A museum with no front door: Malba—Puertos puts contemporary Latin American art ‘in touch with nature’

‘Plant your own garden… don’t wait for someone to bring you flowers’ — so goes a maxim widely attributed to the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. Its message resonates twofold with Borges’s compatriot, the businessman and art collector Eduardo F. Costantini.

On a metaphoric level, it advocates proactivity and drive: qualities that Costantini, 78, has shown throughout his career. On a literal level, a garden of alder trees is an important feature of Malba—Puertos, the lakeside museum he opened last year 50 kilometres northwest of Buenos Aires.

‘This is a different proposition from the sort of museum you find in a city,’ Costantini says. ‘Different from the original Malba… It is in touch with nature [and] involves a more intense interaction with visitors.’

To explain: Costantini has been collecting Latin American art for several decades and in 2001 founded the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (Malba) in the heart of Argentina’s capital. It received 470,000 visitors in 2024, making it the second-most popular museum in the country (after the National Museum of Fine Arts). Its popularity can be explained in large part by a magnificent permanent collection, featuring works by the likes of Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Wifredo Lam and Fernando Botero. Not to mention Abaporu by Tarsila do Amaral, considered by many to be the greatest ever painting by a Brazilian artist.

For years, Costantini toyed with the idea of expanding Malba. However, he decided in the end to open a new museum entirely, in the tranquil district of Escobar: Malba—Puertos. To some extent, this was influenced by the COVID pandemic during which many people left cities — suggesting ‘a need to decentralise cultural offerings,’ Costantini says.

A larger motivation was the need for storage space to house the 700-plus works in Malba’s ever-growing collection. Costantini is a renowned real estate developer — with interests stretching from Uruguay to Miami — and for the past decade and a half he has been developing a residential community in Escobar called Puertos, currently home to 4,000 inhabitants.

‘I hit upon the idea of having [the storage facility] in Puertos,’ he says. ‘But then I thought: Why don’t we have an exhibition hall too? And from there, after some elaboration, Malba—Puertos was born’.

That elaboration included a personal investment of $10 million, as well as the input of Juan Herreros, the award-winning Spanish architect whose CV includes designing the Munch Museum in Oslo (2021). The end result, in Herreros’s words, is ‘a museum without limits or hierarchy’.

Transparency and openness

Malba—Puertos has no front door and no prescribed route with a start point and end point. It consists instead of a 1,200 square-metre translucent roof, beneath which are three indoor pavilions (notable for their tall glass windows) and an open plaza.

One pavilion is used for temporary exhibitions: its current show pairs work by the enigmatic 20th-century master Xul Solar with that by contemporary artist and fellow Argentinian Daniel Leber. A second pavilion houses a temporary exhibition by Ivana Vollaro, Reservados, as well as the aforementioned storage unit, where works from Malba’s collection are racked, and where visitors can occasionally catch a conservator at work.

The other pavilion is home to a permanent sculptural installation by Gabriel Chaile, which Costantini purchased after seeing it at 2022’s Venice Biennale. It features five massive anthropomorphic pots, each one made from clay and representing a different member of the artist’s family.

To walk between the pavilions, visitors pass through the plaza: a communal area that boasts a lovely view of Escobar Lake to the west, as well as a café and a space for hosting music, performance and dance events.

‘There’s a real sense of transparency and openness, one you don’t associate with traditional museums,’ Costantini says. The openness extends to ticket pricing: entry to Malba—Puertos is free.

Some 200,000 people have visited in its opening nine months, an impressive figure given the museum’s relative remoteness. (Though there are plans to introduce a bus route, it’s currently only accessible by car to those from outside Puertos.)

The museum is proving popular with children, on trips with their family or school. Costantini takes pride in this, as well as the fact that three quarters of Malba—Puertos’s visitors say they have never been to its sister venue in Buenos Aires. ‘The museum has already developed its own identity,’ he says, ‘and I think that’s important. If you create a strongly defined cultural offering, you’ll get a response. People feel at home at Malba—Puertos; they enjoy its friendly atmosphere.’

The typically sunny weather in this part of the world helps. Visitors can even lie back and catch some rays on a set of deckchairs by the lake. Technically, this is an art installation called Moda Playera by Daniel Basso, but the experience is no less comfortable for that. This is one of 23 art works placed in the open air around Puertos, comprising what’s known as the museum’s Public Art Circuit.

‘Museums in the 21st century, increasingly, are interdisciplinary spaces,’ Costantini says. ‘They host new forms of exhibition, where the visitor is an active participant. We created Malba—Puertos in keeping with that [trend].’

A museum with its own identity

As for the garden of alders, it’s located just north of the museum plaza. Planted shortly before the museum opened, the trees have now grown so many metres high that they provide de facto walls for what is essentially a fourth pavilion.

Named the Sala del Bosque (Woodland Hall), this space is given over to a single artist every six months to make their own. Right now it’s the turn of Florencia Sadir, whose works — including a net sculpture that catches drops of water on a rainy day — are inspired by the ancestral technologies used in her home region of Calchaquí Valley in northwest Argentina.

Where Malba shows work predominantly from the 20th century, Malba—Puertos platforms artists who, by and large, are all active today. The two museums reflect Costantini’s dual interests in modern masters and contemporary practitioners.

Herreros describes the new venue as a ‘porous and democratic’ space, where ‘exterior mixes with interior’. Anyone who truly wants to experience the exterior can take a walk through Puertos’s nature reserve. Located on the banks of the Luján River, a short car ride from the museum plaza, the reserve has a six-mile trail where works from the Public Art Circuit can be found amidst spiders, butterflies and a few herons.

When Malba opened in 2001, Costantini donated his entire art collection to the museum. Since then, Malba has been run by a foundation (of which he is honorary president) and augmented its holdings through an acquisitions committee. Costantini has also rebuilt his personal collection — and placed it at the disposal of the two museums.

I meet him shortly before the opening of Latinoamericano, an exhibition of 170 works from his and Malba’s collections at the National Museum of Qatar — the largest ever show of Latin American art in the Middle East and North Africa region.

One picture staying in Buenos Aires is Abaporu, which depicts a distorted figure sitting by a giant cactus beneath a sunny sky. Costantini acquired it at Christie’s in New York in 1995, seeing off stiff competition from bidders from Brazil. So important is the painting to that nation’s cultural identity that on the occasions it has been loaned there — for an exhibition coinciding with the Olympic games in Rio de Janeiro in 2016, for example — the Brazilian president issues a special air force plane to transport it.

Most loan requests are more straightforward, and they come almost daily — in such high esteem are the Costantini and Malba collections held. In the next 12 months, works by Kahlo and Lam will go to major exhibitions at Tate Modern and MoMA respectively.

A champion of Latin American art

Costantini was born in Buenos Aires in 1946, and his penchant for business manifested itself early. As a boy, he used to pick fruits and nuts from trees and sell them to a local ice cream maker. He made his first artistic purchase in his early twenties, after spotting a portrait by Antonio Berni in the window of a commercial gallery.

He didn’t have the funds to buy that specific work but managed to pay for a still life each by two lesser-known artists instead. ‘No one in my family collected,’ he says, ‘and that day an emotion awoke inside me, which never stopped. I found I couldn’t stay away from art thereafter.’ (For the record, Berni — an Argentinian artist renowned for having tackled social issues — is represented by 11 works in Malba’s collection today.)

Costantini has played a key role in raising the status and appreciation of Latin American artists globally. He is also one of a handful of figures credited with having established the category of Latin American art in the first place. In the 1980s, he started buying work from across the region, where before — broadly speaking — Argentinian collectors had tended to acquire Argentinian works, Mexican collectors Mexican works, and so on. In artistic terms, there had been little sense of a shared continental identity, even in academia or museums.

Fast forward to 2025, and the ever-busy Costantini has no time to sit and relax in one of Basso’s deckchairs. Aside from his business ventures, he still collects art. He is also involved in a rehang of Malba’s permanent collection, planned to mark the museum’s 25th anniversary next year. Looking further ahead, he is preparing for a time when he’s no longer around to lead the museums he founded.

Costantini is setting up an endowment meant to last a decade or two, after which he wants them to be operationally and financially independent of him and his family — broadly following the model of US institutions that began life as single-owner collections, such as the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

‘If you create a cultural organisation, you need to think long term,’ Costantini says. ‘I’m not looking a few years into the future, I’m looking 100 years into it.’

For more information on Malba—Puertos, visit malbapuertos.org.ar.