Amphibious Museum is a museum within a museum, an initiative by the IVAM to understand the institution itself as an organism—a hybrid, symbolic, connective being, and at the same time, an activator of programming interwoven with the museum’s actions and projects. It alludes to the ability of these organisms to inhabit and move between water and land, playing a crucial role in transferring matter and energy between the two environments. Using this metaphor, the IVAM envisions itself as an amphibious museum mediating between different physical and symbolic territories, generating nutrients and life, memories, and knowledge.
Amphibious Museum is not conceived as a mere programmatic line, but as an undefined space for research, production, and expanded cultural action, also creating networks with other territories—Valencian, national, and international. A para-institution, a museum within the museum.
The proposal is structured around two interrelated axes: Territories–Land and Aquatic Environments. Both are articulated through artistic processes, cultural mediations, and collective actions that engage with natural landscapes and bodies of water. From this perspective, it transports matter and energy, but also memories, stories, images, and desires. In its movement between terrestrial and aquatic environments—across urban, rural, and natural landscapes—it becomes a relational device connecting ecosystems and communities, bodies and landscapes.
Amphibious Museum proposes itself as a territory in suspension, a space of viscous ambiguity where we feel at ease, where the museum ceases to be a static container and becomes an organism that breathes, senses, and mutates. A museum that moves between land and water, between the visible and the imagined, between the ancestral and the to-come. Like amphibians, it inhabits thresholds. Thus, it is understood as a living, permeable organism, traversed by flows of matter, energy, affects, and memories, unfolding and revealing relations of interdependence and ecodependence. An amphibious museum-body transporting nutrients between physical and symbolic ecosystems, and in this transit, activating memories, fictions, and mythologies, generating new research, sensitivities, and modes of attention.
Amphibians—creatures that inhabited deep time millions of years before humans—embody a geological memory that precedes and exceeds our history. Thinking of the museum from an amphibious perspective is to summon this primordial time, to consider past-present-future as a single historical continuum; amphibian tales and mythologies converge with rationality in organizing knowledge of the world. It is about activating a museum that remembers not only the human but the more-than-human, to imagine other forms of coexistence.
Amphibious Museum breaks with binary categories and operates between the real and the imaginary, the dreamlike and the everyday, the archive and fiction. It is configured as a transdisciplinary territory where diverse ways of thinking other possible cartographies converge—other ways of moving through, breathing, sensing, and inhabiting the world.
In this way, Amphibious Museum is a place to speculate on other ways of organizing—or disorganizing—the world. A space of tension, but also of possibility. A laboratory to experiment with alternatives to logics of extraction, accumulation, and polarization, and to imagine an amphibious pluriverse made of interdependencies, care, and resonances. A place where knowledge, practices, and feelings are shared, contaminated, and mutually transformed. A territory where other possibilities of being and existing resonate, where the amphibian is not only memory of the past but living matter to imagine futures. A museum that, by thinking of ourselves as amphibians, invites us to see differently, to move differently, to feel through other bodies and times.
Amphibious Museum is, ultimately, a creature that remembers and dreams. A space to generate new poetics, new vibrations, new affects. A museum that breathes and proposes desirable futures.
