The EDP and Serralves foundations announced on Tuesday that they had ended the negotiations they had been holding for a year and a half with a view to an alliance between the two entities, which will consist of “promoting joint initiatives.” Thus, the MAAT will no longer be supervised by the Serralves Foundation, as announced. The newspaper ECO, citing “sources familiar with the negotiation”, adds that the agreement “has been reviewed… and reduced” and that “the MAAT and Central Tejo will continue to be managed by the EDP Foundation”.
In a four-paragraph statement, both foundations indicated that they agreed to “jointly develop projects in the spaces they manage, namely the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT) and Central Tagus, in Lisbon, and the Museum, the Casa, Parque de Serralves and Casa do Cinema Manoel de Oliveira, in Porto, with the aim of promoting contemporary art, architecture and science”.
“In this sense, in the coming years, the EDP Foundation will annually support a major exhibition in Serralves, starting right now by supporting the major exhibition dedicated to the work of Carla Filipe, which will open this month at the Serralves Museum.
The presentation of some of Serralves’ initiatives is also planned at the MAAT and at Central Tejo, in a collaboration that is expected to last for the next few years, with other exhibitions and programs to be announced,” the statement read.
In this way, the two foundations make public that they have put an end to “the conversations they had been holding with a view to establishing a collaboration for the management of the EDP Foundation’s Cultural Campus”.
“The collaboration between both foundations will now be developed through the promotion of joint initiatives, with the ambition of promoting cultural programming in the country and internationally,” adds the same text.
In November 2021, the two foundations announced that they had signed a memorandum of understanding establishing “a long-term partnership” for the EDP Foundation’s cultural ‘campus’ in Lisbon, now managed by Serralves.
Since then, no foundation has revealed details about the memorandum, nor the amounts involved, nor information about how the artistic program would be carried out.
A month after that announcement, the Association of Visual Artists of Portugal expressed its dissatisfaction with the “alarming prospect” that spaces of the Serralves Foundation and the EDP Foundation, such as the MAAT, in Lisbon, “share the same homogeneous program.”
Source: Observadora
