The Botín Center targets young people

Works by great masters such as Francis Bacon , Juan Gris, José Gutiérrez Solana, Henri Matisse, and Joaquín Sorolla, along with a temporary exhibition dedicated to Maruja Mallo, coexist with the artistic expressions of twenty-somethings at the Centro Botín in Santander, where the walls vibrate as if the Cantabrian Sea were swaying behind them. The museum, which has just expanded its permanent collection with a new donation from the legacy of the late banker and collector Jaime Botín , is approaching summer by combining these pieces with creations forged in workshops and activities aimed at young people.

The center's executive director, Fátima Sánchez, sums it up with a question: "I'm a little bit confused , but... how do we change society?" This commitment is evident in the activities planned for this summer, with workshops like ON Creación, with twenty-somethings experimenting with their artistic abilities.

Sánchez emphasizes "art as a tool" in a cultural institution that seeks to become an "international benchmark" with Cantabria as its base. A pillar of this strategy is trying to reach the younger demographic, for which they recruited an art historian who is younger than the average employee at the center to reach out to this potential audience in their usual leisure spaces, including drinking parties and youth celebrations, and to inform them about the cultural offerings and scholarships available to them. As Bárbara Rodríguez, director of exhibitions and collections and member of the art advisory committee of the Botín Foundation, points out, Matisse, Sorolla, Miró, and Miralles were not always legends: "These people were also misunderstood."

Another fruit of this strategy is the Enredos program, which this summer will feature an exhibition featuring Portuguese artist Nuno da Luz, a former student of these cultural development grants. Enredos hybridizes the work of selected artists with works by artists still in development and other previous recipients of the center's grants, such as June Crespo, Eva Fàbregas, and Asier Mendizabal. Da Luz offers a multisensory experience, with hearing as the central agent in detecting the room's vibrations, where the touch of the walls also attempts to reflect the water temperature, salinity index, wind speed, and wave height.

Fátima Sánchez insists that the Botín Museum strives to prove that its cultural function is making a mark on the people of Cantabria. The mechanism for verifying its reach includes measurement models coordinated with Yale University in the United States, analysis of the projects' average impact, and data collected by the National Institute of Statistics. "We invest in social development; artistic spaces must have objectives," she maintains. It's about launching a lure: there will be visitors interested in youthful creations who end up admiring Rothko , and, vice versa, those who visit the Maruja Mallo exhibition will be surprised by the audacity of the scholarship recipients.

In July, three selected projects from the ON Creation workshop were exhibited: Changing Perspectives, which addresses the impact of stress on people between 10 and 65 years old through photographs or objects where this tension is evident; Evocation, an olfactory approach to art history, combining iconic paintings or artistic pieces with music from Paco de Lucía to the Rolling Stones, all sensorially seasoned with four perfumes; and The Jacket, which reflects how the textile industry generates an enormous amount of waste, water consumption, and pollution to produce garments that often end up confined to closets.