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Antimuseum works with groups without access to contemporary art, developing models of participation in creative processes, and linking artistic practice to specific contexts and its social and political conflicts. We seek the cooperation of associations of different levels (neighborhood associations, historical memory, women, etc.), to facilitate dialogue art/society and achieve this contextualization. In our first stage (92/94) we developed a specific site program in a former factory in Madrid. In the second (95/2000), without our own exhibition hall, the site-specific program moved to different environments: disused locals, private houses, public spaces ... both in Madrid and Mexico City. In the third phase (2003/07), based in Madrid, we started to investigate systematically on models of participation and to contextualize the work of art in specific social tissues. In 2009 we developed the project Portable Contemporary Art Center in Mexico City. Portable Contemporary Art Center is a low cost, portable device for art exhibition. It is designed to brief interventions - from two to four hours - and can be moved and installed by one person. It is equipped with portable multimedia devices. Its function is both to show works of art and serve as a supporting infrastructure for cultural activities - performances, lectures, concerts… - as to mark the urban space. The P.C.A.C. creates a connection between the strategies of re-appropriation of the city of marginalized groups - racial minorities, street vendors, immigrants, homosexuals… - and artistic practices that directly impact the urban tissue. The ultimate goal of this project is to investigate, through the exhibition praxis, the relation public/museum, and provide new insights into the art system, its institutions and strategies of socialization of art. Through the P.C.A.C we intend to contextualize the artwork and activate new social situations around it. In parallel we have increased our commitment to the development of critical theory: between 2009 and 2012 Antimuseum is organizing meetings of Latin-American art experts, focusing on critical issues to our society: femicide, migration, historical memory, urban crisis, ethnic identity... In 2011 we will present in Mexico City the project Hand by Hand with General Cardenas, a series of site specific works at the monument to this president, erected in 1949 at the park España, by Spanish exiles. This project explores the notion of historical memory, and proposes a revision of the narratives of the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish second Republic, in the frame of the end of utopian-thinking. Antimuseum is managed by Tomás Ruiz-Rivas and María María Acha.
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