Not everything can be remembered, just as not everything can be forgotten.

Andrea Muniáin develops a research-based practice between architecture, visual arts, and critical theory. Her work explores how bodies, space, and digital technologies intersect, focusing on the political implications of digital representation. From January to June 2026, she also acts as the artistic voice—or pulso—of Organismo 2026's case study Premium Stuff, which examines storage as a key apparatus in contemporary regimes of value and extraction and investigates how infrastructures of containment shape orientations in time, environmental management, and epistemic power. Taking art collections as a specific challenge, this project is designed to prototype critical tools and situated interventions that make the hidden logics of storage visible while testing alternative practices of archiving, circulation, and preservation.

Taking art collections as a specific challenge, the study prototypes critical tools and situated interventions that make the hidden logics of storage visible while testing alternative practices of archiving, circulation, and preservation.

How do museums and archives participate in broader systems of resource depletion (material, attentional, or otherwise)? Can storage itself become a site of alternative practices rather than complicity?

Museums, archives, and collections often present themselves as protective institutions, yet they are deeply entangled in extractive systems sustained by the idea of preserving artworks in a condition of eternity. This operates materially through climate control, construction, packaging, transport, insurance, digital infrastructures, and the continuous expansion of storage capacity. The standards required to maintain the “original” state of an artwork rely on energy-intensive systems that contribute to broader forms of resource depletion.

In the context of the current climate emergency, it becomes necessary to rethink the logics through which memory is preserved. Collecting and storing are, to some extent, inevitable if we want to sustain memory. The key question, then, is not whether to store, but what is stored, under which protocols, and for how long. 

If “eternity” is a construct that is (often) sustained by institutions, is there another way to redefine “preservation” to prioritize living artistic practices? Is there a way to remember differently?

The question of memory is central here. It is about learning how to operate within the limits of what should be remembered and what may not need to be preserved. Rather than a clear-cut framework, this is a continuous gradient of decisions, a juxtaposition of contradictions that allow us to conserve, refuse, rethink, dismantle, circulate, forget, and remember at the same time.

Not everything can be remembered, just as not everything can be forgotten. In the threshold between the two, preservation becomes a matter of choice and negotiation. Each decision implies a wager: on what to keep, what to let go, what to preserve for a time, and what may no longer need to remain.
 

What steps could artists, curators, or institutions take to shift from accumulating to circulating or transforming collections?

The fundamental shift begins by thinking from the limit. Instead of assuming continuous accumulation, institutions can recognize their finite capacity to store, care for, and maintain collections. This limit can enable a state of constant transience, where collections are no longer fixed but continuously evolving.

Such an approach requires embracing instability as part of the process. It involves making ongoing decisions about what circulates, what transforms, and what may eventually disappear. For artists, curators, and institutions, this means working through uncertainty, accepting that not everything will endure, and that value may lie as much in transformation and movement as in preservation.