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CENDEAC has the main and ambitious aim to gather the biggest bibliographic collection on contemporary art in the Mediterranean area, providing a structure, within the regional scene, that allows CENDEAC to become the most outstanding research centre on that discipline across the nation.
The Reference and Advanced Studies on Contemporary Art Centre (CENDEAC) is a joint venture of Murcia Regional Government and Cajamurcia Foundation. The institution aims to cover one of the most pressing gaps in our country, the absence of independent centres, not linked to museums and exhibition policies, devoted to research and reference on contemporary art.
CENDEAC has the main and ambitious aim to gather the biggest bibliographic collection on contemporary art in the Mediterranean area, providing a structure, within the regional scene, that allows CENDEAC to become the most outstanding research centre on that discipline across the nation.
However, CENDEAC does not restrict its aims to mere and passive contribution of information, it pretends to have an active role that encourages research by starting an editorial line to publish monographs and a journal (Visual Studies ) and also programmes, as principal activities, different seminars, symposiums, conferences, etc. It is common practice, within contemporary cultural policies, to reduce art expressions to strategies that overrate their media and exhibition nature. This tendency has resulted, among other consequences that must not be forgotten, in a cultural management only interested in the creation of museums, art centres or exhibition rooms that have the only purpose of acting like "cathedrals of the eye", like vicars of a need that destroys the present cultural scene, the need to allow the contemplation, that is to make the public worship any piece or experience generated now and in the future by Art History. It is therefore necessary to provide alternatives that dissociate cultural management from common places, alternatives that do not contribute to prolong an inflationary situation that makes very difficult - not to say impossible - the creation of projects that not only widen the range of the scene, but also end up by establishing a reference point, that is, a model for the production and enrichment of culture.
One of these necessary "alternatives to inflation" that would largely contribute to transform inertia into initiative is to think of strategies that make up for the shortage of materials and infrastructure experienced by researchers, teachers, critics and, in general, professionals devoted to contemporary art. There is no use in multiplying the number of art objects "to watch" if, at the same time, their study is not encouraged and, therefore, the production of researchers that can teach how to watch.
To look without reflection is a useless tool lacking reactivating capacity. Because, in the end, what gives meaning and raison d'étrè to cultural spaces is their ability to generate ideas and schools of thought, or, in other words, to boost the productivity and social dimension of the art object.
The creation of CENDEAC has the following aims: