• 

La Virreina Center de la Imatge is a free public museographic institution dedicated to contemporary art in Barcelona. Located on the Ramblas and as a passage to the Raval district, in recent years it has focused on exploring the ideological and aesthetic uses of images.

In this sense, we define research as one of our main attributions, as we understand that this route introduces, within the occasional time that historically defined the museum device, other temporal experiences not oriented towards immediacy and eventuality; other knowledge that resists being typified or that is enunciated through expanded processes of listening, dialogue, and recognition of antagonism; and other critical subjectivities formulated through cooperation, through grammars that undo institutional frameworks, open them to new socialized uses, and incorporate microhistorical experiences that require forms of interpellation lacking the weight of the most nineteenth-century or disciplinary genealogies.

Therefore, we propose three lines of force that structure La Virreina Center de la Imatge, that order its general activity and that are expressed in the form of exhibitions, seminars, courses, publications and shared learning activities, following a common discursive framework.

These three axes of work function as laboratories of ideas that cross the center and activate all the potentialities, methodologies and vocabularies: they are a wide tool of artistic enunciation and collective cooperation that provides to La Virreina Center of the Image an enclave as an institution and enables it to challenge and be challenged by and from the various public counter-spheres.

While the museum is torn between archeology and prophecy, the mechanisms of spectacularizing the culture purified its springs, which has led to urgencies and questions that seemed to be completely overcome. Audience curves are once again functioning as populist legitimacy or suspicion of elitism, and in tune, discourses are flourishing calling for the return of museums to a hypothetically adamic and legendary past.

At this point, it becomes essential to restore the critical scope of the museum and its capabilities for artistic, subjective and social reinvention. To do so, it is not enough to extract it from the logics of the blockbuster or to sublimate mediations from "external" institutional forms, generated or stimulated by the museum itself as protocols of good public conscience. The museum as a whole, not a specific program or limited areas, must function as a mediator within a network without pre-existing or hierarchical strips, must open multiple channels of dialogue and exchange, and erect permanent joints, systems of malleable interaction and in accordance with the various expectations of use. Cultural knowledge resists being framed in an outside / inside framework; it bursts in, becomes and evokes new coordinates between the parties involved.

In this sense, encouraging participation, building foci of proximity and decentralizing the museum means recognizing specific positions and opening up a set of devices whose use "institutes", that is, that not only draws for the museum a physiognomy oriented to the citizen sphere, but that it provides a complex and tense mechanics as an institution, public and enunciative values.

From La Virreina Center de la Imatge we face the need to build, in a cooperative way, an architecture as an institution, a work philosophy and a public policy: that is, perimeters, functions, a network of social exchanges and a specific place in the cultural map of Barcelona, ​​all put in a permanent state of questioning and not mastered in their silhouettes, an idea that goes beyond defining, through differentiated strata, a menu of exhibitions, public programs and mediation proposals .

Understanding the here and now is unavoidable for La Virreina Center de la Imatge: the Raval district and the beginning of the 21st century; the current moment in municipal policies and the context of industrialized European capitalism; the metropolitan memory of neighborhoods and the associative and activist fabric, which has already transcended the limits of visual culture by paying attention to micro-urban phenomena, by deploying dynamics based on exchange and, most importantly, by demanding a space of representation and production within the current institutional cartography of Barcelona.

Finally, we believe that La Virreina Center de la Imatge should contribute to updating the neuralgic role of Barcelona in the development of culture in Catalonia, which requires a boost of strong and reciprocal relations with other cities in the Spanish context, in addition to connect with museum centers that have a similar orientation and scale internationally.

In this sense, we define research as one of our main attributions, as we understand that this route introduces, within the occasional time that historically defined the museum device, other temporal experiences not oriented towards immediacy and eventuality; other knowledge that resists being typified or that is enunciated through expanded processes of listening, dialogue, and recognition of antagonism; and other critical subjectivities formulated through cooperation, through grammars that undo institutional frameworks, open them to new socialized uses, and incorporate microhistorical experiences that require forms of interpellation lacking the weight of the most nineteenth-century or disciplinary genealogies.

Therefore, we propose three lines of force that structure La Virreina Center de la Imatge, that order its general activity and that are expressed in the form of exhibitions, seminars, courses, publications and shared learning activities, following a common discursive framework.

These three axes of work function as laboratories of ideas that cross the center and activate all the potentialities, methodologies and vocabularies: they are a wide tool of artistic enunciation and collective cooperation that provides to La Virreina Center of the Image an enclave as an institution and enables it to challenge and be challenged by and from the various public counter-spheres.