Research / Museumization / Market value

Workshop with Pedro Barbosa, Manuel Borja-Villel, José de la Mano and Mela Dávila

This workshop was part of the Study Sessions AFTER THE ARCHIVE: ARTWORK AND DOCUMENTS. 

Pedro Barbosa is a former trader. In 1999, he started a collection, the Coleção Moraes-Barbosa (cmb), focusing on conceptual art and video works by local and global artists. The 20,000 printed matter items that form part of the collection are used as research material by artists, curators and researchers. cmb also has a project space open to the public in São Paulo showcasing artists and projects from the collection. Barbosa is a board member of Electronic Art Intermix (EAI), Kunstwerk Berlin (KW), and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) Media and Performing Art Committee.

Manuel Borja-Villel is an art historian. He graduated in 1980 from the University of Valencia and completed his studies at Yale University and the City University of New York (CUNY). He was director of the Museo Reina Sofía for fifteen years, and also directed the Fundació Antoni Tàpies and the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA). He has been a member of the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art (CIMAM) and the Advisory Committee of Documenta 12 in Kassel, in addition to presiding over the jury of the Venice Biennale in two editions.

Mela Dávila Freire is a researcher, curator, writer and translator. Her area of work covers the genre of artist publications (which she approaches from a feminist perspective), in addition to art archives and bibliographic collections, a field in which she is particularly interested in the theoretical and practical intersections between archiving and art collection and the ideological biases of archival structures. 

José de la Mano has a doctorate in Art History from the Complutense University of Madrid and has worked as an adjunct professor at the Autonomous University of Madrid. He is also a corresponding academic of the Royal Catalan Academy of Fine Arts of Sant Jordi.
In his gallery, founded in 2005, he is a pioneer in defending the artists of the Centro de Cálculo, one of the transcendental artistic episodes of the last years of the Franco dictatorship. In recent editions of ARCOmadrid. He has made proposals such as the recovery of the monumental interpretation of Picasso's Guernica painted during the transition to democracy by Agustín Ibarrola, which was acquired by the Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao. Also at ARCO, three editions ago, he presented a project on forgotten women of the 1960s and 1970s, which recovered, among others, the memory of the Catalan artist Aurèlia Muñoz, who is represented today in the collection of the MoMA in New York.