The Hermitage of Barcelona will open in 2019 and will exhibit masterpieces
Hermitage Barcelona. Virtual Image
Four years after the president of the Generalitat, Artur Mas, announced as part of a pre-election trip to Moscow to Barcelona would have a permanent seat of the Hermitage Museum in Sant Petersburg, the promoters of the project, the company Barcelona Culture Development, which manages the designer Ujo Pallares, made yesterday its first public presentation of the project. They did it in the Casa Llotja de Mar, before a broad representation of business, cultural and political world Barcelona to announce that, discarded other venues, such as the building of the Customs, they have finally decided to build a building new plant and 15,000 square meters an area of the Port of Barcelona, near the Hotel W. The laying of the foundation stone is scheduled for later this year and its inauguration will be in 2019.
Ujo Pallares, who was accompanied by Jorge Wagensberg, director and head of the museum conception of future equipment, was presented as an “entrepreneur, a Barcelona that admires and loves this city,” he found in his Russian partner Valery Yaroslavskiy complicity and energy to make a success of a project that seemed impossible. “But nothing is impossible but things that have never been done,” Pallares said. The promoter of the project, which since the time it was learned has aroused great suspicion in the cultural sector, said that the Barcelona subsede the Hermitage is an initiative 100% private, which will cost 38 million euros and, for funding, is looking for a local partner after the departure of the Andorran sicav of MoraBanc.
Barcelona Culture Development has asked the Port Authority of Barcelona, where land, a concession for a period of fifty years by the same who signed the agreement with the Hermitage of Sant Petersburg ublican. The Port frowns construction of the new equipment in the Marina Sailing, where a marina for small boats will be built, but to give its approval requires that previously the City requalify the land for cultural uses (they are currently planned for commercial use ).
Jorge Wagensberg stressed that the museum will not be a franchise of the Hermitage, although it will draw on a fund of more than three million pieces, but a museum that does not yet exist in the world that combines art and science, and in which parts Russian museum (paintings, furniture, parts, objects, tools, scientific objects …) will serve to illustrate a story about the human condition. However, he added, which he will have a Hermitage room where permanently one or two masterpieces of the Russian Museum will be exhibited, for “the work of the month”.
The event was not attended neither the culture councilor Jaume Collboni nor the Minister Santi Vila. Instead, Commissioner of Culture of the City Berta Sureda, pointed at the end of the presentation that the City Council “We welcome any new cultural initiative, but at the moment we are listening and, once all aspects of the project known, we must make a deep in everything that involves “analysis. For its part, the director of Patrimoni of the Generalitat Jusep Boya said it “is a project that has a cultural vocation, very clearly, and also a commercial dimension. I think that even uses the name museum is in the tradition of the great private schools, of which there are other examples in the city. That said, I welcome the approach of Jorge Wagensberg, that original way to approach one of the most important collections in the world. We must wait to see how this materializes. What we have heard is a first approximation, but input the Govern de la Generalitat sees these INITIATIVES, like others who have gone out, sympathetically. Now, our intention is to place ourselves in the support and strengthening of public institutions. ”
Both Ujo Palllarés as Wagensberg wanted to make clear that this was not a project designed for tourists and cruise passengers, “although not close the door to anyone” and the latter fought against the idea of an elitist space aphorism: “Stop the elite it can be done in two ways: by killing all those inside or enter inviting everyone out. ”
EXECUTIVE CHAUFFEUR BARCELONA 