The spokesman for the Popular Party (PP) in the Santa Cruz de Tenerife Town HallCarlos Tarife, has asked the mayor of the city, José Manuel Bermúdez, to dialogue with the cultural sector and with the citizens of Santa Cruz in general about the intention of the consistory to implement the rodin museum in the city and has considered that the way to manage this matter has been “debatable”.
It should be noted that the PP forms a government with the Canary Islands Coalition (CC) and a defecting councilor in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, and the vote of this political formation served to reject two motions presented by the opposition (PSOE, Unidas Podemos and Ciudadanos), one of them to carry out a consultation process on the acquisition of the sculptures and another for the suspension of this purchase. This rejection then allowed the approval of the expenditure of 16 million euros that will cost the 68 sculptures manufactured by the Paris museum that reproduce Rodin’s sculptures, considered by the Parisian museum and by the City Council as originals.
Precisely, the popular spokesman, Carlos Tarife, assured days ago on Mírame TV that he considers that this museum is “a tourist attraction and one more cultural value.” Likewise, he pointed out that they have been critical of “the forms and the location”, but they voted in favor because they understand “that the value of a figure like Rodin cannot be discussed”.
Likewise, Tarife now affirms that he does not question the importance of the figure of Rodin, but believes that a project like this “cannot be one-person and it is strictly necessary to involve the city”. He considers that the lack of citizen participation in the preparation of this file “has raised misgivings among social and cultural sectors of Santa Cruz de Tenerife” and that, for this reason, he will ask, within the local government, that the mayor’s office promote the creation of “tables or spaces for dialogue between the City Council and representatives of the cultural and social sphere”.
In addition, Carlos Tarife believes that the way in which the Rodin Museum file has been managed is “debatable”, but they understand that they have time to establish lines of dialogue with the social and cultural agents of the city, “who have shown themselves contrary to it, to reach the necessary consensus for its proper development”.
In this way, the PP distances itself from the Canary Islands Coalition in relation to the Rodin museum, with a few months to go before the regional elections in May. This project has raised a lot of controversy due to the cost of its investment, due to the null relationship between Tenerife and the artist Auguste Rodin and due to its forecasts, which estimate a number of visitors and income per entry higher than the museum in Paris.
IAC Criticism
The Institute of Contemporary Art of the Canary Islands (IAC) has also positioned itself against the Rodin Museum that the Santa Cruz City Council intends to install. The organization considers that the 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 which in the coming months will be totally drowned by the continued recession.” The IAC has thus joined hundreds of other professionals and art institutions that have already expressed their rejection of this project due to its “disproportionate” investment.
