The feeling here is that we are not facing the inauguration of just another museum, but that the opening of Faro Santander, the former headquarters of Banco de Santander now inhabited by Titian, Velázquez, Rubens, Tàpies, Cristina Iglesias, Frida Kahlo, or Leonora Carrington, is not only the culmination of one of the most ambitious projects of recent years, but the starting point of a transformation that will turn the Cantabrian capital into one of the most vibrant and unique cultural hubs in Spain. “We are part of what is about to arrive, we open the door to everything that comes after,” says its director, Daniel Vega, who on Monday, after the inaugural event, was responsible for guiding King Felipe VI through the different spaces of the building rehabilitated by architect and Pritzker Prize winner David Chipperfield: 10,000 square meters of cultural center with views of the bay and the Centro Botín by Renzo Piano, which since 2017 has marked the new direction of a city betting its future on art.
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While Centro Botín was a family project, born from Emilio Botín’s determination, Faro Santander depends on the banking foundation and has Ana Botín as its main driving force. The former radically bets on contemporary art, the latter is more related to a fine arts museum, where, among others, the Banco de Santander Collection, which until now remained semi-hidden in the banking city of Boadilla del Monte, will be permanently exhibited. “We are by no means here to compete,” Vega cuts in, who was previously Director of Exhibitions and Conservation at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. “We come to contribute, to complement, to try to bring things that we think do not exist at this moment, to integrate ourselves into what is already there.”
That is the key to what he calls the “Santander model,” which has nothing to do with cities like Málaga, based on franchises of major museums, but everything that already exists and is being promoted is very “genuine, projects born here, linked to the local and very different from each other.” But like all cultural revolutions, this one has not arisen overnight either. For years, the Port Authority enabled different spaces for art (the Cabo Mayor Art Center, the Nave Sotoliva, the Palacete del Embarcadero…) which have been centers of activity, but it is “what comes after” that will ultimately give the city a unique character. Entrepreneur and collector José María Lafuente inaugurated last May Cultura Material, a space of more than 600 square meters where he plans to organize exhibitions based on the part of the collection he did not sell to the Reina Sofía Museum (the great FoodCultura collection by artist Antoni Miralda, the Ceseepe studio, or the toys of Juan Bordes, with whose funds he has organized his current exhibition…). The center also houses a library of more than 40,000 volumes. The Lafuente Archive itself, now part of the Reina Sofía Museum, will open its doors (date yet to be set) in the former Bank of Spain. And, on the other side of the Bay, in Puertochico, next year the new Museum of Prehistory and Archaeology of Cantabria (MUPAC) will open, which preserves key pieces from the Altamira caves.
At the inaugural event, attended besides the King by the Minister (Minister of Industry and Tourism, Jordi Hereu), the President of Cantabria, María José Sáenz de Buruaga, and the city’s mayor, Gema Igual, Chipperfield referred to the project as “an example of how the private sector can make significant contributions to the common good.” “For generations,” he noted, “this building was known as a bank and, to a large extent, the city perceived it from the outside. Today, it has reinvented itself as a space for culture, meeting, and public access. By opening the building and making it more accessible, Banco Santander makes a valuable gesture: a gesture of responsibility towards the city, its inhabitants, and its citizens,” valued the architect, responsible among others for the restoration of the Neues Museum in Berlin or new museums like the Jumex in Mexico. The mayor also expressed gratitude to Ana Botín, recognizing that this is “the largest private investment in the city’s history.”
The expectation that Faro Santander arouses is great (it hopes to attract about 200,000 visitors) but that does not free it from citizen controversies after five years of construction. The latest concerns the pedestrianization of the street section that passes under the glass arch, the “heart” of Chipperfield’s project, where today three figures by Juan Muñoz (Conversation Piece I) lean out and serves as a link between the façade of a two-piece building constructed at different times that was once a hotel, a sailing club, and since 1923 the headquarters of Banco de Santander. A complaint from neighbors, upset by the change of route of a bus line, has taken the case to court, reminiscent of the one led by Dutch cyclists, who managed to maintain their right of way through the tunnel or central passage of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
It is through this passage that one accesses a lobby dominated by a magnificent helical staircase (“the Chipperfield signature,” says Ana Botella, the Programs Director) from which the five floors are accessed, with 3,000 square meters dedicated to exhibitions. In this first stage, the protagonists are two women, Leonora Carrington and Frida Kahlo. From the former, Symptomatic Surrealism is shown, which until last August was at the Freud Museum in London and focuses on the artist’s stay at Dr. Morales’ psychiatric sanatorium in Santander in 1940, after being raped in Madrid by a group of requetés. A stay in which she was subjected to strong electroshock sessions that nullified her, despite which she managed to find refuge in writing (the autobiographical account Memories from Below) and painting, with works like Down Below and Villa Pilar, the latter a gift to her therapist that can be seen for the first time in Spain.
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Not without controversy, the presence of Frida Kahlo, with no less than fifteen works, including Self-Portrait with Monkeys or Self-Portrait with Bed, in which she is shown smoking next to a doll, is framed within the long-term agreement reached by the Banco de Santander Foundation to manage the Gelman collection, which also includes works by Diego Rivera, Maria Izquierdo, Rufino Tamayo, or José Clemente Orozco, as well as an important photographic archive. According to Mexican legislation, the works must return in 2028 (they have temporary export permission for two years) but once that period has passed, they may return to Santander or move to other parts of Europe, depending on the art collection, says María Beguiristain, art and exhibitions director of the Banco Santander Foundation.
Beguiristain is also in charge of the little-known collection owned by the bank itself, made up of the sum of different collections and which, although it will continue to have a presence in Boadilla, is now shown here in a thematic proposal by María Dolores Jiménez Blanco that will not be fully visible until the 17th since part of the rooms where works by Picasso or Goya will be located had to be left empty to host the inaugural event.
The center, which defines itself as art, culture, and technology, includes an auditorium, a Cube room where three immersive experiences about the history of Banco de Santander and the city itself are presented, developed by Zanskar, Layers of Reality, and Intervento, and on the upper floors a café, a restaurant, and terraces with views of the bay.
These spaces not only support the museum but also invite people to use the building throughout the day, as well as an exquisite space dedicated to children, Llamita, because, Botella states, “art starts from play and this space is designed to ignite the flame. Institutions must promote play, it is the beginning of everything.”
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