Barcelona will allocate a fund to “alleviate” the situation of the Picasso Museum and the Miró Foundation | Catalonia

That there is a before and after of the covid-19 is evident. Also for museums in Barcelona, ​​especially those that in recent years have made more efforts to generate their own income and not depend on public contributions. Like the Picasso Museum and the Joan Miró Foundation, which generate more than 70% of their budget and which, after closing on March 13, see their financial situation in danger. Its directors Emmanuel Guigon and Marko Daniel have already denounced it in two interviews granted to this newspaper in which they agreed to ask for greater involvement from the administrations, especially the municipal, taking into account that both Picasso and Miró donated the funds to the city to create its museums in 1970 and 1975, respectively.

This Tuesday, Joan Subirats, responsible for municipal culture, in the presence of Mayor Ada Colau, on the day that eight of Barcelona’s museum centers reopened, announced that “a covid-19 fund is being worked on to alleviate the situation of museums like the Picasso and the Miró, who depend mainly on tourists and who this summer will be affected by the lack of foreigners ”.

According to Subirats, “it is studying how to allocate this fund and part of the municipal budget for museums that depend on the economy of visitors; something that will have to be agreed in the framework of the Barcelona Pact ”. This is the agreement signed by the City Council, the presidents of the municipal groups, fifty entities and organizations in the city that started on April 28 in order to agree on actions to mitigate the effects of the covid-19.

From there four tables have emerged, in the Education and Culture there will be a series of agreements that will be agreed by all and will be brought to the plenary. The culture table met on May 21 and will do so again on June 10 and 29. According to sources from the area that Subirats directs to alleviate this economic deficit, there are also the 25 million that Pedro Sánchez promised to allocate within capital expenditures for cultural facilities with national significance, “as are the Miro and the Picasso” , they point.

Subirats’ statements came after her visit with the mayor to two of the eight municipal museums that reopened yesterday after 82 days closed. “It is very important news and a reason for joy after almost three months of confinement in which he has not stopped doing important things, to be able to reopen the municipal museums,” Cola explained on the access stairs to the Salón del Tinell, after touring, in the company of the museum coordinator, Neus Pelegrí, several floors of the Marés Museum and being able to admire closely the collection of Romanesque and Gothic carvings and then go to the nearby Museum of History of Barcelona (Muhba) where its director Joan was waiting for them Roca that showed him the splendid Salón del Tinell and the measures taken by its center to be able to open it from three in the afternoon, like the rest of seven other spaces: Born, Montjuïc castle, Pedrables monastery, Ethnological Museum, El Museo del Disenny y el Arxiu Fotogràfic.

“It is essential that face-to-face activity in the cultural sector is reactivated because it is a good of first necessity and even more so in times of crisis,” said Colau, inviting all Barcelona residents to “meet again with the life of their city and visit cultural public spaces such as museums; first-class equipment ”. According to Colau: “We must take advantage of the anomaly that this summer there are not so many visitors to rediscover and recover the cultural spaces of the city that are going to be more accessible.” It will not be easy, traditionally Barcelonans turn their backs on their museums and visit them in a minority. Only 14.4%; poor numbers that have led Subirats to ensure that there is “a problem of obsolescence; You have to rethink the very concept of a museum and get local people who have already gone to a museum like Picasso to feel interested in coming back. There is an idea in the museum that it is static. The feeling of deja vu.

‘The collapse of a model’

Ada Colau’s visit to the Marés and Muhba museums was made at a gallop, but stopped when she reached the Salón del Tinell. There, the mayor, posed for the photographers while she was able to calmly read a poster that drew her attention to the medieval city. It is the one with the title The collapse of a model and refers to the Barcelona of the middle of the 15th century “a city that was the shadow of what it had been due to the economic crisis of the moment due to the civil war that had erupted in 1462 that had left it exhausted”. A German traveler wrote soon after in 1494: “The city seemed dead compared to what it had been.”

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