MEDIATION FOR FIVE HANDRAILS
Picture: Sue Ponce.
In the Cristina Garrido exhibition, Ximena asks ‘What Juan Muñoz work are you according to your zodiac sign?’; Jesús begins with La Chola Poblete, and Álex climbs up to the roof. Mar asks if the museum is a theatre; Ana talks about death and thresholds.
A handrail like Tiresias’s gesture to read with his fingers. And like the grain in a house’s wood, we could say: the grains running along the staircase allow the body to lean; they stick to the walls in a right angle but also an ellipse. A handrail to slide through the museum and see things from above.
Or to go to the exhibition next door, or see the work just around the bend in the hallway.
Mediation for Five Handrails is a collaborative project between AMECUM (Association of Cultural Mediators of Madrid) and the Museo CA2M. Based on a proposal that began with the exhibition Juan Muñoz. In the Violet Hour, we are rethinking mediation in its own context by putting the mediator’s body at the centre, amidst so many objects and so many words.
This project is also viewed as an investigation that revolves around two lines of action at AMECUM: reflecting on and experimenting with mediation, good practices and other ways of viewing it, and bringing visibility and recognition to the figure of the cultural mediator.
In the quest to challenge the logics according to which mediation tends to be understood as a service, we are suggesting a perspective of mediation as a critical, autonomous cultural production based on personal, positioned inquiries. It is a situated, contextualised process in which the mediator is also a cultural producer who makes new collective questions and interpretations possible. Five different tours conducted by five different mediators: Mar Sáenz-López, Ximena Rios, Jesús Morate, Alex Martínez and Ana Folguera.