The Museum of Everybody Else
You know that glass cabinet in your grandmother’s living room that nobody was allowed to touch — the one full of “very important” things that were, in fact, spectacularly useless?
Cáceres is about to build one.
Only this one costs €18 million.
A gleaming new museum. A cathedral of vitrines.
Stuff from everywhere — except here. A new, odd form of inner-colonialism.
An enormous display case planted on a site that once fought for something far more dangerous than tourism: literacy.
It’s being sold as “culture.”
It’s being financed as “development.”
It’s being packaged as “progress.”
But it looks suspiciously like a piece of furniture with a municipal budget.
I’ve written a hallucinatory, slightly unhinged, very pointed piece about what happens when a city forgets its own memory and replaces it with imported souvenirs, polished glass and architectural confidence. In Spanish in the HOY here. (PDF en Castellano).
The full English translation is available below.
The first time I was nearly arrested by a piece of furniture I was five years old, standing in my grandmother’s living room, holding a cookie in one hand and a small plastic dinosaur in the other. The room smelled of cigarettes, furniture polish and unspeakable secrets. And there, against the far wall, glowing like a radioactive altar, stood the cabinet.
It was tall. It was glass. It was full of things that radiated the kind of silent authority normally reserved for minor deities. Inside it were plates that no one was allowed to eat from, cups that were too important to drink from, and tiny souvenir spoons from towns nobody could find on a map. These were not objects. These were moral instruments. They existed to teach you that adulthood was a condition of permanent anxiety and unnecessary preservation.
You were not allowed to touch the cabinet. You were barely allowed to look at it. It was valuable. It was important. It was, in retrospect, the first museum I ever visited — and it was completely incomprehensible.
I remember standing there thinking: This is what growing up means. You accumulate useless stuff, put it behind glass, and then dare your children to destroy them.
Decades later, Cáceres has decided to do exactly the same thing.
Not a metaphorical one. An actual, politically sanitized, officially blessed glass cabinet, planted purposely on the bones of El Madruelo, a place that once stood for the radical idea that poor people deserved to read.
El Madruelo is not a neutral building. It was a school of the Second Republic. It was an affront to clerical monopoly, a brick-and-mortar insult to holy mandated ignorance. It was part of the great, furious, unfinished project of dragging Spain, kicking, screaming, and very much not praying, into literacy.
So naturally, we have decided to bulldoze its memory and replace it with 14,000 plates and 2,000 exotic flutes.
Because nothing says “historical consciousness” like importing an aristocratic Catalan family’s travel souvenirs and calling it culture.
We are told this is a “first-order cultural institution,” bureaucratese for “large, shiny and untouchable.” It’s culture as anesthesia. Culture as interior decoration. Culture as something that happens to other people in other places — while Cáceres politely provides the parking.
The collections themselves are impressive, sure — in the same way that a Fabergé egg is impressive when found in a shepherd’s hut. They are global, eclectic, and exquisitely disconnected from the land they are being embalmed in. Stories from everywhere except here.
Cáceres, meanwhile, is demoted to backdrop. A charming stone stage set. A municipality with good light and low political resistance.
The city that once fought illiteracy is now fighting irrelevance with vitrines.
This is not a museum. It is a civic china cabinet. It is a shrine to the idea that objects become important when placed behind glass. It is adulthood as a municipal condition: the moment when a city decides to stop asking questions and start collecting spoons.
And soon, some local kid will be dragged inside, told not to touch, and will stare at these artifacts from faraway lives — and feel exactly what I felt in my grandmother’s living room:
That something enormous, expensive and sacred has been built…
…and none of it is for them.
