The Ministry of Culture has announced the appointment of Mónica Carabias Álvaro as the first director of the next National Photography Center (CNF), which will have its headquarters in Soria, at the former headquarters of the Bank of Spain. It will be a state -owned institution managed by the Ministry of Culture, through the General Subdirectorate of Visual Arts and contemporary creation of the General Directorate of Cultural Heritage and Fine Arts.
Carabias Álvaro has been selected in a system of free designation; Born in Madrid in 1969, she is a Doctor of Contemporary Art History from the Complutense University of Madrid, in whose Faculty of Geography and History she exercises as a professor of the Department of Art History since 2019. Likewise, since 2023 she directs the Complutense Institute for Research Feminists (instatem).
His studies so far have focused on the history of photography in Spain as an instrument for the visual construction of historical memory in the twentieth century and in the role of women in the creation of artistic proposals and photographic development, attending to Emerging authors and the new methodological approaches. He has also directed projects such as New contemporary topographies. Return with the landscape (2020-2023) e Artificial intelligence: models and applications in the field of artistic creation, teaching, research and knowledge (2023-2025), and has published The place is important. MEMORY LANDSCAPES AND MEMORY OF THE LANDSCAPE IN THE CURRENT PHOTOGRAPH (2024), The move was not all: poptoography (1980-1981), an author of Miguel Oriola (2023) and Magnum photos in female: a mined field of contradictions (2022).
He has been a Carabias member of the Technical Commission of the Provincial Foundation Plastic Arts Rafael Botí (2008-2011), conservative of the Royal Photographic Society of Madrid (2001-2003), coordinator of the Museographic-Museological Project for the Museum of Contemporary Art of Madrid in Madrid (Mac) (2011) and Technical Exhibition Coordinator in the MAC (2007-2010).
The opening of the National Photography Center will take place, as announced, in 2026, will have an area of 3,573 square meters distributed in four floors and will require a ministerial investment of 8.5 million euros. Its location responds to an attempt to encourage activity and set population in territories in which it presents low density.
The opening of a national museum specifically dedicated to photography responds to a demand for culture and by the specialized sectors in this particular area; This space is expected to specialize in its conservation, schedule temporary exhibitions.
