The possibility of visiting reserves is increasingly becoming a key moment of the interaction of institutions with the public. The heritage collected is not always accessible, either for specific conservations and accommodation needs, or for being lent to other institutions where they are included in exhibitions, or even for the curatorial program defined by the institution.

If there are institutions that program exhibitions around their collection, whether they include lent works around a curatorial theme, there are also institutions that host exhibitions from other collections, allowing those to circulate and reach a larger audience. However, it is also possible to exhibit without having a collection, since it is not an essential condition to a program, seeing as each exhibition, whether of its own collection or from a collection outside of the institution, allows for a new look by selecting and regathering works, creating new intimacies, new readings, new relationships with the venue that hosts them.

Therefore, deriving from these collections, the search to partially show the reserves, the places where the works are stored, increased – visitable reserves, which in practicality are informal temporary exhibitions, where some works that will later be shown, whether or not under restoration, can create bonds of complicity with the public. In reality, what is shown is carefully crafted to be a part of the next exhibition. When it cannot be exhibited because of its conservation status, however, it is given the autonomy of becoming a temporary exhibition.

If this practice is common in many museums, galleries, or other cultural institutions – to allow visiting a collection in its reserves environment without the mediation of the discourse from the curator and the exhibition venue –, it turns into a presentation without a net, risking all of what that reading might bring. The collection shows itself, and unveils itself. It allows itself to be seen while it is documented to be cataloged, and archived.

It seeks complicity without mediation from the public. The opportunity of that singular moment is not always possible.

Reserva aberta is also the first public presentation of the collection organized in vertical formal filing cabinets, resulting from the sponsor support from Casino Figueira, in Figueira da Foz.

Désirée Pedro