In addition to preserving, studying and publishing the art in its care, the museum is a social hub that aspires to engage with the local community. In this spirit of public service and participation, we pursue different projects that explore the connections between works of art and the social dynamics of our time.

Projects

This project invites participants, through photography, to observe the place where they live carefully and slowly, focusing on the moments and little things that make it unique to each one of them. The resulting photographic mosaic created from this collection of intimate and individual views of Málaga is displayed in the city’s streets, encouraging passers-by to also observe their immediate surroundings more keenly.
The museum begins in the street is being organised in connection with the exhibition dedicated to Joel Meyerowitz, an artist for whom photography is a window onto the extraordinary aspects of everyday life and the city is a privileged space. It addresses the challenge of exploring the city viewed as a place that tells stories; for, as Meyerowitz states, you only need to pay attention to be able to capture them.

Social participation project 

The museum begins in the street 

During the month of April 2024, a working group made up of students and the museum’s artistic and educational team will be set up to debate and reflect on María Blanchard and art history. The meetings, to be held alternately at the university’s Faculty of Philosophy and Letters and the Museo Picasso Málaga, will address the exhibition María Blanchard. A Painter in Spite of Cubism comprehensively, delving into theoretical aspects linked to her life and work, as well as aspects of the production and management of exhibitions and educational and cultural activities.
The content produced at these meetings will serve as a starting point for developing activities to enrich the educational programme linked to the temporary exhibition on María Blanchard, which can be visited at the Museo Picasso Málaga from April 30 to September 29, 2024.

Project in collaboration with the University of Málaga 

Blanchard Today 

<div style="padding:56.25% 0 0 0;position:relative;"><iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/903348953?badge=0&amp;autopause=0&amp;player_id=0&amp;app_id=58479" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;" title="Versión definitiva MPM - APROP INDEBIDA"></iframe></div><script src="https://player.vimeo.com/api/player.js"></script>
 
 
Appropriation has played an important role throughout history. Lending, recycling or adopting images can be a means of building or creating new realities. This project examines this concept in depth, producing a collective work consisting of the successive creation, intervention and manipulation of images by different participants. It takes as a basis the bond that existed between Picasso and Málaga, exploring the mark each left on the other.
Pablo Picasso and Málaga-born Vicente Serra had the following conversation at La Californie in November 1957:
‘What a pity it is, Pablo, that apart from admiring you as an artist they can’t know about your human worth in your birthplace. Then again, it’s only logical that you don’t remember [Málaga] either after all these years.’
‘What do you mean I don’t remember it?’ he replied. ‘Come with me.’ And he took him up to the second floor and showed him a window in a sort of tower, saying: ‘See this window? I’ve had it put in facing south, which is where Málaga is, and when I look out, it’s as if I can see it and smell it.’
That is how Picasso, speaking from his house in the South of France, referred to his city of birth. Such recollections of the south, the Mediterranean and Málaga were constant throughout his long life and career.
<a href="https://www.museopicassomalaga.org/actividades/apropiacion-indebida-presentacion-del-proyecto-y-zambomba-flamenca" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Mis?appropriation</a> is divided in two phases that are linked to the Museo Picasso Málaga’s collection and the temporary exhibition <a href="https://www.museopicassomalaga.org/exposiciones/el-eco-de-picasso" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Echo of Picasso</a>.
In the first phase, a group of participants take on the challenge of looking for traces of Picasso in Málaga (and vice-versa). They walk around the city, taking photographs of references to the artist and his oeuvre in the form of souvenirs, buildings, nature, advertising and cuisine.
In the second phase, another group of participants manipulate the photographs taken by the previous groups, using collage and gel plate transfers.
The result is a mural composed of panels of images that have been ‘appropriated’ by more than 370 participants and relate Picasso to Málaga and Málaga to Picasso. This large-format collective work will be on display at the Museo Picasso Málaga during the months of December 2023 and January 2024.
Project carried out with the collaboration of Fundación ‘la Caixa’

Social participation project  

Mis?appropriation 

<div style="padding:56.25% 0 0 0;position:relative;"><iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/889852662?badge=0&amp;autopause=0&amp;quality_selector=1&amp;player_id=0&amp;app_id=58479" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;" title="0. Veinte veces Pablo"></iframe></div><script src="https://player.vimeo.com/api/player.js"></script>
<img class="image" src="https://www.museopicassomalaga.org/cms/uploads/Captura_de_pantalla_2023_11_30_a_las_12_08_19_5c61e2765e.png" alt="" />
The Museo Picasso Málaga opened on October 27, 2003, a date that could be considered a before and an after for the city of Málaga’s cultural scene. Since then, the museum has received more than nine million visitors, organised seventy-seven exhibitions and published sixty-six books, becoming one of the most important institutions in Spain and enjoying national and international recognition.
From October 23 to 27, 2023, Twenty Times Pablo paid a double tribute: to the Museo Picasso Málaga’s twenty years of existence and to the city and the visitors who have attended and supported its various shows and events throughout these first two decades.
<a href="https://www.museopicassomalaga.org/cms/uploads/PROGRAM_Aamarillo_1ed31793ac.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The scheduled activities</a> extended beyond the Palacio de Buenavista, the building that houses the museum, to important parts of the city’s historical centre: the Eduardo Ocón auditorium, Plaza de la Merced, Calle Cañón and the area around Málaga cathedral, Calle San Agustín, Plaza de la Higuera and Calle Alcazabilla. They included projects with schoolchildren, a street procession, free guided tours, open-door days, concerts and experimental music sessions, dramatised readings of texts by Picasso, plays, audiovisual installations, light painting shows, meetings with influencers and poetic actions.
In addition, during a moving institutional event that was staged as a tribute to Christine Ruiz-Picasso and was attended by various authorities, the Museum’s auditorium was christened with its new name in honour of its main promotor: Christine Ruiz-Picasso auditorium.

20th anniversary of the Museo Picasso Málaga 

Twenty Times Pablo 

Music for Picasso

The Time Capsule

Like the first day

Participatory Visits

Christine Ruiz-Picasso Auditorium

Alejandro Hurtado and Rosario la Tremendita concerts

Reading Picasso

I’M 20

The Future is Already Here is a project that invites museum visitors to take part in putting together a concept map designed to answer the following question: what do you want the museum of the future to be like?
Participants can choose from a selection of twenty concepts, including sustainable, inclusive, critical, engaged and participatory.
This diagram shows the results of the query requested by the museum in real time, showing the concepts organized by size and space according to the votes received:
<iframe src="https://mpm-tags.onrender.com/results/index.html?lang=en" width="100%" height="500" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Survey for the museum’s visitors

The Future is Already Here

The Museo Picasso Málaga has been holding the Art and Social Participation Seminars since 2011.
Throughout their solid track record, they have addressed questions that arise from the at times-complex relationships between museums and cultural institutions and today’s globalised and diverse society. These questions that do not always have answers but require a forum for thought, dialogue and reflection.
Concepts such as inclusion, integration and participation have progressively changed over the course of the various editions of the seminar. In addition, the uses and adaptations of the terms have been tailored to the needs of today’s society, not only taking into account national realities but also building bridges with other continents such as Africa and South America.
Through seminars as well as workshops, roundtables and dialogues, topics such as the role of culture as a vehicle for social participation in vulnerable communities, cultural mediation in social improvement processes, the contribution of art as a driver of social change, museum programmes and social inclusion in terms of gender, art and memory, their involvement in the local community, and new forms of digital participation in museums, among others, will be addressed.
The Art and Social Participation Seminars are one of the lines of work and research developed by the Museo Picasso Málaga and are underpinned by commitment to an understanding of art and culture as a tool for social improvement.
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Art and Social Participation Seminars

In 2015, the 192 member states of the United Nations met to sign an agreement: the Agenda 2030. This report includes 17 goals, known as the SDGs, which in turn comprise targets (169 in total) and indicators for assessing the situation. The member states undertook to achieve all 17 goals by 2030.
Museums have an important role to play in this connection by inspiring and encouraging the community and visitors to reflect on the challenges posed.
Accordingly, every month since September 2022, the Museo Picasso Málaga has been running an educational and cultural programme entitled The SDGs at the Picasso based on one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Talks, seminars and debates are held where specialists in different fields of knowledge address issues such as eradicating poverty, gender equality, environmental protection, the importance of assuring healthy lives and wellbeing for everyone, taking care of the oceans and seas, and responsible consumption.
The programme also features workshops for schoolchildren aimed at raising their awareness and encouraging critical thinking in the face of inequality.

Sustainable development goals and targets 

The SDGs at the Picasso

Elena Bárcena Martín. Head of the department of Applied Economics, University of Málaga 

Putting an end to poverty 

Alicia Marchant Rivera. Professor of Historiographic Sciences and Techniques, University of Málaga 

Achieving gender equality 

Marta Postigo Asenjo. PhD in Philosophy and senior lecturer in Moral and Political Philosophy, University of Málaga 

Pablo Fernández Berrocal. Professor of Psychology, University of Málaga 

   Ensuring healthy lives and promoting well-being 

Antonio Tovar Sánchez. Scientist of the Spanish National Research Council

Life below water

Pedro Linares. Professor of Industrial Organisation at the ICAI School of Engineering

Affordable and clean energy

Javier Polavieja. Banco Santander Professor of Sociology and Director of the Laboratory on Inequality and Discrimination, Universidad Carlos III, Madrid

Reducing inequality

Gonzalo Lacurcia. Senior Consultant at the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat)

Sustainable cities and communities

Ana María Castillo Clavero. Professor of the Faculty of Economics and Business Studies. University of Malaga

Sustainable Consumption and Production

Irene Díez:: Coordinator of the Circular Economy Area, Fundación Biodiversidad

Human Beings, a Threat to Biodiversity?  

Andrés Alcántara: Corporative Development of Centro de Cooperación del Mediterráneo, Unión Internacional para la Conservación de la Naturaleza (UICN)

Joaquín Araújo, a naturalist, lecturer, scriptwriter and television director

Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all 

Shortly after dawn on April 8, a white dove took flight from the courtyard of the Palacio de Buenavista to draw symbolic attention to the wars that are still causing the loss of human life and forced migrations around the world.
Throughout his lifetime, Pablo Picasso witnessed some of the bloodiest events in history: the First and Second World Wars, the Spanish Civil War, the Korean War and the Vietnam War. The cruel barbarism of those conflicts was captured in some of the artist’s most significant works, such as his series of drawings on the First World War; the painting Massacre in Korea, which will be included in an exhibition at the Museo Picasso Málaga in the autumn; and one of his most emblematic paintings known around the world: Guernica.
Picasso helped to make the dove a universal symbol of peace based on his conviction of art’s power to raise the world’s awareness of the injustices caused by war.

October 25, 1881 —— April 8, 1973

Pablo Ruiz Picasso

The Museo Picasso Málaga has been running the ‘Art and Social Participation&quot; programme since 2004. Aimed at all audiences, it sets out to promote effective inclusion and real accessibility to art and culture for everyone.
In ‘Engraving in Verse, each participant addresses the challenge of giving visual form to a fragment of Picasso’s verses in order to create a choral composition out of all the prints. Each print is transferred onto intaglio paper with texts by Luis de Góngora, a Golden Age author and a point of reference for Picasso, who came to illustrate twenty-one of his sonnets.
All in all, ‘Engraved in Verse’ is an amalgam of graphic art made up of words and images. Displayed on eleven panels, it shows the intaglio prints created by the participants and the panels with the verses by Picasso that inspired the compositions.
This project, as part of the ‘Art and Social Participation’ programme run by the Museo Picasso Málaga, is organised with the collaboration of Fundació ‘la Caixa’.
<img class="image" src="https://www.museopicassomalaga.org/cms/uploads/FLC_H_Cast_Negro_Pos_gris_peque_f542b345b7.jpg" alt="" />

Social participation in connection with the Dialogues with Picasso exhibition

Engraved in Verse

Women tell stories is a project with social participation produced in the context of <a href="/en/exposiciones/paula-rego-1" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Paula Rego’s exhibition</a>.
This project aims to look into childhood reminiscences, memory and longings in the same way that the Portuguese artist’s personal experiences and her fascination with storytelling and fairy tales are present in her work. She draws on classic tales, fables and oral narration, giving them shape through the use of drawing and pastel technique.
As inspiration for the creative work done in the studio, this activity invites the group to debate and reflect on the work of Paula Rego in the exhibition. The idea is to explore the artist’s fascination with storytelling and her extraordinary use of the pastel technique in large-scale works produced in the 1990s and 2000s.
In view of the good reception and encouraging results of this project, it is being extended to the end of December 2023 in connection with Pablo Picasso’s graphic oeuvre. Memory and made-up or real stories continue to be the starting point for a project that uses images as a means of generating processes for bringing participants closer to art, fostering positive emotions.

Workshop drawings

Social participation

Women tell Stories

Paula Rego's fascination for storytelling and the extraordinary use of the pastel technique in her work invite us to delve into our childhood memoirs, collective memory, desires...

Women tell stories

Women Raise the Curtain is a cultural and educational project run in connection with the Paula Rego exhibition and devised from a female viewpoint. Throughout the spring, women are entrusted with putting together a narrative that debates and reflects on the role of women in classical tales, art, literature and films. The project includes meetings, talks and seminars, such as Women Rewrite Tales, Women in Leading Film Roles, The Corners of Time and Women Talk about Paula Rego.
The project likewise analyses the artist’s oeuvre on the basis of her life experience and the historical context to which it belongs, exploring in depth her dimension as a female artist. Women are also the makers of creations through dance and the actions performed by artists or anonymous women who give artistic form to their personal experiences.
Women Raise the Curtain has the special support of the Portuguese Embassy in Madrid, as well as the Festival Ellas Crean, Colectiva. Observatorio Cultural Feminista, Apertura. Centro de Fotografía y Artes Visuales; El Corte Inglés; and ERCO.

Project 

Women rise the courtain

Nine hundred Malaga inhabitants of different ages and social roles, such as schoolchildren, university students, senior citizens, members and associates of various NGOs, as well as professional photographers, participate in the creation of a collective photographic mural. Each of these people choose a street or a place in the city which they photograph for very different personal reasons, but which, when connected to all the others, offer a unique and participatory topography of the urban skin of our capital.
This project with social participation takes as its starting point the photographic work of Brassaï, who captured the urban surroundings of the city on the Seine through the camera, forming a topography through those signs on the walls that were charged with symbolism and emotion.
This project aims to construct a collective representation of Malaga generated by the free and unconditioned photographic gaze of some of its inhabitants, together with that offered by the urban artist Dadi Dreucol, who creates a large-format mural in which he collects fragments of the traces found on the city’s walls.
Las paredes de Málaga invites us to observe, explore and reflect on an unusual and intimate way of seeing the city. The project is shown at El otro museo, a venue for meeting, reflection and artistic production in the temporary galleries at the Museo Picasso Málaga.
With the collaboration of <a href="https://www.omau-malaga.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">OMAU Málaga</a>.
As part of the exhibition <a href="/en/exposiciones/the-paris-of-brassai" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Brassaï’s Paris. Photographs of the city that Picasso loved</a>.

Social participation 

The Walls of Malaga 

¿What is "Las paredes de Málaga"?

The mural

Graffities in Málaga

Multidisciplinar artist, in the program "Toy Graffiti"

Dadi Deucrol

Doctor in History of art, in the program "Toy Graffiti"

Jaume Gómez Muñoz

In the context of the exhibition [Miquel Barceló. Metamorphosis](/en /exposiciones/miquel-barcelo-metamorfosis), the Museo Picasso Málaga presents The Clay talks project, the aim of which is to stimulate and give visibility to social participation in the artistic environment.
More than five hundred people in situations of social vulnerability take part in more than seventy workshops on the museum’s premises during the spring of 2021. This project is a continuation of the museum’s accessibility programme, where different groups take part in a number of different actions, turning the art gallery into a venue for meeting, experimentation and reflection, also with the aim of empowering the most vulnerable.
In total, more than 600 kilos of clay is used, which is kneaded, modelled and painted with slips and enamels, and then fired at temperatures of between 750º and 1050ºC.
The artist himself, Miquel Barceló, collaborates in several of the workshops and works the clay with the participants, accompanying them in learning about his ceramic production.
The result is a collective work that is shown at El otro museo (The other museum), a venue dedicated to artistic encounters and production in the temporary galleries. The Clay talks was open to the public until the close of the Miquel Barceló exhibition Metamorphosis, in September 2021.
This project is undertaken in collaboration with the <a href="https://fundacionlacaixa.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">“la Caixa” Foundation</a>.

The Clay talks

A space to meet, experiment and reflect together

MásMuseoPicasso is a research project that since 2013 has been compiling and cataloguing initiatives taken in Spain that use art as a tool to promote processes of social participation. It is a platform for use by professionals in the sector, institutions and researchers.
<a href="https://www.masmuseopicasso.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">MásMuseoPicasso</a>
The online platform enables users to do a comparative study of proposals, as well as searches by category, according to the place where the project or programme is run, the artistic techniques selected, or the target groups involved.
Currently, the platform includes – in addition to the database of projects and programmes in museums, associations and cultural institutions that use art as a method of social inclusion – a large number of interviews with national and international professionals linked to the field of art, social inclusion, sustainability, migration and gender studies.
With the collaboration of <a href="https://fundacionlacaixa.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Fundación “la Caixa”</a>.