Executive Director – maat museum from 2019 to 2022.

You can read more of all we did at maat website (which was fully restyled and reprogrammed since March 2020) and maat ext. (i.e. maat extended) which was luanched in September 2020 as a new permanent digital space and an expanded realm of action for the institution. A novel editorial practice dubbed maat Papers was also established in the form of serialized inprints  accompanying a variety of exhibitons, reserach projects and public programs. 

A relevant book collecting these years of prjects, reaserach endevaours and creative feats was published in December 2021.

Here follows my preface:

“2020/21 – The Meaning and Making of Cultural Agency”

It might be premature to assess how and to what degree the memories of the past two years will affect our long-term future thinking; to be sure though the spatio-temporal hiatus of the pandemic has thrusted in the foreground how vigorously we ‘can’ act as a community to safeguard the values we share, and that hold us together. The question is whether we will keep our senses alert and our intentions forceful with equal confidence once the logistical technicalities of epidemiological control will be normalized in our everyday life. My answer to this interrogative is ‘yes, we can’, on the condition that spheres of public agency where “the articulation of debate, the sharing of positions and the articulation of knowledge” can be preserved. We have upheld this credo for institutions of culture to become civic arenas performing as purpose-driven organizations all throughout times when they were at their most vulnerable, but also when the importance to renew their relevance in contemporary societal discourse was at its most critical. I am a believer in the role and responsibility of cultural institutions to empower inclusive forms of confrontation that can help us all discern, explore and engender equitable futures, planetary respect and mutual care. We have made ‘prototyping the museum’ a motto supporting our every action, co-designed with professional and general publics, stakeholders of various background and provenance, entities of research, education and practicing activism, to ultimately conjure a future-driven museum that transforms as we transform with it.

We have endeavoured to make the present our home, as it is the most difficult to inhabit and yet the only temporal construct through which we can gauge both past and future, convinced that the new institutional paradigm is one where multiple temporalities, modes of creative engagement and encounter collide – where we practice coexistence not as an amalgam of individualities but an interwoven body of bonds and ideas as collective potential.

Lisbon, October 2021

BL

Photo credits: maat and Central  – EDP Foundation Campus, photo by Fernando Guerra.