The MUN opens its new era with the great challenge to attract the attention of the public.
The Museo Universidad de Navarra has presented in Madrid its new artistic director , Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro. Two world premieres (with Jesús Carmona, and with Muriel Romero and Pablo Palacio, from Instituto Stocos) and the first and great exhibition Collection are the milestones of this season.
Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro (A Coruña, 1970) has been appointed artistic director of the Museo Universidad de Navarra. With extensive experience in university museums and other centers in Europe, the United States and Latin America, he is now the new manager of the artistic strategy of the MUN together with Teresa Lasheras, in charge of performing arts and music.
The Museum's general director , Jaime García del Barrio, has welcomed the new artistic director in a meeting with media held in Madrid, in which he has valued that his incorporation is "a new step in what a university museum can do".
Pérez-Barreiro assumes this position after six years linked to the MUN as professor of the Master's Degree in programs of study of Curatorship. He presents himself as a person with activity professor and research, so he sees his arrival as a boost to the rapprochement between these disciplines and art. The MUN has some very special characteristics," he confessed, alluding to the fact that the management is divided between one person from the visual arts and another from the performing arts. -It's a great opportunity to learn and to ask ourselves questions.
As a university, the MUN allows us many luxuries of time, thought... The greatest of these luxuries is to be able to ask questions," he continued. -We have the university community, disciplines, knowledge and the opportunity to learn from what they tell us". In this process, he considers the Museum as "the great mechanism of the University to share knowledge with the public". In fact, he believes that "a museum should be a laboratory of artistic production", of interdisciplinary dialogue, and "a place of mediation with the public".
The University of Navarra Museum also stands out for its collection, which is "unique, very well thought out and well-founded," said the new artistic director . It is also the protagonist of the sample MUN Collection. Four decades, whose inauguration will take place next Tuesday 24. The exhibition is structured around the donations that gave rise to its origin: the photographer Ortiz Echagüe and the Navarre collector María Josefa Huarte; the successive incorporations, partly born of the project of artistic residences Tender bridges; and the evolution during the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries with photographic, pictorial and sculptural works, as well as new formats such as video installations.
Thanks to this collection, in addition, the professors of the University of Navarra have the opportunity to carry out projects of innovation in education with their students. This is what Professor María Angélica Martínez, from School of Architecture, told us. And she exemplified it with the case of "El maletín de Tàpies" (Tàpies' briefcase), a project developed with students from Degrees of Architecture and design, whose goal is to bring art closer to people with visual difficulties. Specifically, they worked with L'Esperit Català, by Antoni Tàpies. The proposal was part of the project SociARTE, which puts the Museum's resources at the service of social organizations, and was supported by Fundació Antoni Tàpies, ONCE and Fundació "la Caixa".
A moment from meeting/© José Juan Rico
For her part, the director of Performing Arts and Music, Teresa Lasheras, explained the MUN's interest in "all those artistic projects that seek to give birth to new languages, technical reflections, formats and experiment with them" and in "new ways of linking artistic projects with audiences. We always want to be mediators, translators between artists and the public," he explained.
Museo en Danza is the cycle that brings together the contemporary dance proposals that the MUN brings each fall. Pursuing the dialogue between the arts and artistic disciplines, and between arts and academic research , its seventh edition includes two world premieres: Súper viviente ( September 26) and Incubatio (October 31).
Jesús Carmona brings to MUN Súper viviente, a play that reflects on mental health, with the support of members of board of trustees promoter and sponsorship Zurich insurance. To work on this show, Carmona has had a group of experts from the University, the Clinic and the Cima University of Navarra, belonging to psychiatry, psychology, neuroscience and artistic Education . In addition, this Thursday 19 will hold a meeting with the public at the Museum, interviewed by two students from the University.
Instituto Stocos has also found a "great affinity" with this peculiar environment, as explained by Pablo Palacio, co-founder of the company together with Muriel Romero. Incubatio, in particular, combines dance, music, artificial intelligence (AI) models, virtual reality (VR) and motion capture techniques.