Reflecting on Valencia
Being very impressed by l’Etno Museum’s displays and curation.
Valencia is a wonderful city, just the right size for a few days away. Its winding streets are filled with historic sights, cultural offerings, independent shops, street art, delicious food, and sunshine. It’s also close to the beach, wetlands, and hilltop castles. Something for everyone and lots for this museum and history lover. The images below give a flavour of the visual treat that the city offers as a whole.
The museums themselves presented a bit of a mixed experience. Some, I was sad to find, felt rather unloved. Both the Museu de Belles Arts and the Museo Nacional de Cerámica came highly recommended by the guidebook and were in noteworthy buildings, but both had large parts closed when we visited and felt badly in need of a refresh. The Museum of Fine Arts had an impressive collection of Valencian Gothic and Renaissance Art, boasts a self-portrait by Velasquez and a beautiful palm-filled courtyard. Yet the rooms felt tired, visitors were scarce, and I was especially sad to find the entire Sorolla floor closed.
The Ceramics Museum is in the spell-binding Palacio del Marqués de Dos Aguas, a baroque masterpiece in its own right, with a richly decorated exterior and principal floor, complete with suites of ceramic furniture, wall paintings and chandeliers. Again, alas the floor with the majority of the collection was closed, and some of the rooms had parts barriered off in ways that did not enhance the viewing experience.
The church visits were more consistently impressive. San Nicolás, known as the ‘Sistine chapel of Valencia’ has a recently restored and spectacular painted ceiling showing the stories of Saints Nicholas and Peter. A nice simple leaflet guide helped us to identify and understand the iconography, and it was a treat to watch a conservator in action working on two of the altarpieces.
Valencia Cathedral is famous for being home to the holy grail, but also boasts a nice small museum, again recently refurbished, with some of the treasures of the collections. I am usually rather anti-audio guides, but this one was informative and concise, a good way to experience the space. It also raised interesting considerations around what constitutes a ‘gothic’ interior that has significant baroque and neoclassical interventions.
Designed and built in a very different century, but similarly testament to Valencian skill is the City of Arts and Sciences. This architectural complex sits at the end of the Jardins des Turia, a park created out of the city’s encircling dry riverbed (created by redirecting the river after devastating floods in 1957). Designed by Santiago Calatrava and Félix Candela the complex feels like stepping into the future and comprises a series of buildings catering to different arts and sciences, around a series of water features.
L'Oceanogràfic was a pricey but fun visit to an open-air oceanographic park, including a dolphin display and a rather lovely aviary. The Science Museum is in one of the more spectacular buildings, but I was sad to find rather disappointing. A science centre rather than museum, without permanent collections, the building constricts the displays to temporary structures that feel like they’re camping on the long floors. It was hit and miss whether displays had multi-lingual text, a number of the interactives weren’t working (which were the main way of engaging with much of the material) and where there were interesting objects they were often facsimiles. What could have been a fascinating display about instruments and the science of sound, had nothing to tell me what was interesting about the specific instruments selected to demonstrate different sound types, or where they were from.
The standout experience was undoubtedly L’Etno - the ethnographic museum that forms part of the collections of the University of Valencia. Readers of this blog will know that I am a big fan of an ethnographic museum as a way to experience a new city, so was eager to visit this one and it far exceeded my expectations. L’Etno is free to visit and sits alongside the (much more dry and traditional) Pre-history Museum. The directed visit (coming after the pre-history) brings you into the final gallery of L’Etno, working backwards to exit through the first. This is certainly confusing and does the museum a disservice, but the success of the displays notwithstanding this challenge is a testament to their brilliance.
The museum takes three themes to discuss the idea that ‘It is not easy being Valencian’, looking at ‘The City: Local and Global’, ‘The Irrigated Farmland and the Marshland: The Imaginaries’ and ‘Dryland and Mountain: The Invisibilities’. This mixes contemporary and historic collections to focus on how Valencian life has changed in the last century. It highlights how the rural, agricultural life that is widely associated with Valencia (rice growing being the origin of the local dish: paella) differs significantly both from the popular imag(in)ery and from the urban life that has grown alongside it. Likewise, this again complements and is at odds with life in the drier mountains that actually make up much of Valencia’s terrain. The displays are imaginatively designed, mixing objects, AV, interactives, and carefully written text, to make you think about group, and individual, challenges and opportunities in Valencia through objects.
Ultimately, L’Etno aims to answer the fundamental question posed in its opening text ‘What is ethnology and what is it for?’. Its displays do this far better than, I think, any other comparable museum I have seen. I only wish I lived nearer to visit and appreciate this museum and city more often. For now a selection of photos will have to suffice.
