WHO WHERE / QUEM ONDE

HOW / COMO: At different stages of their career, the artists that comprise this Collection, each with a unique artistic language, some reinventing media and pushing the boundaries of their respective artistic disciplines, others remaining more faithful to their areas of operation, were considered indispensable by the commission panel who, in making their selections, took into account different genres and generations, the career status of the artists in question, the need for stimulation at the various stages of the artists’ production, and the diversity of the galleries that represented them.

The Contemporary Art Collection Space – Lisboa Cultura and the works that will fill it, in different modes and formulations over the coming seasons, are yet another important contribution to promoting and forging contacts with contemporary artistic production, broadening the scope of other projects inside and outside the world of Lisboa Cultura.

WHY/ PORQUÊ: In a time scarred by wars and conflicts, local, national or global, museological structures have the vital role of creating a space where issues can be raised in public debate and differences can find connections, where we can build a bridge between generational, geographic and cultural divergences. This is not a relativist position, in which everything is accepted, but rather an anti-dogmatic approach. Art can be disarming.

In this sense, art spaces, as institutions of knowledge production (different to universities or libraries), have a critical function that involves questioning what those structures are doing in the world. Indeed, one of the functions of institutions involves questioning the more establishing modes of making, the references, the paradigms, the narratives and canons to which we are all subjected, in order to imagine them with greater openness and less dogmatism.

Art stimulates a sense of freedom, empathy and ethics. While acts of exhibition and writing about art are events and moments that make creators permeable to others and to the world, placing them in a situation of great vulnerability, this also gives them a huge capacity for resistance. Creators go beyond their own place (concentric, closed, isolated) to meet others and the place of others, imagining alternative worlds and, possibly, the chance of a better life together.

With these considerations in mind, when we build a collection or open an exhibition space to show a collection to the public, we are providing access to knowledge and to a history that examines these alternative possibilities. They offer an entry point for future generations to the knowledge produced today, which itself condenses many hundreds of years of creation. For that reason, the exhibition space is always a place for the future, even when it displays items relating to history (be it repressive or liberating).

It was undoubtedly with this responsibility in mind that Lisbon City Council created and maintained an acquisitions fund to allow it to build a contemporary art collection that examines its own time and, concomitantly, the myriad times and geographies that converge within it.

For all the reasons mentioned above, public accessibility of this municipal collection is viewed as being fundamental. Access to art, and to its inherent freedoms, ethics and alternatives, is even more vital at a time when the global situation seems unstable – or even regressive – in terms of freedom and civil and human rights.
Collections and the history of art are not an issue of the past. Collections, and this collection in particular, which also represents the history of this complex and contradictory present, are matters of the future, possibilities for response, for a promise and a responsibility towards tomorrow.

By making it accessible, through a programme of exhibitions and diverse activities, we allow for the creation of an intergenerational memory; contributing to passing our lived experience from one generation to the next, recalling our present, the struggles, the resistance, the freedoms, the ethics, that must form part of all futures, and surviving.