Led by Jonathan Ruffer, the Auckland Project is working to regenerate large sections of the town of Bishop Auckland. Part of the redevelopment is the new Spanish Gallery, the first museum in the UK to be devoted to Spanish art, which opened on October 15, 2021.
Factum Foundation and Skene Catling de la Peña were commissioned to rethink the concept and role of a museum for the top floor. The result, ‘In the Blink of an Eye, Transience and Eternity in the Spanish Golden Age’, is a space filled with great objects, all with their own specific history, biography and meaning in their original location, but with the potential to unlock a profound understanding of Spanish art when put together in dialogue with each other. The original pieces were all chosen, digitally recorded using non-contact technologies and re-embodied as physical facsimiles to reveal some of the defining characteristics of this period of Spanish art and its context.
The outcome is a portal into Spanish Renaissance and early Baroque thinking and a collection of mutually beneficial collaborations that redefine sharing, connoisseurship and preservation.