Interview by Nell Whittaker 
Portrait by Toni Mateu

NW It’s MACBA’s birthday year. How are you marking the occasion?

EDO With a year of programming. In the logo we’re using the word trenta, in both writing and in Catalan. Trenta describes not the one-day anniversary, but the three decades. It makes me think of a friend of mine who, in front of me, once called his wife chiquita, meaning little girl. I asked, “When you say that, do you remember the girl you met?” He replied, “No, I remember the woman who grew up with me.” That captures the feeling that the museum is not just the sum of things that it has done, but also the relationships it has made. That’s why we decided to celebrate for a year. We are not only looking nostalgically at a moment in time, but looking thoroughly, carefully, emotionally, poetically, and politically at the periods that we have lived through. We have a homage to Cérémonials, the carnivaleque events that Antoni Miralda, Dorothée Selz, Joan Rabascall, Jaume Xifra and Benet Rossell ran between 1969 and 1973 in Paris, during the last years of the Franco era. There will also be 12 big events and other things, like a collaboration with a TV network in Spain. But the biggest way we’re celebrating is with this incredible Pan-African show we’ve worked on with colleagues at the Art Institute of Chicago. Normally, the first floor of MACBA is dedicated to the permanent collection, so you are introduced immediately to a Western understanding of museum-making, but now the Pan-African social and political imaginaries establish, even if temporarily, the canon. The show explores how Pan-African history is fragmented, episodic and uneven in terms of social and political imaginaries and wonders how those forms of aesthetics help us to imagine a new planetary thinking. It goes beyond the idea of race as a schematic to unify Black and African communities around the world in solidarity, communion, self-determination and self-representation. But we can also think beyond that, through Marxism, as an understanding of people who want to be liberated from an imposed “us” and create a self-determined narrative with a Pan-humanist agenda. To have that form of thinking on the main floor of MACBA signals that, in this political climate, we need to push for an understanding of the world beyond boundaries. The people who saw the struggle of the left during the Republican era in 1930s Spain and joined the civil war understood the possibility of a new world arising. The spirit of these people, who lost the battle against fascism in the Spanish Civil War, is very much alive in what we’re doing now, in opposing the rise of fascism across the world.

NW A word you often use is “recovery”, particularly the curator’s role in recovering African art and practice. How has the idea of rescue been present for you at MACBA?

EDO Senghor, whose nuanced approach I came to understand through the writings of Souleymane Bachir Diagne, talks about African art as knowledge. We need to restore knowledge-making, because Western notions of reason has led to incredible failure. Before globalisation, histories of the world were told from their own geopolitical standpoints. If you were in Spain, you’d learn about the rest of the world with Spain at the centre. But when the world starts to move around and you begin to pull the histories together, a tension arises where a certain idea of reason is imposed onto a world that was undefined and plural. Barcelona is an open museum, so it’s appropriate that the show like this also links to events of the 1930s, during the late Franco era, when it lost its colonies, including Equatorial Guinea, where my family is from. Our day-to-day living is a product of this history, which at times was violent. 

NW What are the implications for curatorial practice, as cultural authority is becoming decentralised? How has the role of the curator changed in the last 30 years? 

EDO MACBA was a key element in the development of New Institutionality in the early 2000s, a theoretical framework for an institution that transcends the dominant 19th-century model shaped by industrial and colonial capitalism. For MACBA, it meant developing workshops, lectures and experiences to disrupt the idea of the museum as an authoritative space. At times, it was paternalistic to the communities it addressed. But one is the sum of the relationships you establish, so even a temporary engagement with an exhibition helps to expand a relationship with the institution over a larger period. It’s important to be clear about what it means to be a public institution, as opposed to a private one. It has to be porous and permeable enough that one can see their identity reflected in the space. Without that, you cannot build a public sphere. You have to find balance. You must be connected with your immediate environment, which for us is the neighbourhood of El Raval, where 30% of the people are not from Barcelona or Catalonia. They speak 11 different languages. Some are individuals who participate in the city’s cultural life, while others are not, and they are in more precarious economic conditions; however, we need to serve all of them. The museum, collection and building belong to all of them, to all of us. Equally so, we need to connect with the global arena. Ultimately, there has to be a coherent relationship between the content and the administration, or the management, of the institution.  All of that is museum.

NW  One of the strange upsides to the contemporary authoritarian crackdown on art, as we see in the US, is that it reveals that collective art-making is meaningful.

EDO One of the most beautiful things I have seen recently is The Purpose of Light, an exhibition of Misan Harriman’s photos of demonstrations from the past seven years. Here, in Barcelona, for Día de la Hispanidad, the artist Daniela Ortiz helped demonstrators create these incredible images to present during the demonstrations. In Chile, 2020, during the Estallido Social, or “Social Outburst”, it’s not a coincidence that the police hit protestors in the eyes. Jean-François Lyotard gave lectures about history according to Kant and the use of “sublime” to talk about political movements. In them, he talks about demonstration as the aesthetic expression of progress and transformation in a sense. It pushes the agency of the crowd towards change, by the fact of being together for a cause. We are back to where we were in 2019, with a fear that we know how it ends, but this is the moment to bring those voices to the foreground. That is what institutions, as part of the public sphere, can and should do. .