Last week, Pepe Serra, Director of the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (MNAC), kicked off a public programme previewing the museum’s transformation and reorganisation over the next four years and introduced a presentation by the cultural strategist András Szántó. Expanding from its Palau Nacional home to incorporate two renovated halls of the nearby Victòria Eugènia Pavilion, MNAC will effectively double its exhibition space. The final project will open in 2029, coinciding with the centenary of the 1929 International Exposition. While Szántó’s decidedly corporate and tech-bro positivist vision set the tone in terms of some museums’ inexorable drive toward audience evangelism and the experience economy, Serra presented the new MNAC as the culmination of the museum’s original foundational narrative, the completion of an essentially political project to create a great art museum to represent and promote the entirety of Catalan artistic creation, an institution worthy of a major European capital.

As curator and professor Anselm Franke emphasised just the day before in his densely theoretical talk at La Virreina Centre de la Imatge, museums are essentially in the business of cultivating “cosmogonic replicator codes”. These cultural origin myths and world-making stories encode values by framing “how things began” and thus how things ought to be. From this perspective, what MNAC presented as an operational and ideological necessity functions along two distinct strands. On the one hand, Szántó’s vision of institutional legitimacy is less concerned with new origin myths as with perpetual reboot and self-optimisation, urbanistic adaptability, marketing cunning, and audience entertainment. On the other, Serra frames the expansion as a form of strategic fulfilment and historical or managerial imperative – the completion of a museum born from a political mandate, and measured less in reach than in symbolic density.

The MNAC expansion is unfolding against a wider European backdrop of major museums undertaking both physical enlargement and narrative recalibration. The Centre Pompidou in Paris, for example, is currently closed for a major renovation project until around 2030, while the new KANAL–Centre Pompidou in Brussels is due to open end of November (with ten exhibitions!). Yet within Barcelona’s own cultural landscape, MNAC’s pitch-rolling and storytelling – asserted both as a territorial consolidation and a disruptive force – raises pressing questions for the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona and its own expansion, scheduled to be completed by early 2027. Renovation and construction works are already under way on the MACBA project, yet little in the way of a coherent institutional myth has emerged to render the new building’s story as a cultural project, a situation compounded by MNAC’s growing desire to collect contemporary art. With the recent announcement that MACBA’s Elvira Dyangani Ose will depart at the end of her first 5-year term, the task of articulating a sustaining narrative will fall in part to a new director – one who may see the museum’s current possibilities as something to be carried forward, or perhaps as unfulfilled promises to be reshaped into a cultural institution capable of articulating its own identity and symbolic presence.