Meanwhile, in the Archive: A Beast, a Sealed Tin and a Cake Being Eaten

Málaga in late July is a furnace with opening hours. Step out of it into the Archivo Municipal and the temperature drops ten degrees and four centuries. The building keeps the city’s paperwork: deeds, censuses, the long grey ledger of who owed what to whom. Since Friday it also keeps a beast.

The beast in the archive

Juanjo Fuentes opened El nombre del bicho, ya te lo he dicho in the Salas Mingorance on 24 July. Thirty pieces. It runs until 27 September. The city’s own listing calls Fuentes an essential reference in Málaga’s cultural fabric, an artist who has been drawing a discursive map here since the 1990s. Municipal prose. Not wrong, though.

The title is a taunt, and taunts are the oldest form of criticism: the name of the beast, I’ve already told you. You know it. You just want to hear it said aloud again, in a cool room, with witnesses.

An archive is where a city stores what it cannot afford to forget and would rather not look at. Installing a living artist in one is a small, deliberate blasphemy. Fine. Blasphemy keeps well. It ages into liturgy.

Meanwhile, down at the water, they are venerating a tin.

Meanwhile, the tin

Under the glass cube at the Centre Pompidou Málaga, To Open Eyes: Miradas de artista has been running since July 2025 and stays until January 2027, arranging the Paris collection by visual rhyme rather than by date. Duchamp is in it. Ryman, Pollock, Bourgeois, Beuys, Abramović. And Piero Manzoni’s Merda d’artista, number 31 of ninety, tinplate and paper, five centimetres tall, made in Milan in May 1961 and sold by weight at the price of gold.

Thirty grams. Sealed. Nobody opens it, and nobody ever will, because opening it would end it. That is precisely how a reliquary works: the saint’s finger stays in the box, and the box is the miracle.

An archive keeps what a city cannot afford to forget. A vitrine keeps what it cannot afford to open.

Meanwhile, a short walk round the head of the port, a woman has been eating a cake.

Meanwhile, the cake

At MUCAC La Coracha, in the audiovisual room on Paseo de Reding, Verónica Ruth Frías’s Mi porción del pastel has looped since 9 June. Eleven minutes and nineteen seconds. A three-tier cake, iced with reproductions of Botticelli, Van Gogh and Picasso. The artist eats it.

No hedging, no footnote. Frías — born in Córdoba in 1978, with work held by the Pompidou Málaga, the Thyssen-Bornemisza and the Museo Picasso Málaga — is asking who sits at the centre of the story and who gets passed a plate at the far end of the table. In a city that sells one of those three faces on every fridge magnet from the Alcazaba to the quay, eating him is not a neutral act.

It closes today, 26 July. On Tuesday the same room goes to Marina Abramović’s Self Portrait, 2002/2013, until 11 October. The gods change shift and the room does not blink.

Three relics

A beast already named. A tin nobody will ever open. A cake that gets eaten, and then, tomorrow, is gone from the wall.

Only one of the three is actually being consumed, and it is the one closing tonight. Málaga’s institutions are very good at keeping things. Somebody, occasionally, should be eating them.