Abel Azcona is a Spanish artist originative from the city of Pamplona. Photography © Courtesy of Abel Azcona
1.In your opinion, what is the role of a museum?
Art must be understood as a transformer tool. I understand the creative process as a social, critical and political tool. We should think of the institutions created for art as a necessary amplifier and colaborator in the communicative and socially transformative process that art implies.
However, many museums haven’t been capable of adapting to the new mindsets, which view contemporary art as discursive and political above the aesthetic, so it becomes the artist’s duty to encroach -artistically speaking- this spaces and to make the visitor or viewer leave the space transformed. We shouldn’t conform with a merely esthetic experience.
2.What are your favorite museums in the world? Why?
Fifteen years ago, I started doing my first performances in the streets of my native city, Pamplona, so I try not to loose the esence that streets or spaces which are more on the underground side hold. I have had the oportunity to dsisplay my work at the Venice Arsenale, the Bogotá Museum of Modern Art, the Art Leage Houston, the Ramirez Villamizar Museum of Modern Art, the Leslie Lohman Museum in New York, the Museo Norte in Santander, the Málaga Contemporary Art Centre, the Barranquilla Modern Art Museum, the Círculo de Bellas Artes of Madrid, the Alicante Museum of Modern Art or the Bogotá Contemporary Art Museum.
