Activity
From 27 November 2025 to 27 November 2026
MURMURS
Twelve speculative actions for the Year Thirty
To mark the Year Thirty, the MACBA presents a programme that turns to the speculative potential of rumour. Over twelve months, it will bring together a series of live art events that revisit key moments from the recent past, including unrecorded performances, unfinished projects and cancelled events. These are speculative gestures of reinterpretation, pointing to the gaps, silences and blind spots of dominant historiography.
A museum is, by definition, a time capsule. From the 18th century onwards, the great museums of modernity emerged as mausoleums of an imperial past that continues to cast its long shadow into the future. To commemorate a museum’s history might therefore seem like a redundant, perhaps even dangerous task, as it draws us towards what Jacques Derrida called archive fever, a compulsion tinged with melancholy.
This November marks thirty years since the foundation of Barcelona’s contemporary art museum. To celebrate, MACBA presents a live arts programme that is not concerned with institutional memory but instead seeks to address the desires and aspirations that led to this museum’s creation in 1995. Ultimately, it’s not about paying tribute to a cultural institution, but to the art scene that first imagined it and thus made it possible.
The program reflects on the constitutive force of gossip –that seemingly trivial word-of-mouth that weaves together a community, serving as a conduit for shared experiences and cultural preferences. This murmuring is what gives an aura of mystery to anonymous books and manuscripts cast adrift in bottles. It thrives around vanished artists, stolen artworks, unreleased records and censored films. It is the power of stories that outlive us.
The poetics of rumour challenge the mortuary solemnity of the museum, instead evoking the lightness of the unfinished, the undocumented and the unrealized. They open up spaces for imagination and conjecture. Rather than venerating a monolithic past that risks entombing us under its weight, these murmurs invite us to keep the intangible afloat.
Over twelve months, the programme will bring together works shaped by rumour. Some of them revisit events that have assumed an almost legendary status within the local art scene, such as the collective rituals staged between 1969 and 1973 by Antoni Miralda, Dorothée Selz, Joan Rabascall, Jaume Xifra and Benet Rossell, or the enigmatic happening – an out-of-tune Bach sonata – conceived by Carles Santos and Pere Portabella during their imprisonment in La Model when it was still a gaol.
Curated by Sabel Gavaldon and Alicia Escobio.
Programme from November 2025 to February 2026
Programme from March to November 2026
participants
Asia 
Lúa Coderch
ARSinNOVA Cor de Cambra 
Doble Pletina 
Jorge Dutor 
Esther Ferrer
Dora García
Edwin van der Heide 
Arnau Horta 
Roc Jiménez de Cisneros 
La Cora 
laSADCUM 
Lolo & Sosaku 
Guillem Mont de Palol 
Observatori de Vídeo No Identificat – Arxius OVNI 
Tres
Marc Vives
YESSi PERSE curated by
Alicia Escobio Alonso 
Sabel Gavaldon In collaboration with
with the support of
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.
MACBA Thirty
We celebrate Year Thirty of an infinite MACBA that projects the future as a space for revision and possibility: of taking up what was left unfinished, updating what needs it and projecting anew everything that can still be transformed.
