Exhibition Entanglements: The Department of Architecture at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá, 1983-1995

Architecture exhibitions and museological organizations have been crucial in producing, understanding, and disseminating modern architecture in the twentieth century. The scholarship on the history of architecture exhibitions and museological organizations has proliferated in the last two decades. However, these studies often concentrate on significant exhibitions and leading organizations, highlighting successful and celebrated cases in cities such as Venice, Rotterdam, Paris, London, Montréal, and New York. Similarly, these studies tend to focus on what is visible in the gallery room, for example, curatorial decisions, exhibition designs, and objects on display. This dissertation aims to contribute to the literature by looking elsewhere, analyzing the architecture exhibitions of an overlooked museological platform, and examining the concealed relations that made them possible.

The Department of Architecture at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá was used as a case study. Established in 1983, the Department presented twenty architecture exhibitions in eleven years. Despite its great trajectory, the Department of Architecture ceased activities in 1995 and later fell into oblivion. Considering architecture exhibitions as relational entities, this thesis attempts to elucidate how the multiple and complex relations underlying exhibitions affected the dissemination of architectural culture in Colombia. The qualitative data collected and analyzed indicate that the exhibition entanglements of the Department of Architecture consolidated architecture as a matter of public interest, promoted knowledge of other architectural cultures, stimulated research on Colombian architecture, and fostered the preservation of architectural memory.

With the disappearance of the Department, not only was a platform for discussing, devising, and discovering architecture lost. Cooperation routes, institutional alliances, social dynamics, and substantial memories also vanished. This thesis reconstructs an architectural legacy to review, rewrite, and reimagine the history of architecture in Colombia. By recovering a forgotten minor history, this research engages with the past in order to make a statement about a future for architecture exhibitions, encouraging museums, art galleries, and cultural institutions in Colombia to make architecture a matter of concern through their exhibitions, public programs, publications, collections, and overall visions.