Museu Etnològic i de Cultures del Món: the hidden museum where the gaze widens

What is Museu Etnològic i de Cultures del Món and where does it come from?

The Museu Etnològic was founded in 1949 in Montjuïc as a museum of non-European peoples — at that time it was called 'Ethnological and Colonial Museum', a name that says a lot about the time. For decades he gathered pieces from Africa, Asia, America and Oceania brought by Catalan explorers, anthropologists and missionaries. In 2015 the museum merged with the Museu de Cultures del Món — opened in the Palau Nadal and the Palau Marc in El Born — and was reorganized with a critical look at its own colonial past. Today it is one of the most interesting museums in the city because it is trying, live, to rewrite what it means to exhibit non-Western cultures in the 21st century.

Why go — and what's the purpose of your appointment with the artist?

If your creativity has been looking only at what you know for a long time — Scandinavian design, American art, European literature — the Museu Etnològic is the reset. An hour here in front of a Dogon mask or a Quechua textile and your head goes out of its usual lane.

How to take advantage of it (concrete practice)

Choose ONE room — the one in Africa, the one in Asia, the one in America. Not all three. A. Stay 40 minutes. Look at objects as objects, not as 'culture'. Draw one in your notebook. Then sit in the museum courtyard and write down what the object made you think. Probably things you didn't expect. That is the exact function of the appointment with the artist — to take you out of the known.

Why this place connects with Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way

The practice of the appointment with the artist that Julia Cameron prescribes in The Artist's Path has a principle: creativity needs to be fed before I can produce. Cameron calls it 'filling the well.' The metaphor is exact: if it doesn't rain, the well runs dry. If you don't expose your brain to non-work stimuli once a week, your ability to generate new ideas quietly declines, week by week.

Museu Etnològic i de Cultures del Món is an ideal place for a date with the artist because it meets the three conditions that Cameron asks for: It takes you out of your routine (a place other than your work and home), does not require production (you are going to receive, not create), and exposes you to curated stimuli (someone with judgment decided this was worth watching). Three conditions, an hour or two, once a week. It is probably the practice with the best mental ROI that you are going to add to your routine.

If you haven't taken the course yet, this is the place to start. Your Artist's Path is the free 12-week program that applies Julia Cameron's method to your life — including two hours a week blocked off on your calendar for appointments like this. More about the course at the end of the post.