In Chillida Leku

Monday 6 July, we had the opportunity to visit Chillida Leku at the invitation of its director, Mireia Massagué. Jaume Torres, President of ARS Foundation, and Marta Areny, the Foundation's Secretary General, walked through the gardens and the collection of the museum that Eduardo Chillida conceived during his lifetime at the Zabalaga farmhouse, in Hernani. It was a private encounter that proved, above all, a lesson in how time and institutional complicity can sustain a cultural project across decades.

Chillida Leku

Chillida Leku spans nearly eleven hectares of woodland and meadow in which more than forty monumental sculptures by Eduardo Chillida converse with the landscape and with one another, arranged around Zabalaga, the sixteenth-century farmhouse the artist himself restored to house part of his work. The museum, first opened in 2000, closed its doors in 2010 amid the financial crisis and remained inaccessible to the public for nearly a decade, until it reopened in 2019 under Hauser & Wirth, the gallery that has exclusively represented Chillida's estate since 2017 and which, working alongside the sculptor's family — owners of the property — professionalised its management and secured its continuity.

Mireia Massagué has directed Chillida Leku since 2018. She joined the project after having directed the Gaudí Exhibition Center and worked at the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya, and has since turned the museum's reopening into more than a single milestone: a model of sustained, long-term management, built together with the Chillida family and Hauser & Wirth, that today positions Chillida Leku as an international reference for how a private artistic legacy can remain open, alive and accessible.

For ARS Foundation, encounters like this one are part of an exercise we consider essential: weaving complicities with other international art institutions that, like us, work at the intersection of art, territory and the long-term sustainability of cultural projects. Chillida Leku is, in that sense, a case study in its own right — the way a gallery, a family and a director have managed to build together an institution capable of enduring — and a conversation we hope to keep cultivating in the months ahead, as ARS Foundation advances its own programmes for sculpture in public space.

Chillida Leku

It is no coincidence that this visit comes at a moment when ARS Foundation is already working on an International Biennial of Public Sculpture for 2028. Projects such as Chillida Leku — where sculpture is not displayed within a closed room but occupies and transforms a territory — are exactly the kind of reference we want to keep in mind as we design our own programme of site-specific interventions. Learning from those who have already walked that path, and doing so through direct conversation with institutions such as Hauser & Wirth, is part of how we understand cultural diplomacy: not as a declaration of intent, but as a network of relationships cultivated one visit at a time.

We thank Mireia Massagué for her generosity in opening the doors of Chillida Leku to us, and for taking the time to share with us the history of a project that, more than twenty years after its first opening, continues to show that art in the landscape only endures when institutions are willing to care for it with patience and people are able to take on that challenge with professionalism and enthusiasm.