The Polling Station Section from Davis Museum Barcelona

What/who inspired the work?
In 2010, the Generalitat de Catalunya recognized the Davis Museum as a cultural entity and since then, one of the annually required protocols by the Servei de Museus i Protecció de Béns Mobles (Museum Service and Protection of Personal Assets) and the OPPCC, Observatori dels Públics del Patrimoni Cultural de Catalunya (Public Observatory of Cultural Heritage of Catalonia), project developed by the ICRPC, Institut Català de Recerca en Patrimoni Cultural (Catalan Institute for Research in Cultural Heritage) is the ecounting of the number of visitors to exhibitions held at the Davis Museum.

The first inspiration for The Polling Station Section was a book titled Fluxus. A collective portrait of George Maciunas, 1931-1978, in which it described the nonconformist ideas of this artistic movement. In many of Fluxus events, the public had no passive role but was invited to participate in the action with the artists, becoming co-authors of the presentation. The second inspiration was Les Aveugles, (1986) by the French artist Sophie Calle. The work consists of a series of photographs of blind people accompanied by the answers they gave to one same question: "What is beauty?".

What do you hope your viewers will feel/think?
The museums and heritage facilities of the 21st century have placed visitors at the center for your strategy so that the public has developed one key role in achieving your goals.

This is one of the reasons why museums have focused their efforts on satisfying the interests and needs of the people who visit them so that the traditional visit to the museum has become a global experience, generated in from the offer: the exhibitions, the activities and personal attention.

The ultimate goal of museums is to make this experience the best satisfactory as possible. Therefore, the satisfaction of the visitors has become one of the components of his experience in the museum.

Some studies carried out in recent years have highlighted the existing relationship between satisfaction and other factors, such as the repetition of the visit and the recommendation of experience in social media, as indicators of loyalty and involvement of visitors. The interest of those responsible for the museums to achieve maximum involvement or engagement of its visitors have raised the need to evaluate the satisfaction, the measurement of which has to do with tangible aspects but also intangible, qualitative aspects.

The combination of the ideas described above was the trigger for the creation of The Polling Station Section and its characteristics are:

1. is a multiple referendum in which the main actors of an art exhibition are at stake. The artist votes to the museum with their works. The visitor votes in the exhibited artwork choosing:
• Like | Thumbs Up
• Love | Beating Heart
• Haha | Laughing Face
• Wow | Surprised Face
• Sad | Crying Face
• Angry | Red | Angry | Pouting Face
2. is a physical space for the meeting, the visualization of the works, the debate and the documentation of the visitors/voter's opinion.
3. is an online collection of artistic photographs, in which the visitor no longer remains at the margin of the work of art, but it is literally in the inside of it.
4. is an online counting visitors book. Through this, the Davis Museum can gather the necessary data and send them to the Department of Culture of Catalonia, who will produce statistics.
5. is an online guestbook that allows followers and artists to instantly know who, how, when, and what visitors are thinking about their exhibited works of art.

Why did you choose the medium, the matter, the style?

One of the features of the Davis Museum is its existence as an expanded digital entity, thanks to the use of social networks. I chose Instagram because it is the most important photos platform: free, easy and effective.

Davis Lisboa
Barcelona, February 2017.

Instagram