Museu Habitat: II International Meeting Countering Abysses. Poetics of Scale 2025

With two years of experience, the Museu Habitat program has opened several spaces for reflection, exchange, production and experimentation around the history and current affairs of the museum institution. The Museu Habitat has been built as a protean organism that seeks to bring together different types of communities and generate non-consensual spaces. The task of mobilizing meetings and actions has been carried out by a diverse team of artists, curators, activists and managers, which includes the research and mediation collectives Entrar Afuera, IDRA and Transductores.

The set of initiatives deployed has been complemented by two meetings and an exhibition. The first meeting, “Which museum?”, held in May 2024, started from a question that represents the germ of the program: which museum is possible and desirable today? And in 50 years? The second, “Turning spells”, stated that today it is no longer possible to reflect on the institution exclusively from its own foundations, be they physical or conceptual. Thinking and acting only from what happens within this normative building leads to inevitable sensory and epistemological frustration. For its part, through more than 120 works, the exhibition “Fabular paisatges” reflected on how exhibition devices are constructed, which stories are privileged and which stories are silenced. In line with these two meetings and taking into account the polarization that Fabular paisatges aroused, the Habitat Museum opens a new moment of synthesis and possible reformulations based on the seminar “Contrariar abisms. Poetics of scale”.

In December 2024, an assembly was held at the CAP Gornal, organized by the Entrar Afuera collective and mediated by Ràdio Nikosia, in which social and institutional agents converged. In this assembly, the notion of vertigo was taken as a clinical space, of personal experience and institutional challenge, from which to rethink roles and provoke experiences. In this sense, the general impotence that we all feel in the face of war, inequality, racism, gender violence and the devastation of nature, seems to lead us irremediably into the abyss, but at the same time it calls us, definitively, to resistance. This is posed as an urgent need.

In this context, the Habitat Museum proposes a dynamic of work on multiple scales, ranging from micro to macro and vice versa, and which delves into the interstices, into undefined options, that is, into what is located between gesture and action, between the personal and the social, between discourse and affections.

“Contrariar abismes. Poetics of scale” unfolds from three conceptual axes: exhibiting, narrating, fable-making. Exhibiting and narrating are two of the intrinsic tasks of the museum and both work in constant interaction. The decisions about what and how is exhibited construct a story that can and must be questioned permanently. In turn, fable-making is thought of here as a way of imagining other forms of narrating, but also as an exercise in confrontation with what has been fabled.

In this sense, the meeting seeks to resume and open up questions, contradictions and proposals with the aim of generating escape routes that can give rise to the necessary transformative movements and the construction of other spaces and ways of doing things.

Download the programme.