THE ETHNO. Corona, 36
For fifteen years the permanent exhibition of the Valencian Museum of Ethnology remained unchanged on the upper floors of La Beneficència, an eternity considering that it is a show about popular culture, by nature, dynamic and adaptive, especially at this moment in history so liquid and globalized where technology pushes gigantic changes without rest. We are talking about Valencian culture in the broadest sense, the one that talks about the material goods that we have created as a people and that make us unique. The reform carried out has rejuvenated the objects on display - they have restored more than 700 pieces in two years—, but it has also modernized the museographic discourse. It is easy to idealize the uses and customs of each town, in fact, it is a tool that nationalisms tend to use (central and peripheral) to justify a forced singularity that has more myth than reality. Those in charge of the museum say that, precisely, have escaped that romanticism to bring us a vision of culture that adapts to the new social realities, useful, innovative and with critical capacity. The first section dedicated to the city is the most innovative at the exhibition level and touches on topics such as changes in consumption and transport habits (from the car to 600, to public transport, to ValenBici…), voracious gentrification in trendy neighborhoods and long-standing frictions between the local and the global. Materialitzades, for example, in the disappearance of the Carbonell package in a world colonized by Amazon, in a urinal from Alcora de 1930 decorated with a Design drawing or in a Northern Station, tan singular, which is opposite the AVE Joaquín Sorolla station, an aseptic non-place that could belong to any other country in the world. The section dedicated to the vegetable garden and the marsh collects the Valencian clichés and then undoes them: the idyllic hut is not a comfortable space, the work of the peasants is hard and many times thankless and the sacrosanct paella can be (and it is) constantly defiled with chorizo. Let's assume it! Finally, Mountain and dryland refers to inland regions, more invisible in this land of beaches and tourism of ours, but sustaining industrial activities as traditional as toys or nougat. The culture is alive and maybe in a few years we will look at the telephone booth with the same strangeness as today we admire one of the first elevators that worked in the city, an absolutely wonderful wooden artifact. You want to know what it is to be Valencian? come in, enter… AU
