Encendida, ARCO, MUSAC, Centre d'Art La Panera, Pavillon Vendôme (France), Kadist Foundation (France), Bienal de Cuenca (Ecuador), ArteBA (Buenos Aires) TENT, (Rotterdam) or the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (Madrid). He has taught curatorial practices in different postgraduate and master's programmes such as Honnours in Curatorship at Michaelis University in Cape Town (South Africa) or the Independent Studies Programme at MACBA and is currently a tutor at the École du Magasin de Grenoble (France). He curated the Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2017, with a project by the artist Jordi Colomer.

In his latest projects he tries to offer gestural approaches to curating as other modes of discursive distribution, in pedagogical and educational formats and in curatorial actions close to performance. 

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