Jesus Villalobos spoke with curator Marielsa Castro about Museos en Común [Museums in Common], a project she promoted within the Jumex Museum, whose goal was to foster meaningful ties between the closest communities. Far from the fetishization imposed by the empty politics of audience creation —so popular among cultural institutions—, Museos en Común has emerged as a way to propose the museum as an amalgam of the social fabric in the midst of gentrification and dispossession.

Jesus A. Villalobos Fuentes: How did the Jumex Museum become interested in building relationships with other geographically close audiences, as it did with the Granada Market and the Maestro Antonio Caso Elementary School?

Marielsa Castro Vizcarra: Since the Jumex Foundation was located in Ecatepec (2001-2013), the institution was interested in carrying out projects with the neighbors. The Granada neighborhood was primarily an industrial area, and after the construction of the Soumaya Museum and the Jumex Museum 11 years ago, there was a transformation that goes hand in hand with the development of what is now called “Nuevo Polanco.” There is a process of gentrification and revaluation in the area due, in large part, to these urban changes.

While our exhibitions attract a wide and diverse audience, many of our visitors are doing so for the first time. So the relationship with most visitors is short-lived. For some, this will be their only visit, and that's great, but we're also interested in creating a much longer-lasting, deeper relationship that truly connects us with the museum's audiences. The Museos en comun project began in 2021 with these concerns and the following two questions: How do we connect more lastingly with our audiences? And, how do we relate to the immediate context? Although the museum has been in Granada for 11 years, its relationships with certain parts of the neighborhood are not obvious. In just a few meters, the demographics change radically. Here, we're in a kind of bubble surrounded by shopping malls, apartments, and museums; but if you walk five minutes northwest, the context changes completely: it's a different economic stratum and a different land use. We are interested in going a little further. This is how we began the first stage of the Museos en comun project: with the community of the Granada Market, a traditional market with more than 60 years of history and located a 15-minute walk east of the Jumex Museum. 

Lorena Lopez: I have been here for over 30 years. I like participating in all activities, I like art, I really like reading on my phone, I like poems, I love the history of the city. In the project, we learned things we didn't know about the history of the markets, and at the end, during the photo exhibition, we learned the story of everyone in the market. My children, and most of us, grew up here, but many studied and decided not to work here anymore. When you see the photographs, you realize that time has passed. The photos and faces speak volumes about what people have experienced. Before, there were just pieces of dirt road. A few years ago, I liked to go running and see the promos about all the changes they made. The bike path, for example, is very visually pleasing. I was very pleased to see that change. I really like going to museums, although I used to think the Jumex Museum was just for kids. I like my job, I like people to leave happy. I think, above all, what people like is being treated well and you reap the rewards of people loving you. 

 

JAVF: Tell me about the development of Museos en comun. Rather than narrating the different stages of the project, I'm interested in understanding how each edition has been transformed by these new audiences.

 

MCV: This project is a collaboration between the curatorial area and the education area. At first, we weren't familiar with the museum's immediate context, so the first activity our education assistant, Sofía Santana, and I did was walk around the museum, focusing on the Pensil and Granada neighborhoods. From my past experience working with communities, such as the Bogota Trans Community Network, I learned that it is very difficult to create a community from an institution. The ideal way is to work with an allied community. 

We made two attempts in spaces other than the Granada Market and failed. And I think it was for the same reasons community projects often fail: on the one hand, because the community isn’t calling on us; and on the other, because it takes time, and in this capitalist world, what we lack most is time. It is important to start from there. In community projects, we must learn from failure and mistakes. It's very difficult to plan for the future; you have to be flexible and available to the community you're inviting. "Doing something in common" is almost impossible to do from an institution; it must be done with the community. 

We spent about five months visiting the market, understanding its dynamics, and getting to know the people, until we began discussing the possibility of doing a project together. The first guest on the project was artist Alonso Gorozpe, who has experience in community projects and institutional liaisons. We needed someone who could connect with the community, without being part of the institution. We soon realized that the population that had time to do this was children, not adults. Every Thursday, we organize workshops on the esplanade, an underutilized space, used by children to play after school. 

It all started with talking to the tenants and the children. Children wanted a play area, tenants wanted a space for their customers, and customers wanted a space to sit and eat. We were clear on the fact that it had to have flexible fixtures that could cover all needs, and over the course of a year we began a co-design process with the children and invited the artist Chavis Marmol and the architect Mariana Rios to accompany this process. What surprised us was that, up until that moment, none of the tenants had visited the Jumex Museum. In order to change that, we organized a couple of tours with children and a celebration at the museum with the tenants and their families. In a way, a party is also a meeting place for this community, as well as the form that the project has adopted on several occasions. The next processes, over the following years, were more fluid, and we managed to invite the parents, mothers, grandmothers and grandfathers of these children to participate in the workshops.

 

Mrs. Jobita: I really enjoyed the workshops they came to give, especially because of the conviviality. I liked the proposal they brought, remembering many things that we had already forgotten: how we got here, how long we had been here,how important our customers are to us. I had another job before; I studied secretarial work and accounting, I was in a different environment. And when I got here, I had to start from the bottom. The truth is that I really like my job, I really like being here. I've been working here for 35 years. Now, I have small grandchildren, and I'd like them to go to the museum, to get to know it. Since I'm always here at the market, I haven't been there myself. What for? I don't have time to go. But I saw that the children were happy in the workshops they offered on the esplanade.

 

JAVF: Before this approach, do you know if they had any perceptions of the Jumex Museum? Considering that the market is 60 years old and the museum only 10, was there a relationship between that process of change and the museum?

MCV: The vast majority of the tenants were not familiar with the Jumex Museum and, therefore, were not familiar with its relationship to the changes in this context. On the day of the celebration, most people visited the museum for the first time. Almost all the tenants and their families attended, there were about 200 people. They closed the market to come to the party we held in the square. They told us they wanted a salsa band and food, and that's what we shared with them. It was an incredible event. Much of the museum's focus is on building long-term relationships with audiences, but it's also on attracting people who don't normally visit art museums and making this museum part of their accessible context.

Maria del Rosario Valencia: Every workshop had something new for us. We did everything with everyone's participation, everyone doing their part. The one I liked the most was the one with the logos that we started. Mine is the one up here and everything here on the glass. It was our initiative, because they did it our way, to our liking, but with their initiative as well. I've been working here since I was a child. I've seen too many changes; this used to be a working-class neighborhood, one could say. Now, it is not. There are now a lot of offices, a lot of buildings; there have been many radical changes. Some have affected the market, others have not. Because there are so many malls, all of that “displaces us.” It has affected us a little, but thank God we have survived. The Jumex Museum is something I had never seen before, and we are getting to know it day by day. I was present at all the celebrations in some way.

JAVF: There is an exchange in this sharing. You have told me about the knowledge and time that these people offered. When you see, in the record videos, the result of the posters, the bicycle workshops, the fixtures, the photographic exhibition, all these parts of the exchange are visible. But what about those that aren't? How does this program change the dynamics of the museum? 

MCV: I think the Museos en comun project has taught us all a lot at the museum, particularly about flexibility, as it's a project that can't be fully defined because it depends on another community. But, as with any curatorial project, it's necessary to make budget projections and define a curatorial proposal. It is also a complex project to do because it does not take place in the physical space of the museum. In practical terms, at the administrative level, for example, we work with artists on a very long-term basis and on projects where the results can vary. Even the way to communicate it is a challenge, because it is not an exhibition, nor a public event. It does not fit into existing categories. These changes, although seemingly minor, have an impact on the institution. 

Emotionally, I think about the 61st anniversary of the Granada Market, which we celebrated in August 2023. The tenants invited all the museum workers to a party at the market. Many of them had never been to the market before; it was the same as when the tenants came to the museum for the celebration in October 2022. It's about connecting and opening the doors of two spaces within the same neighborhood, connecting their communities. It has been interesting and complex to have an atypical project. Although we already have a much more structured notion of how to do it, I think being patient, flexible, and open to ambiguity and uncertainty are the greatest lessons.

 

JAVF: And the Maestro Antonio Caso Elementary School? How did you get there?

MCV: The process of Museos en comun at the market had several stages. We've been doing this for three years, and each year has been a different project. The first was the fixtures we made with the children; we displayed it at the museum and then took it to the esplanade. The second was the signs we made with the females tenants and artists Circe Irasema, Can Can Press and Bienal Tlatelolca. At the same time, we held bicycle workshops with the Enchulame la bici [Pimp my bike] project, so that the tenants could fix their bicycles and teach these workshops. 

In the third year, and almost as a closing touch to these times of collaboration, we held a photography exhibition featuring portraits that Dorian Ulises Lopez Macias took of the tenants. This process was truly an exchange because it was the female tenants who curated the space, designed the museography, and worked with the installation team. We proposed sharing what we do within a museum, in exchange for sharing their stories and the contexts of the market. 

At the same time, at the suggestion of one of the female tenants, in early 2024, we began working with the Maestro Antonio Caso Elementary School, which is across the street from the market and is where the most recent generations of market children have attended. We don't want Museos en comun to be a static project and to remain in a community indefinitely. At the school, we worked with the 4th-grade group and the artist duo Celeste to produce a backdrop that was used on Mother's Day and later displayed at the Jumex Museum as a stage for educational activities. We also began a long-term project: the rehabilitation of a school garden. We are carrying out this process with the same group of children and it has been facilitated by the community workshop, the social research consultancy Nosotrikas, the landscapers of Macondo, and the artist Natalia Ramos.

JAVF: In the first public program, you reflected on different strategies that the museum uses. One of them is the act of pointing out and focusing on something. What is showcased with this project? On the other hand, museums have always been spaces of exclusion, and many of the tools within them have perpetuated this division. How does the project assume and modify this?

MCV: The Museos en comun project aims to question the museum itself. What are the roles, the limits, and for whom is a museum? All these questions are the ones that are focused on within the project. While, as you say, museums have historically been spaces of segregation, this project seeks the opposite: to question those invisible and visible barriers that museums have, to make a more friendly, more flexible, more ambiguous, more accessible museum. 

The interest of that first program, where all the guests had experienced with community processes, laid in the question: Is it possible, from the institution, to carry out a common project? Understanding “common” as a place of exchange, where there is dialogue and where voices can be heard in the same way. If you only focus on traditional museum practices, you'll be stuck there. It's important to constantly question the institution, and I think the project does so by stepping outside the physical space of the museum and, above all, by addressing audiences who don't normally visit us.

On the other hand, after four years of working at the Granada Market and one year at the Elementary School, we've developed a friendship, and that's also important. Of course, there's a critical interest in questioning the institution's limits, but there's also another side that's looking to have a good time. We want people from the market to come to the Jumex Museum and have a good time, we want the children from the school to feel the museum as another safe learning space, and we want to have a good time when we go to the market or to school, too.