It is in the Netherlands that we launch this Manifesto, these ideas of open and transformative surfaces. This Manifesto through which today we propose and set up a museum as woven in and within the social fabric. It is rooted with the cables under the soil. It entangles with the veins in our bodies, with the waves moving through the air. 21st-century museums have turned their walls inside out. Museums work as an open and dialectic platform for making society from within society. Museums are no longer archives on an ivory tower with valuable “objects” we have to maintain intact. They lost their absolutist approach and dispersed all around us, they are the potential of and ever-going transformation that comes from within.
Museums were for too long kept distant from our bodies. For too long, they were safe-houses. We wanted to be moved by them and we succeeded. We were not against auratic objects, we were against top-down impact. The walls of a museum are no longer physical limits, but the practices of archiving art now shape movement in space. Museums are ecologies of connecting flows, of moving energies. Their objects are toxic. They exist among and inside of us. Where are the limits of a museum?
Art cannot make a difference separated from everything else. Art is not only to be looked, to be interpreted. They are trans-corporal by nature, they are experiences that disperse into the spaces in between. Art moves us sensuously and emotionally. It touched us when we would walk into the museum and when the museum walked into us. It folds and enfolds us, existing as a potential in our bodies.