project47

David’s talk about his journey through the Olympic Games area (Hackney?) and the evident gentrification that they’re provoking in the area reminded me of what happened in Barcelona in the 1992 Olympics and, more recently, in the 2004 Forum of Cultures. I remember that one of the main reasons for controversy concerning the Forum was the type of companies that sponsored it, such as Indra. I’ve just Googled the companies that will sponsor these London Olympics, and hey presto! http://www.londonolympics2012.com/sponsors Maybe this is not big news for many people, but still I can’t help but be outraged at the fact that companies such as Dow Chemical Company, that has thousands of deaths behind its back, will sponsor an event that is supposed to represent health and respect.

I just want to mention the National Museum of Colombia, which I visited this summer. Its permanent exposition followed indeed the typical chronologically progressive tour many museums have, but there was a temporary exposition going on called “The Stories of a Scream: 200 Years of being Colombians” (http://www.museonacional.gov.co/sites/bicentenario_site/bancos.html), that I thought was surprisingly original. It raised more questions than answers about Colombia’s independency, such as how the first symbols of the country were created, how heroes are “made”, or how women’s role in history is remembered. So it’s an example of how museums can break the orthodox normative power they usually represent.

Lastly, we also talked about how the act of collecting can be seen as a way of organizing or even creating an autonomous reality/world. It’s interesting how the first examples of not exclusively religious collections (studiolo, wunderkammer, chamber of wonders,…) didn’t seem to have any order. They grouped in a single place artistic, natural and the most bizarre objects noble men and women could find to recreate the world in that small space. Exotic objects brought from the recently discovered America contributed to complete this world. It was also a way of representing collector’s power, and the Gallery of Maps in the Vatican (1580-1582) illustrates this. It is a corridor where there is a sculpture collection and its walls are painted with the different parts of the world known until then, especially the ones controlled by Christianity.