One Day on Earth

From April 2022, the Museo Moderno presents a series of new exhibitions as part of its programme entitled Un día en la Tierra [One Day on Earth]. The exhibitions develop an integrating holistic discourse around the urgent need for reflection on humanity’s present and its relationship with the planet. The Museum’s galleries will be housing more than eleven exhibitions, laced together by this overarching narrative. These include both group exhibitions from the Museo Moderno’s public collections in dialogue with guest artists and solo exhibitions, while our digital platforms will simultaneously be running major artistic, educational and social programmes. This ushers in a new stage in our programming, which aims to be increasingly open and representative of the vitality and relevance of Argentina’s artistic community in line with the Museum’s mission to be ever more inclusive, accessible and federal.

One Day on Earth is a programme that arose in response to two years in the COVID-19 pandemic, which has forced the world to rethink itself so radically. This challenging time saw the Museo Moderno team responding to society’s needs by deploying digital programmes involving more than 400 Argentinian artists each year, an active online public of more than 6 million people per year and more than 4,000 teachers from across Argentina, with whom we have kept in direct contact and who have developed their interest in the power of art to enrich their teaching experience. For the Museo Moderno, then, the pandemic meant understanding that we had to be a lot closer to and in daily dialogue with the artistic and educational communities that are our lifeblood.

The pandemic also meant understanding the strength of this great Museum’s art and historical collections, which today hold more than 7,600 works. We decided, then, to let these works have their say, to express their thoughts, their ideas, their analyses of the past, to help us understand who we are as one human race.

Works from past and present, from our public collections and on loan, come together here to reflect on the pain of the pandemic, the increasingly visible violence of the world, the need to eradicate all gestures of discrimination and embrace a greater awareness of the need to care for our planet, to be more respectful of differences, more certain of the value of art in building a better world.

Creating One Day on Earth is also a utopian act, imagining that, for a brief moment, today in 2022, walking the galleries of the Museo Moderno is like walking the surface of the Earth. Here we can encounter its geographical and material landmarks, ancestral knowledge, the ways we inhabit and feel our planet, and the reparation provided by art as an agent of sensitive understanding and transformation.