MACMO / Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Montevideo
MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART OF MONTEVIDEO
Members: Agustina Rodríguez, Eugenia González, with collaborators participating at various stages.
Year of creation: 2014 to present
Location: The MACMO’s space is symbolically composed of the various sites where it carries out its activities, both in the city of Montevideo—its place of origin—and in any other region or country. The museum’s unfolding is therefore permeable to different territories and contexts.
Contacto: [email protected] / [email protected]
Web: http://macmo.uy
Description, Concept, Objectives
The Museum of Contemporary Art of Montevideo —MACMO— is a space for experimenting with alternative forms of institutionalism through art and for rethinking contemporary art itself. It functions as an artistic practice in its own right, combining structures and languages typical of institutions with the autonomy, flexibility, and fluidity of an independent project.
Without a fixed location, MACMO is activated in various places across Montevideo, Uruguay, and the region, adapting to diverse contexts and establishing alliances with kindred initiatives or other institutions. Its goal is to foster processes of research, production, and encounter that interweave the curatorial, educational, historical, artistic, and political, with a focus on transforming how we inhabit, perceive, and narrate the present.
MACMO is built as a museum-in-becoming: a symbolic and relational space in constant transformation, activating contemporary art as a tool for critical reflection, collective imagination, and situated action. It chooses to inhabit the form of the institution as a territory, exploring open, subjective, unstable, and relational ways of being a museum.
Activities
Exhibitions and curatorial programs
Since its inception, MACMO has developed exhibitions, interventions, installations, and talks in Montevideo and other cities, conceived as opportunities for experimentation, situated reflection, and collaborative practices through non-conventional formats.
Highlights include: Sin resultados and Irreverencias, critical and poetic explorations of art and artificial intelligence; Témpano. El problema de lo institucional, which addresses the tensions and potentials of institutional critique; Colección Bahía de Montevideo, which activates urban memory as a living and territorial archive; Desplazamiento y simultaneidad and Largo presto, focused on the circulation of image, sound, and expanding temporalities; El carácter destructivo, a rereading of the institutional archive through its fissures and future possibilities; Consideraciones sobre lo público, investigating public rights in education and normative acts through the symposium format; Do it, activating works through instructions, appropriations, and linguistic displacements; and Discursos encontrados, which rearticulates so-called “historic” discursive acts by bringing them into the present.
Situated Collaboration
MACMO views collaboration as a fundamental practice, fostering relationships with projects, collectives, and institutions to amplify reach and construct shared knowledge. Among the collaborative projects developed are: Colección Bahía de Montevideo (with Territorio Específico); Coleccionables de Emergencia (with its namesake in Argentina); Biblioteca Paradigma (with Parque Paradigma, Argentina); El Carácter Destructivo (with Los Nuevos Sensibles, Chile); Instructivo de destrucción (with Movimiento GRSB, Ecuador); among others.
Research and Publications
Research is a central and transversal axis for MACMO, understood not as a separate area but as an expanded practice that articulates curatorial, artistic, educational, and institutional dimensions. The museum proposes heterogeneous forms of knowledge production grounded in experience, creation, collaboration, and the archive.
Its lines of work include the critical appropriation of the concept of research through art, the indistinction between theory and practice, the exploration of non-linear communication formats, and a commitment to associative knowledge construction.
The Revista Museo is a key tool for documenting and disseminating these processes. With ten issues published, it functions as an experimental and polyphonic publication that combines texts, visuals, working documents, and records of the museum’s actions. Each issue serves as a logbook that condenses MACMO’s evolution, expands its research lines, and generates mobile, activatable archives.
Difficulties
Sustaining a project like MACMO for over eleven years has required us to face a series of challenges inherent to its flexible and self-managed nature. One of the main lessons learned was that not all initiatives require the same rhythm or scale. Ensuring continuity has also meant allowing pauses, embracing low-intensity periods, and aligning processes with the personal rhythms of the team.
Thinking about institutionality from a non-productivist logic led us to abandon the original goal of three exhibitions per year, adopting instead a more organic and uneven format, with one medium-scale annual activity and other smaller actions. Our small team also limits our operational capacity, making prioritization essential.
The lack of resources—or their limited nature—is a constant that hinders long-term planning. We depend on external, usually public and restricted, funding. This forces us to plan based on immediacy, fragmentation, and arising opportunities, rather than from a predetermined annual program.
Future Challenges
MACMO continues moving forward. Future challenges include: sustaining continuity without losing flexibility; working on long-term projects that allow for deeper processes; and expanding the team to delegate tasks and support the project’s growth.
Operating in an expanded territory—both geographically and symbolically—means accessing new resources. A key challenge is to improve material and structural conditions without compromising the autonomy that defines MACMO.
