MUSEUMS CAUGHT IN THE CROSSFIRE:

WHEN CONFLICT, VIOLENCE OR CIVIL UNREST ARE AT YOUR DOOR

Sergio Garza Orellana1

On 1979, the American rock band The talking heads first released the single Life
during wartime, in which stated that, at least for the protagonist of the fictional and
violence-ridden world created in the song, this ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco / this ain’t
no fooling around / no time for dancing, or lovey dovey / I ain’t got time for that now.

All of those persons and institutions that have been involved in situations of violence,
conflict or civil unrest, know perfectly that the song speaks a familiar truth by saying that
this ain’t no fooling around: there comes a time when we, as museum workers, have to
make difficult choices to control and shape the situation that we are immersed into. How
should we, as cultural institutions, react to conflict in our communities? Which is our role
towards our audiences?

We would like to review a case scenario that we lived in our museum, in hope that the
achievements and mistakes we made in our way, could shine some light on the difficult role
museums have when faced with a difficult situation.

In 2007, a relatively peaceful region was struck, as were hundreds in Mexico, by the
war against drugs: Torreón, Coahuila, a strategically situated location in northern Mexico
for drug trafficking from our country to the USA. The situation started slowly with some
isolated shootings in some of the “bad” neighborhoods of the region, but it escalated
quickly to a point where anyone could be on the crossfire of two rival cartels anywhere on
the city and at anytime during day or night.

1
This paper is part of a debate panel presented along Andrea Kajer, Deputy Director of the Minnesota
Historical Society and Ole Winther, Head of the Division of Museums of the Danish Agency for Culture, and
Rosario Ramos, executive director of the Arocena Museum in Torreón, Coahuila. . Sergio Garza Orellana
(Mexico City, 1986) is a curatorial assistant at the Museo Arocena, Torreon, in northern Mexico. He has been
in charge of the Arocena Institute since 2009, as well as various IT, media and education projects at the
museum. He holds a Bachelor's degree in audiovisual communication by Iberoamericana University and a
Master's degree in Art History, Museums and Historical Heritage Management, the Pablo de Olavide
University, Seville, Spain.
 By 2010, Torreón was one of the most violent cities in Mexico, and in the world.
According to the Citizen Council for Public Security, Torreon escalated to the third most
dangerous city in Mexico in 2010, and for one week in 2011, our city was the most
dangerous city in all the world, including San Pedro Sula in Honduras, which had the
terrible reputation of the world’s most violent city for quite some time. In 2012, Torreon
reported 1,087 homicides, with a rate of 94.72 persons killed for every 100,000 inhabitants
of the region.

This is the general landscape that the Arocena Museum struggled with in its first
years, having opened in 2006: the rate of murder, robbing, and general criminal activity
continually rose while our museum opened its first temporary exhibitions and organized our
first educative programs. The “war on drugs” that the past federal administration started
took a high toll in Torreón, awakening feelings of terror and despair within the community.
As the years went by, more and more people were faced constantly with death, and thus,
began to seek answers to some of the most basic philosophical questions that, slowly,
acquired different shades and meanings in the context of this situation. Faced with death,
the meaning of life and our individual purposes took several different twists within our
population. People that before this situation had never had an interest in history, philosophy
or art were suddenly starting to look for answers in classical humanities, in museums, in
libraries, seeking what these institutions had to offer to our everyday lives.

But the thing is that museums in conflictive areas are not exempt or outside this
violent panorama. The Arocena Museum was located in an especially violent zone, the
historical center of our city. As the violence grew, the museum was faced with the constant
reduction of the people who visited it, as fear outgrew our audiences’ need to seek answers
in our institution. This scenario also took a high toll on other establishments, as hundreds
had to close their doors, due to the lack of nightlife and social interaction beside our home
or work spaces.

In 2012 the violence reached a terrible high peak, and our visitors rate fell 22% in
comparison with the previous years. In one especially dark night, two bullets found their
way inside the museum, coming from a shooting between the federal police and a drug
cartel, that sadly took place right outside our institution. Fortunately, the museum was
closed at the moment, and no damage was taken, except, of course, for the repair of the
structure of the building, and the increase of fear within our staff and audiences. Two other
shootings that took place outside the museum, forced us to serve as a temporary shelter for
all the people that, scared, searched for a refuge within our walls.

With shootings outside the museum, our halls serving as a shelter and a very delicate
situation between state and local politics, controlled media and audiences reluctant to visit
us due to fear, we had to do something as a museum, but, what? Confronted with this
question, we had to revisit our idea of what our museum was, our idea of what we wanted
our museum to be, and what could we do within our range of action.

1. THE OBVIOUS: PREPARE YOURSELF

As recent events throughout the world can testify (Denmark, Tunisia, Colombia,
France) no institution is exempt of a violent or conflictive situation. Shootings related
to drug trafficking, civil uprisings, terrorism related activities and many other type of
situations can be very hard to predict, and can occur in third world countries, as well
as more developed ones. The bottom line here (a pretty obvious one) is ‘be
prepared’. Every museum and institution should have a current and carefully thought
emergency plan. A lot of museums and galleries have already thought of this, and
have excellent strategies to deal with unpredictable situations as bomb threats,
shootings, or terrorism related attacks, but everyone should question themselves if
they are really prepared for possible conflictive situations. At the Arocena Museum,
we had a contingency plan that covered the most common emergency situations as
fire, earthquake or flood, but this plan failed to cover more intricate and difficult
questions to answer: what should we do if a person showed up with an AK-47
(unfortunately not uncommon in Mexico) and demanded to enter our halls? How
would we evacuate? Should our unarmed staff call the police and risk a shoot out in
the midst of our museum, crowded with children? Our security staff worked hard in
resolving this issues for our particular situation, and thought of many different
scenarios and answers for these difficult questions. In a large museum,
communication between different areas is not always easy, and the issue was resolved
with a panel that displayed different codes for different type of situations throughout
the museum. This communication system, along with several hours of training every
member of our staff, proved to be a great answer for most of this issues. Every
museum has different perspectives on this difficult scenarios, and there are many
ways to resolve them according to each particular case. But the thing that cannot pass
inadvertently is to ask these questions beforehand, and have different strategies ready
at hand, as well as communicating them to the right persons, specially those who
work with publics inside the museum.

As I said, this first step should be an obvious one, and many of our institutions may
already have thought of different strategies. Sadly, not everyone has, so this could be
a crucial issue that may help in difficult situations, and even save lives in an
unfortunate event.

2. UNDERSTANDING THE VIOLENCE: OUR MAIN OBJECTIVE

As we prepared for the uncommon, we started to think also of our role as a museum
in our particular situation. Should we take a stand and point fingers in a so-much-
larger-than-us situation? Should we close up for a moment and wait for better times
to come and show our collections? Should we do nothing and continue to work as
usual? With many different perspectives, thoughts and interests between the many
players that conform a museum (board members, directors, security staff,
conservators, audiences) we arrived at one conclusion: our main objective as a
museum is to help our audiences to understand the violent world we live in, as well
as to serve as a beacon of hope for better days. The Arocena Museum, as an art
related institution, should take action on the issue and to spread the message with art.
With this intention on hand, we prepared two exhibitions to help our audiences to
compare and comprehend situations that most of the time were beyond
comprehension.
The first exhibition opened in 2012 and was titled “Collateral Damage. Francisco de
Goya / Demián Flores”, and was a reinterpretation of Goya’s engravings of 1810 –
1820 The disasters of war. In them, Goya showed gory images of the 1808 uprisings
in Spain and the Peninsular War between Spain and Napoleon’s French empire.
Violent and unjust conflicts, hanged men, executions and many dead bodies are the
protagonists of Goya’s prints on the horrors of war. In the Arocena exhibition, these
images were confronted with some engravings by a Mexican artist, Demián Flores,
who confronted the original images with a “tropicalized” and intervened version of
them. The Spanish scenarios quickly became Mexican landscapes in which the narco
culture had a strong presence as well as many unjust situations we live in Mexico
every day. Thus, the exhibition helped us in many ways, as it showed that violence is
present in many places and in different times, we are not alone in this, and, that we,
as a community, could overcome the difficult situation in which we were.

The second exhibition was a joint venture between the museum and the our State
government, as it was a big effort that paid well: to bring to our halls the not-so-
beautiful images that the Colombian painter, Fernando Botero, had created on the
topic of the drug trafficking related violence in which Colombian society lived in for
the most part of the 80’s and 90’s decades. Fernando Botero’s Testmionies on
Brutality served a very important purpose on our audiences: to re – sensibilize
ourselves. As the violence progressed for a significant time lapse in our city, and in
any violent place on earth with a similar situation, an interesting and horrible effect
occurs: we get used to it. The astonishment of hearing shootings in our streets, and
the supreme horror of getting glimpses of dead bodies, with a significant amount of
time, become usual situations in the everyday war we lived in Mexico. As time passes
by, you may think that life was always this way and that there will be no better times
as the situation may continue eternally. Art, as in the Fernando Botero’s case, snaps
you right out of this feeling. You get to see violence again as the horrible situation
that does not belong to humanity, and that we should do everything in our power to
get rid of it.
 The third action we took was a more academic one: we organized a panel on violence
and art, inviting some very interesting people to talk with us on the topic. From Goya
to memorial museums, from violence in movies to popular devotion paintings of the
18th century, art has been a powerful way make us think about our violent world and
ways to change it. Five lectures were taught in the Arocena Museum for everyone
who wanted to understand a little bit more about our violent behavior as humans. We
finished the symposium with some local examples of art as a tactic in violent
contexts: urban art as a form of expression, civil artistic interventions as a form of
making yourself heard by authorities and retaking our streets by meaningful and
pacific ways as a sign that we, as citizens, would not cede our city to violence. Many
people came to the panel and wanted to take with them the written transcription of the
lectures, as art is a powerful instigator of doubts, perspectives and possible solutions.
We ended up posting the transcripts in our website and handed some copies of the
lectures for people without internet access.

On the song by the Talking Heads, the singer presents a difficult panorama for those
students whose life was disrupted by conflict and violence: Why stay in college? Why go to
night school? / Gonna be different this time / Can’t write a letter, can’t send a postcard / I
can’t write nothing at all (…) / Burned all my notebooks, what good are notebooks? / They
won’t help me survive.

The Arocena Museum served as a shelter in a particular situation, but, as a museum,

that is not our goal, as neither should be. Our objective is not to point fingers and blame
whomever we think deserves to be blamed. The real duty our museums have is to help our
audiences understand the violence, its provenance and its possible future, by analyzing and
comparing our situation with others around the world. Students that, as in the song by the
Talking Heads, burn their notebooks, because what good are notebooks? are a common
kind of people within conflictive zones. Our objective, our great, difficult and elusive
objective, is to help our audiences, as the student in the song, to understand that art, will
help us survive. Art will help us recover meaning and will inspire us to take action. Art is
fundamental in a broken society, as it is, in many cases, our memory and our identity. If we,
as a museum, choose to close down, we will be closing down doors to hope and peace, and
thus, contributing to violence to take upon the inner part of us: our sense and meaning.