Nova Assembleia (New Assembly) and some additions - Xana

Looking at and pondering the MNAC, the Museu do Chiado, which I have been familiar with ever since attending the Escola Superior de Belas-Artes de Lisboa (ESBAL) as a student of Fine Arts, sparked a sense of urgency about recreating this space. Strangely enough, I had not been a frequent visitor, as it was not really on my radar at the time; life is always far too interesting to start rooting around in the store of memories, and I feel nostalgia for people, rather than for the enclosed feeling of shrines.

However, as I believe that museums can be open spaces, and that creating means delving into our time and territory, I propose the installation of boxes or modules to form the benches of a “new assembly”, so that we can be present in the museum space, but in another way, in another type of architecture.

This construction follows in the wake of various earlier works, such as Assembleia (Assembly), installed in the garden of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Arco de Triunfo (Triumphal Arch), erected on an avenue in Barcelona, and Muro de Lisboa (Lisbon Wall), built along beaches in the Algarve. Such works question the representation of architecture that is associated with the wielding of power, proposing the idea of constructing an alternative space, and also the way in which some social movements experience a fleeting utopia.

In this project I overlap about 600 industrial boxes so that they form the shape of an amphitheatre. This allows us to sit and view some of the museum’s paintings, chosen intuitively from a range of works that span the collection from its beginning up to 1959, the year I was born.

Some objects and phrases that I and others have spoken about art, museums and society are placed on the structure. These are like traces of memories, of utterances about these things, which now go on existing as a spur for us to think about and act in the world. The hope is that these objects and words will  – as Jean-Luc Godard once put it – “make it possible to re-link, to move from one subject to another, and thus to live in society, to be together”.

Because words do not explain everything.
Because the world contains mysteries that, once glimpsed, intrigue us all the more.
Because art is complete freedom, which is poetic idea.

January 2012
Xana