http://twitter.com/museuabello

19.10.10

This coming Friday, October 22nd at 8:00 PM, we’re launching a new small project. The idea is quite simple:

http://twitter.com/museuabello

involves opening a
Twitter
account for the
Museu Abelló
. As is well known, Twitter is a social network and microblogging service that allows its users to send and read text entries with a maximum length of 140 characters called tweets; a large number of museum institutions have adopted Twitter as another channel of communication with their users (i.e. advertising). Instead of using it that way, we propose using this channel as a place for the production of discourse and public debate (an ‘arena’) for the duration of the exhibition. Specifically, we will provide several secondary school students from Mollet del Vallès, the town where the museum is located, with a mobile device from which they can publish tweets on the Museu Abelló’s Twitter. The proposal launched to the students is to create, through this channel, in situ and ‘in real time’, a chronicle of their daily experience in their institutes. The open nature of the Twitter network allows this chronicle to be debated (also in real time) both by us and by any other Twitter user. The collaboration with the students has been established without the intervention of the educational centers they attend, thanks to the mediation of the
Espai Jove La Nau
, which has put us in contact with a group of young people who are regular users of the facility.

http://twitter.com/museuabello arises from Oriol Fontdevila’s proposal to participate in the

De com convertir un museu en arena

cycle in the
Aparador
space of the Museu Abelló. The Aparador, the transparent facade of the museum, is an exhibition space that aims to “make the reception of artistic works more accessible to passers-by, potential visitors to the museum.” For his part, Oriol Fontdevila’s curatorial proposal “has the purpose of investigating the social dimension of the museum and influencing […] the different implications of defining the museum in relation to the community and as a public institution.”

The Aparador of the Museu Abelló, although sui generis, is an exhibition space; the project intends to omit both the exhibition logic of the production and reception of the artistic object typical of the museum, and that of the reproduction of habits and discourses typical of the educational institution, and to affect to some degree, even if temporarily, the structures and procedures that these institutions are responsible for perpetuating, with the hope of establishing other types of processes (communicative, of production and circulation of knowledge) that are more just. We think that the project responds to these intentions to some extent, generating and appropriating, on the one hand, one of the possible communication channels of a museum, and on the other hand, connecting it with the knowledge and experience of a group of students; it seems to us that this device can enable an overflow of the limits imposed by the different institutions between their interior and their exterior, by allowing the knowledge and voice of the students to circulate through channels that have not been designated to them in advance (neither by the museum nor by the school). What seems clear to us, in any case, is that the role of the students who collaborate in http://twitter.com/museuabello differs from the one they usually establish from school with the museum, which relegates them to the function of mere depositories of the knowledge preserved by the museum itself.

The museum provides the Barcelona public with a free bus that leaves at 7:30 PM from Can Fabra square (Segre street, 24 – 32) in Barcelona, goes to Mollet, and returns to Barcelona at 10 PM. We will provide the snacks and the musical selection.

For the occasion, the publication that you can consult in the header of this entry has been edited (you can also download it in PDF), we have published some more information here, on our website and for those who want to be entertained a little more, in the

Textos F

section – which we have decided to launch – we have posted another PDF of the brief document that we presented to the Museu Abelló with the proposal for http://twitter.com/museuabello.