museum in progress: You realized an image for the project "urbanTension". Please tell us about the ideas that lead to the piece.
Minerva Cuevas: The image for the "urbanTension" project shows a background that is visually related to political parties or flags colours arranged in vertical stripes, the foreground is a quotation from Joseph Proudhon's "General Idea of the Revolution" that remains shocking to read or even becomes highly distressful if we remember it has been valid since 1851.
mip: Can you tell us about the relationship of your work and the experience of tension in urban space?
MC: The image for the "urbanTension" project shows a background that is visually related to political parties or flags colours arranged in vertical stripes, the foreground is a quotation from Joseph Proudhon's "General Idea of the Revolution" that remains shocking to read or even becomes highly distressful if we remember it has been valid since 1851.
mip: What kind of effects do you expect, what sort of reception by the viewer/reader/passerby?
MC: It is not strange to find the idea of "the system" or "the government" too abstract to relate it to its everyday life symptoms, that is what the text within the design aims to remind us. Is only when we realize how politics regulate our lives that we start questioning them not by "taking a position" but by rejecting its terrenial manifestations and not swallowing their disguise of the unique instances that warranty order and security.
mip: It seems that after giving up religion, aristocracy, craftsmanship, the visual arts are now giving up the museum (as an institution and as a concept of art) and other specialized spaces for art as well. Will we find ourselves soon again in a kind of Lascaux or Altamira situation, a situation in which the making of art is simply a way of confronting reality, artists spreading throughout networks in many different ways personalized cultural messages?
MC: I do understand my activities and projects as political actions. I haven't been interested in museums as spaces for art or places where the work is welcomed in the status of art but rather as public spaces with defined audiences, in that sense public places as parks or subway stations. I do prefer to insert my work outside institutions as very often they are campaigns developed using media strategies, the work has to be placed where the people is or where the message can be better read. Better if we read our contexts as we pass by.
urbanTension 01