A research project co-produced by Arteleku-Diputación Foral de Gipuzkoa Provincial Council, the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art-MACBA, and the Universidad Internacional de Andalucía-UNIA artandthinking which is also part of a project featuring exhibitions and activities co-produced by both institutions and the José Guerrero Centre - Granada County Council.

Desacuerdos. Sobre arte, políticas y esfera pública en el Estado español is an institutional collaboration project which explores the connection between artistic practices, policies, and the public sector in Spain over the past four decades. It examines the dynamics and the correlation of forces within the civil society, with all its complexities, contradictions, and conflicts. It stems from a premise that conceives the public sector as a "factory" which produces the political, and delves into the role that art plays in the process.

Desacuerdos is conceived from the desire to create a historiographic counter-model which goes beyond the academic discourse and contributes to laying some of the foundations for the reconstruction of a critical cultural sphere. How could one provide a historiographic account of Spain's distinctive artistic modernity, an unorthodox modernity which is intrinsically linked to the political and social vicissitudes of the past century? To what extent can cultural institutions lead to new radical democratisation processes of society, when their façade of legitimacy crumbled long ago? Does a new historiographic account produced under the auspices of cultural institutions make sense when civil society is showing clear symptoms of revitalising itself in opposition to the growing economic and state authoritarianism? What is its use? These are some of the questions which needed to be addressed when we set out to rethink the ways in which we wanted to narrate the history of Spanish art in the last fifty years as opposed to the established accounts.

Providing a critical historiographic account of artistic policies can only be done by implementing cultural management models which are unequivocally new. In this respect, we believed it was fundamental to develop an investigation process - whose results can be viewed at www.desacuerdos.org and in Desacuerdos 1 and 2 - with a decentralised structure and a network of collaborating cultural institutions of various kinds developing projects which went beyond the institutional limits, thus enabling other critical sectors of culture to operate without being subsumed or conditioned.

The exhibitions will give a central role to the idea of archives and documentation, and will include a comprehensive programme of discussions, meetings and activities so as to allow the individuals, scholars, groups, associations, etc. who developed the artistic and social practices, to express themselves.

Desacuerdos will become a visible project in 2005 with the inauguration of a series of exhibitions under the same name: the 3rd of March at the Macba; the 9th of March in the José Guerrero Centre in Granada; and the 4th of April in Arteleku, where the documental archive generated by the exhibition itself and the Desacuerdos. Mutaciones del feminismo: genealogías y prácticas artísticas seminar will be presented. Thus, Desacuerdos is articulated as a project featuring exhibitions and activities which take place in three different and complementary venues simultaneously.

At this final stage of the process, we propose a public debate which allows the different positions, approaches, and visions of the project to be translated into a productive discussion which is accessible to the public.

To this aim, a forum for discussion has been opened at www.desacuerdos.org where researchers, authors, producers, organisations, institutions and the public can voice their opinions.