Eve Battle | València (EFE).- The team from the Museu Valencià d’Etnologia (L’ETNO) celebrates its election as the best European museum of the year, which they consider a recognition of local work, innovative and risky exhibition proposals, in their case fruit of the “madness” of a multidisciplinary group “sick of museums” and addicted to museography.
The anthropologist and archaeologist Joan Seguí, director of the museum, and his team feel overwhelmed by the media attention they are receiving, a “push”, thanks in a conversation with EFE, popular culture and social museum proposals, which opt for a groundbreaking, contemporary discourse adapted to new languages.
Seguí assures that they went to Barcelona last Saturday, where the winner was revealed, “relaxed” and with few expectations since they were competing with 32 other international museums, some of them “very powerful”.
The EMYA Award (European Museum of the Year Award), established in 1977, is the most prestigious in the world of museums and has been won by centers such as the Museum of the Mind (Haarlem, the Netherlands), the Museum of Design ( London, United Kingdom), the CosmoCaixa, the MARQ-Museo Provincial de Arqueología de Alicante or the Guggenheim in Bilbao.
Unanimous jury choice
Seguí is especially grateful that the decision of the nine members of the jury -in which this year there was no Spaniard- in the choice of L’ETNO was “unanimous”, endorsing his exhibition project.
“It is not easy to be Valencian, nor Valencian”, a reflection on identity in a culturally increasingly homogeneous world, with a very attractive, contemporary staging, with real objects that create a story adapted to the new public.
Seguí has been accompanied in this “madness” by a multidisciplinary team, made up of some 24 people from areas such as anthropology, archaeology, cultural managers, restoration and administration.
The success of the project is also thanks to the fact that “we are sick of museums and we are totally drugged with museography,” he jokes.
Take advantage of the award to ask the political and management class to “understand that these things cannot be done without means. Culture, be it a museum, a library or whatever, needs minimal resources to reach minimum quality standards”, he claims.
Old charity building
The Museu Valencià d’Etnologia (L’ETNO), dependent on the Valencia Provincial Council, created in 1982 to collect, study and disseminate traditional Valencian popular culture, is located in the historic building of the old Casa de la Beneficencia -a center shelter for orphaned children and without resources built in 1841-, and shares space with the Museum of Prehistory, its “big brother”.
Its permanent exhibition “It is not easy to be Valencian, nor Valencian”, awarded with the EMYA, begins with the “pantry of culture” in the “white room”, the brightest of the visit, an exhibition of everyday objects, of different eras, which talk about the evolution of society and invites the visitor to reflect on cultural identity in the modern globalized world.
The exhibition offers a tour of about 1,400 linear meters, which can be visited in half an hour, with explanatory texts adapted to current times, about one hundred words “which is what has been calculated to be the maximum that can be read while standing ”, explains Seguí.
It is also committed to lighting and groundbreaking design, for which professionals from the world of theater and set design have been sought. A museographic proposal so attractive, says its director, that “it ends up being almost one more object” of the exhibition.
ETNO, claim for Instagramers
In fact, the museum has seen a significant increase in tourist visits, especially Italians, attracted by the aesthetics of the show, who post their photographs on social networks.
“It wasn’t the pretense,” points out Seguí, who claims he doesn’t have an Instagram account, “but if it serves to arouse interest in any of them, it’s already been worth it.”
The exhibition offers a journey through time, with jumps to the past and the present, to show the transformation of the traditional city. From the first wooden elevator, an element that meant a great change in construction and made penthouses more expensive, to the replica of a room from the 40s of the last century, in a house in the center of any historic city, today surely converted into a tourist floor of a virtual platform.
The tour continues through the streets of the city, with an old car and a Seat 600 in front of a bus stop, to address the new forms of mobility, and a traffic light with two women hand in hand, a reflection of sexual diversity, indicates I followed.
He also uses a phone booth as a resource to talk about migration; or the counter and old shelves of the S.Carbonell de Ruzafa haberdashery -which the owner donated in full to the museum when he decided to close it- to reflect on traditional local trade in front of a vending machine; and confronts the leisurely work of a loom with the current “coworking” system.
The trip concludes with a homeless woman sleeping on a bench, a representation of the problem of loneliness in contemporary society, of poverty and social exclusion.
Seguí considers that a good museum is one that “makes you ask questions and discover things you don’t know”. “If at the end of the visit we have generated a reflection in you, we have already achieved our objective”, concludes the director of L’ETNO, who hopes that the award will also serve to attract a new audience, especially young people. EFE