Picasso in the Monster Institution was an activity developed in La Casa Invisible in Malaga within Midstream, a European network of cultural mediation devices of which the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies (eipcp), Museo Reina Sofía, and the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art (LCCA) are part of. The institute and the Universidad Nómada describe as a hybrid and monstrous the institution that it is the result of the criticism and that has the capacity to propose new politics. In this podcast you can listen to Roberta da Soller, Rogelio López Cuenca and Elo Vega, three people who work within the framework of these critical institutional models and, that try to put an end to the urban problems caused by the gentrification and museumification in the cases of Venice and Malaga. 

Roberta da Soller: My name is Roberta da Soller. I´m part of S.a.L.E. Docks. It´s a collective running space in Venice. It was a public space, abandoned. We occupied it ten years ago. It´s in the center of Venice in a very gentrified area of Venice. It´s a space that works on contemporary art and politics above all.

It´s very interesting the word, monstruo. It´s a sort of category of things that you cannot classify. The Monster Institution, for me, is all those kinds of new institutions that are running now that conceive the culture of production, but also the production of the cultural labor and the labor in general, as something that´s not already conceived, it´s not already done. It´s an ongoing process of thinking about new kinds of rights, a new kind of labor, and a desire of staying together.

Before to have the problem of the art and market, that is a process that is developing itself in this period, we have a problem of mass tourism in the city of Venice. And for example, in this period we have a mayor that is of the right wing and he is very much enjoying the fact that Venice has this appearing of overwhelmed space with masks and gondolas and a lot of stuff. So this mayor is pushing the process of mass tourism at a very high level. Of course, we have a lot of restaurants and we have a lot of hotels. There is also the problem of Airbnb but it is just the tip of the iceberg. Because of course if you sell all the city to the tourist mass, there is no place for citizens. Their homes and their houses in general are very expensive to rent so people cannot afford anymore to be there and cannot allow themselves anymore to stay in the city.

Rogelio López Cuenca: My name is Rogelio López Cuenca and I am a visual artist and researcher. For more or less two decades, I have been involved in a research project about the transformations that are taking place in the city of Malaga, having as starting point the opening of the Museo Picasso, and the processes that this opening starts.

We take the opening of the Museo Picasso of Malaga as the central axis of all these recent transformations. The intention to picassoize the city and recover the figure of Picasso as a fundamental piece in the construction of the collective identity goes back to the 80´s, when it was initiated, but more so connected to the politics aimed to the normalisation of Spain´s image as a European country comparable to the neighbouring countries. Nevertheless, when the opening of the Museo Picasso takes place, which is the peak of the real estate bubble, different things are already happening.

The decline of the industrial capitalism is complete. The fundamental consequences are the hyper-specialisation of a certain area, an area which in the beginning was called “the Picasso environment”, an area where different museums have been opened and where what was left of the of the old city has disappeared in the sense of a multi-use space and, at the same time, the final transformation of the city of zones, the habitat in specialized residential areas or in production areas etc.

Elo Vega: My name is Elo Vega, I am an artist and a researcher, and for the last few years I have been collaborating in different collective projects together with Rogelio López Cuenca in issues that are also related to the memory, the gentrification process and the formation of the city.

The project that we intend to carry out now would be the continuation of a project in which Rogelio, since 2003, when the Museo Picasso opened in Malaga, starts to address and investigate the concept of the picassisation of the city, using the city as a brand linked to the symbolic capital that the figure of Picasso can be. The random fact that Picasso was born here already adds value, a surplus value to the city´s brand.  

From this project, which is still open, in 2009 Rogelio creates an exhibition which is called Ciudad Picasso where he starts to analyse the whole phenomena of the city transformation, and in 2012 we organised a workshop here in Malaga that was called Surviving Picasso.  It was also related to the film called Surviving Picasso, but also we used Surviving Picasso with a certain irony in relation with the book Life with Picasso by Françoise Gilot, who was the only woman who in a certain moment said “That´s it” and left on her own. She was a painter.  

Roberta da Soller: In Venice the gentrification works above all what we are working on is the gentrification caused by the art system and the relation between art and market. For example, the gentrification in Venice, above all in the area S.a.L.E. Docks works in several ways. You can find more or less three features of this gentrification process. One of these is for example the union of the artist´s brand and the architect brand. For example, there is a public foundation where you can find this union between the artist´s brand and the architect star. One example is the next door to S.a.L.E. Docks that is the Fondazione Emilio Vedova, where the brand artist is Emilio Vedova, but the architect star is Renzo Piano. It´s a public institution, it´s a public foundation, but in fact it works like a private foundation, like a private system.

You can find also the expression of the global collector. For example, it can be personified by François Pinault, who conceived art like private property, on occasion of speculation not in the city. And then you can find the art events where nothing happened in fact, but what happened is the event itself. For example, Biennale has a lot of collateral events. These collateral events are based in several private properties around the city and they pay a lot of money for this collateral event. Also, a lot of areas are completely gentrified by the art market. People cannot live and cannot work and cannot do anything more in that area, the rents are very high because of the galleries, and they are completely ejected from the city and from the area.

Rogelio López Cuenca: The appearance of these young and emergent professionals connected to the creative industry etc. in a certain area, people who do not have families, who do not need schools or those kinds of services, who can live some years of their lives surrounded by bars, restaurants, night life, cultural attractions etc., but it is also transitory. These people do not create community, they do not create any claims regarding the space, the environment, and therefore, with their presence, they increase the market value of these areas. It is not necessarily related to the residence. Maybe some clueless person that buys a house because they visited the city and said “what a wonderful place”, in the same way as somebody would go to Disneyland and say that it looks beautiful, but nobody would ever think of living in Disneyland. In Disneyland you cannot buy a light bulb, toilet paper or park a car.

Roberta da Soller: This is very interesting because there was an article two days ago about this process. For example in the area of S.A.L.E. Docks, the last shop where you can buy the basic necessities has closed. Of course, there is a lot of supermarkets. For example, there was an ancient theater that now is transformed into a supermarket. It´s very strong to enter in it because you see the structure of the ancient theater but you have a very large scale supermarket in there.

Rogelio López Cuenca: It was the local businesspeople themselves, in the same way as the residents, that were the first people to celebrate the opening of the museum and the pedestrianisation of the area, and then in the next decades they have been swamped and expelled from the area, because they cannot face... At the same time the controlled rent was liberalised and old businesses, characteristic in that part of the city, were also pushed out. Like bakeries, record stores… which gave a difference to that area of the city. 

Right now there is a claim from the hospitality businesses sector, regarding the demand from the residents who protest against the noise, against the limitation of the use of the public spaces. They were directly demanding that the city centre should no longer be considered a residential area, but rather as an area of touristic exploitation.

There are no observations yet in the local press about the negative or critical comments to observe this phenomena. There is still cause of celebration. The entrance of bigger cruise ship or the srrival of I don´t know how many visitors per day is still a cause for celebration. In Venice, they have now prohibited the entrance of the big cruises ships into the main channels.

Roberta da Soller: In Venice the paradoxical thing is that if you enter in a big cruise ship in Venice normally people don´t go down from the big ship because in this big cruise ship there is everything inside. You have the casino, the place you can buy things, and you have everything, so this is completely not useful for the economic environment of Venice.

• Roberta Da Soller is an activist and member of the collective which operates S.a.L.E. Docks, an independent space of contemporary art and cultural practices in Venice which has been running since 2008. S.a.L.E. Docks programmes seminars, exhibitions, research projects, workshops and public actions that seek to create an environment in which art and culture are removed from the market value logic.
• Rogelio López Cuenca. Artist. A member of the former direct action collective Agustín Parejo School between 1982 and 1984, his work stands at the crossroads between visual poetry, archival research and public intervention, exploring the relationships between art, memory and ideology. Málaga/Guernica 951 (2017), Ciudad Picasso (2011), Malagana (2000) and Sobrevivir a Picasso (2012) are some of his projects under construction and centre on contemporary interpretations of Pablo Picasso. He has exhibited at the Museo Reina Sofía, IVAM, MACBA, MUSAC, CGAC and Artium, among other institutions
• Elo Vega is an artist and researcher. Her work addresses social, political and gender issues through art projects which are at once cultural critique devices and a political instrument. In recent years she has worked with the artist Rogelio López Cuenca in workshops and collective projects related to history, memory and monumentalization as an element of ideological control, for instance Gitanos de papel (Cultural Centre of Spain in Montevideo), Historia de dos ciudades/Saharawhy (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago de Chile), Efigies y fantasmas (Museo de Huelva) and Granada. Guía monumental (Centro José Guerrero).