A Soft Museum

Celina Eceiza’s Soft Museum is a walk-in, immersive space in which fabrics and carpets deconstruct the rigid, concrete rooms of the lower floor of the HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark — a late-modernist building from 1952 — while simultaneously questioning the premises and constructs associated with the emergence of such spaces in late modernity. The ideology of the White Cube — which often underpins these late-modernist spaces — can make art appear distant; as Brian O’Doherty wrote, the ​“ideal gallery suppresses all clues that might interfere with the fact that it is ​‘art’.” The result is an ​“intensified presence” of the space itself, which carries something of ​“the sanctity of the church, the formal authority of the courtroom, the mystery of the laboratory,” turning it into a ​“unique cult space of aesthetics.” Indeed, the force fields of the White Cube are so strong that an ​“object becomes art” within it, only to lose value once it leaves its walls. Yet the object itself is usually no more than a medium for debating ideas. Moreover, the White Cube can make art harder to engage with, as it often establishes an unequal power dynamic between artwork and audience. 

Eceiza’s recent practice focuses on handmade textiles and drawings in combination with sculptures and immersive installations. Her installations treat space as a metabolic organ that is capable of processing a range of physical, emotional, and psychological states, as well as practices, beliefs, desires, and rituals. Her concept is almost cosmological. Her approach to the soft museum and its soft architecture is not an attempt to isolate the elements of life, but to embrace them cosmopolitically and universally, assuming that the universe resides within all of us. Eceiza’s perspective is not anthropocentric, but animistic and mythological-spiritual, envisioning both humans and non-human beings — such as animals or plants — as continually reborn, existing in a constant cycle. For the Argentine artist, this gathering of different figures mirrors an ecosystem in which diverse agents depend on one another.

She also considers the audience as guests. Eceiza engages with perspectives that are not only social but also psychological, anthropological, and metaphysical. In doing so, she redefines hospitality as an artistic practice: visitors are not merely invited to view her work; they become part of it, transform it over the course of the exhibition, and are welcomed as guests who are encouraged to attune themselves to their environment and explore Eceiza’s unique energy in their own way.

To think softly also means viewing materials and spaces not as fixed entities, but as dynamic agents. Here, participation matters more than didactic teaching, and indeterminacy more than prescription. Above all, it is about dissolving the boundaries between the visitor and the museum space, between the formal and informal. Eceiza is acutely aware of the fragility of her soft museum, and understands visitors not only as guests to whom she offers a gift but also as agents who can examine and question their surroundings — and who might, through carelessness, come too close to its delicate objects. For Eceiza, however, this is part of the process of a fluid space of experience.

Thus, her soft museum oscillates between unconditional hospitality and the conditions that inevitably underlie every form of hospitality: between welcome and acceptance on the one hand, and institutional rules on the other. In Ofrenda, hospitality is not entirely free from conditions. Yet Eceiza offers visitors far more freedom than is usually the case in exhibitions: they may interact with the work, become part of it, touch it, lie down, linger, talk, read, or even take a siesta. What matters is that they adopt an attitude of care and attentiveness — care for both the work and for others. For these are indeed artworks and individuals, each deserving autonomy and subjectivity, and requiring respectful engagement. These ideas also resonate with the act of giving or receiving gifts, which likewise demands care and responsibility from both giver and recipient.

In this way, Eceiza engages with urgent questions of care, nurturing, and responsibility. These concerns also resonate on another level of hospitality in her work, in her references to Argentine artists of previous generations, whom she integrates into her exhibition. In doing so, she offers a special homage to these leading figures of Argentine art history, giving her work a truly radical dimension. One such figure to whom Eceiza often refers is Marta Minujín, who in 1973 created the so-called Soft Gallery by lining the walls of a space with around 200 white mattresses. Minujín, too, emphasized life itself, since people spend much of their lives on mattresses — sleeping, conceiving, being born, and often even dying on them. The Soft Gallery functioned both as an immersive installation and a stage, where Minujín invited poets, musicians, and performers to participate in events. Similarly, Celina Eceiza’s work can be understood as a soft museum. It begins upstairs with the tapestry-covered stairs in the foyer, leading into the basement of HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark, where she expands her organic universe into a tangible spatial experience. For Eceiza, intuition is key — something one feels not only metaphorically ​“in the head.” This is why her completely redesigned main hall seems almost to call upon visitors to trust their feelings and intuition rather than relying solely on reason.