Curator Vicente Todolí highlights “great evolution” of contemporary art in Portugal – Observer
Curator Vicente Todolí, who left the direction of the Serralves Museum 20 years ago, highlighted this Friday, in Coimbra, the “great evolution” of contemporary art in Portugalconsidering that the great challenge is the continuity and sustainability of the projects.
The Spanish curator, who left Serralves in 2002 to take over the direction of the London museum Tate Modern (from which he left in 2010), looks at the work he did in Porto as well as other initiatives at the time, in the country, like a stone that is thrown into the sea and that goes “waves”.
“This was done”, he notes, considering that other places and spaces that have emerged in the last 20 years have thrown “one more pebble and one more pebble“, creating more waves, in favor of the evolution of contemporary art in Portugal, which he hopes “don’t end”.
“There has been a great evolution, above all in institutional terms”, the curator, who is in Coimbra within the scope of PARTE Summit, an international meeting that brings together thinkers from the contemporary artistic milieu in the city, told Lusa, this Saturday.
Vicente Todolí directs one of the artistic circuits, between the North and the Center, which precedes the meeting, which has a second phase in Loulé, at the beginning of August.
For the former director of Serralves, the challenge in Portugal involves the need for continuity and sustainability of projects.
“The risk is the occurrence of a mirror effect and they end up continuing to happen”, “which is allowed to create projects, considering that only continuity is a legacy”.
“Spaces cannot be like rockets”, he noted, noting that there are “more and more special people”, public, private or private institutions.
According to Vicente Todolí, in someone who is not rich, it is very important that there is a “grinta”, an Italian expression widely used in cycling that refers to the “claw“.
If at the beginning of the century, the director of the former Serralves Museum had difficulty in attracting public, currently it is believed that he no longer puts it, making the idea of plastics as plastics more distant from the public.
“This is over. Now contemporary art is better known than classical art. The problem is that they will see the most mediatic artists and then we get into commodification”, she noted.
For Vicente Todolí, who does not like the art world, but art itself, “there is an increasing commodification of art”.
“What is important to maintain the independence of institutions”, he said, is the advice for cases that do not depend on box office revenues to compose their budget, such as funds associated with large or banking institutions.
“The commercial part is also the one that journalists take the most for – the prices, the markets. Everyone contributes to this. Anyway, that’s how it is”, says, taking care of the media, the current director of Hangar Biccoca, of the Pielli Foundation, in Italy.
PARTE Summit has, this month and in August, its first edition, between the cities of Coimbra and Loulé, in an international meeting with some of the “most influential thinkers in the contemporary artistic milieu”.
The seminar will take place on the 30th of July, in Coimbra, and on the 6th of August, in Loulé, proposing “a new format for reflection and knowledge sharing, which takes as a starting point 12 questions previously formulated by some of the most influential thinkers in the art, gathered in Portugal at the invitation of the PARTE program”.