The Rodin Museum in Paris abandons the controversial project of opening a headquarters in Santa Cruz de Tenerife. The rectors of the museum center dedicated to the famous French sculptor yesterday submitted their official resignation to this project financed with 16 million euros of public money in light of the numerous criticisms leveled by a broad representation of experts from the cultural, artistic and academic sector of Canary Islands. This was announced in a letter signed by the director of the Rodin Museum in Paris, Amélie Simier, addressed to José Manuel Bermúdez, mayor of the capital of Tenerife and one of the main defenders of the project, whose government team yesterday ordered the immediate suspension of its Administrative file.
The rescission of the agreement occurs one year and three months after the signing in Paris between the managers of Rodin’s legacy and those responsible for the Santa Cruz City Council, which set a part -around half- of the Cultural Park as the location of the future installation Viera y Clavijo, whose rehabilitation works will begin this year 2023. “We must conclude that the conditions currently do not exist for the city of Santa Cruz de Tenerife to host an international museum project,” reads the Paris statement, which highlights in turn “the cultural and heritage values” of the city of Tenerife, although “we are sensitive to the recent events in your city and the unfortunate statements of a part of the cultural, academic or political sector”.
The director of the Parisian museum regrets all the “unfortunate” criticism of the project
Thus culminates a well-known controversy with national reverberation around this million-dollar project that has essentially confronted two perspectives: in its favor, the referent of the “Guggenheim effect” in Bilbao or the “Picasso effect” in Malaga for the sake of a greater impact. tourism in the city, as well as the identification of Santa Cruz de Tenerife as a “city of sculpture” by the First International Street Sculpture Exhibition in 1973, promoted by the Official College of Architects; and against, the disproportionate and unjustified investment of a commercial operation that turns its back on the reality, needs and demands of the cultural sector of the Archipelago and that, moreover, is built in the void of a biographical, historical or artistic link to Auguste Rodin with the Canary Islands
“Loss of Opportunity”
The mayor of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, José Manuel Bermúdez, regretted yesterday the “loss of this opportunity” and pointed out that the opposition groups “are not up to what the city and the municipality need to plan their future”. because “they continually try to boycott, one after another, projects for the city.”
Precisely, hours before this official confirmation was announced, the PP spokesman and Councilor for Environmental Sustainability and Public Services, Carlos Tarife, asked the mayor to dialogue with the cultural sector and with the public, since he considered that the way to manage this issue has been “debatable” and that large projects for the city “cannot be one-person.”
Likewise, Bermúdez has stressed that this news “does not paralyze the investment policy” of the City Council that he presides over for the benefit of the recovery of local heritage and culture, since he stresses that “the culture and historical heritage of the capital must be axes of socioeconomic development, generation of opportunities”. For this reason, it would undertake to promote “a process of dialogue” with cultural, social and economic agents to agree on the possible future uses of the Viera y Clavijo Cultural Park, now that the space destined for the Rodin Museum headquarters will not house this project.
Bermúdez points out that the opposition groups “are not up to what the city needs
For their part, those responsible for the Parisian cultural space regret that “the current questioning of Rodin as a universal artist, the questioning of the originality of his works and the questioning of the motivations of a national public institution” like this “have led to this inevitable decision they regret.” Thus, the Rodin Museum invites, finally, “to a local reflection, beyond ideologies, to make the culture shared by all a collective success”, they state.
More than 3,000 voices against
On the other hand, the criticisms and manifestos against opening this branch of the Rodin Museum of Paris in Santa Cruz de Tenerife has been adding more and more supporters by prominent personalities from the culture and art sector in the Canary Islands.
Specifically, at the end of last November a denunciation campaign was deployed on social networks, which to date has accumulated more than 3,000 signatures of nationally and internationally renowned arts and culture professionals, and who brand the project as “waste”. , “inconsistency” and “fanciful”.
«As has been repeatedly pointed out, this operation has been justified on the basis of an economic study that is not rigorous, which offers estimates of the museum’s economic return that are so exaggerated as to be fanciful. A more realistic estimate and attentive to the sector, will have to assume that it will be a non-refundable investment and that the resulting institution will require repeated investments to remain open, ”says a collective statement.
On December 20, the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of La Laguna (ULL) also expressed its direct rejection of the project, since it considers that the initiative “seriously harms the culture” of the Tenerife capital and “does not benefit” to Canarian society, for which reason the institution outlined an appeal to the city council to stop the project, as well as a demand that the corporation “study the best way to allocate its funds to the promotion of culture produced in and from the island of Tenerife.
Lastly, the territorial delegation of the Instituto de Arte Contemporáneo (IAC) in the Canary Islands, constituted as an independent association made up of professionals dedicated to contemporary art in the islands as a whole, joined the protest campaign against the project through an official statement, in which they argued that this project “does not respond to the cultural reality of the islands -marked by precariousness, in many cases, extreme-, which has been hit by the pandemic and the different economic crises, and that in months to come will be totally drowned out by the continuing economic downturn.” “This lack of resources for local culture makes it impossible for cultural professionals to develop professionally with dignity,” they conclude.
As a whole, this critical current with the project of the Parisian headquarters in Tenerife has also highlighted that those responsible have not at any time had the appreciation or participation of the agents linked to the island’s cultural fabric and, even less, with the Canarian citizens. in the construction process of the project.
Real value of the works
According to publicly accessible information, the Santa Cruz de Tenerife City Council signed an investment of 16 million euros of public money for the acquisition of a total of 83 works by the sculptor Auguste Rodin, to which another 12.5 million investment would be added. under construction for the next few years.
Along these lines, the criticism of this long-term million-dollar bet is divided into two aspects: on the one hand, the non-originality of the works and, on the other hand, their lack of opportunities for artists from the islands.
The Faculty of Fine Arts of La Laguna and the Institute of Contemporary Art were against
In the first aspect, the inventory of the purchase of works from the Rodin Museum in Paris was translated into the acquisition of 68 copies of limited editions in bronze, in small or medium format, produced by the Rodin Museum in very recent dates or still pending commission, to which is added a set of specimens made post mortem by the team of the Parisian institution from molds bequeathed by the same universal sculptor.
In this sense, the IAC in the Canary Islands criticizes that these copies “do not have the same economic value or the same artistic relevance as the unique works; and, therefore, they lack the speculated attraction of exclusivity that the Tenerife council emphasizes”, since the ULL Faculty of Fine Arts points out that, even if they were labeled as “original works”, they were going to be manufactured by order in the coming months. “More than a century after the artist’s death, which places the museum project as a commercial transaction with the institution that provided these sculptures,” they indicate.
In this regard, the Parisian center emphasized in its statement that the project for its headquarters in Tenerife would house spaces dedicated to art created in the Canary Islands, as well as an interpretation center on the First and Second International Sculpture Exhibition on Calle de Santa Cruz of Tenerife.
However, from the IAC they once again defended that «public institutions must set up spaces for dialogue with professionals and value the cultural history of the Canary Islands, which is rich, avant-garde and with great contemporary potential (…). And in these moments of crisis, defend a model with zero risk that is committed to economic sustainability and that also gives priority to the cultural values existing on the island and not foreign ones”.
