[contra]panorama

From February 10, 2024 to April 21, 2025

[contra]panorama
In 2021, MACBA launched the triennial Panorama, which aimed to “deepen its collaboration and dialogue with local artists and cultural agents”. This second edition of Panorama retains the same aim but works towards it through a year-long series of interventions that take the project’s title literally, in order to question both the continuing relevance of the triennial (or biennial) format and its capacity to offer a panoramic image of the present.  The idea that art holds the capacity to carry out a cognitive mapping of a world-system that has become ever more complex and determinant remains a compelling one. Art can then be understood as a tool with which to sketch out “cartographies of the absolute” in order to provide much-needed aesthetic and political orientation. But the panorama is an apparatus for total vision. It produces an image that remains inaccessible to our bodies, devoid of obstacles or interruptions. It presupposes a privileged location for the viewer from which to take command of what lies under its gaze, a gaze not constrained by bodily limits, which abstracts while hierarchising. This is the gaze – both totalizing and hierarchical – that has always characterised the modern art museum. In this sense, the museum shares the intimate connection of cartographic technologies (including the panorama) with modern processes of surveillance, submission, and domination and, in particular, with their colonial instances. There is no other exhibition format today where the panoramic impulse and the spectre of the colonial remain so present as in the biennial. Hence the “[contra]” (counter) of this new edition of Panorama does not signal an antagonism, but the oscillation between a panorama and its counter-plane. Given the necessity of orientation and the impossibility of tracing a continuous thread from particularity to totality, [contra]panorama tries to abandon the metaphorical watchtower of the biennial format in order to look from other positions: interstitial zones that point towards the transition between inside and outside, between different scales of thought and action.  [contra]panorama is a year-long, collaborative research programme that will use the extensive archive of projects and questions historically generated from MACBA and its most immediate context, opening them up to a dialogue with a whole series of cultural agents including, ACEP, AMECUM, Eleonora Belfiore, Laura Benítexz Valero, Elena Blesa in collaboration with Violeta Mayoral, Nerea Calvillo, Lorena Cervera, CGT, Concreta ed., Las Cosas, Fernándo Domínguez Rubio, Antonio Gagliano, Jose Iglesias García-Arenal, Dora García, Albert Gironès, Ren Loren Britton, Nicolas Malevé, Montserrat Moliner, Julia Montilla, Verónica Lahitte, Eva Paià, PAAC, PERMEA, Radia Cava-ret, Marina Ribot, Jara Rocha, María Ruido, Saberes & Sabores, Isabel Seguí, Sindillar and The White Pube. [contra]panorama will take place between February 2024 and April 2025 with different speeds, intensities and formats. Conceived by Alicia Escobio (Public Programmes, MACBA), Yaiza Hernández Velázquez (Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths), Yolanda Jolis (Education, MACBA), Anna Ramos (Ràdio Web MACBA) and Isaac Sanjuan (Education, MACBA) with the collaboration of Zaida Trallero (Exhibitions, MACBA) and Meritxell Colina (Exhibitions, MACBA). 
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Projects
Eleonora Belfiore. It is about more than just money: artists’ ‘hidden subsidy’ of the arts as systemic exploitation, 2020
Eleonora Belfiore. It is about more than just money: artists’ ‘hidden subsidy’ of the arts as systemic exploitation, 2020
Lecture In this presentation, Belfiore drawing on empirical research carried out since she published Who Cares? At What Price? she reiterates how the normative frameworks of contemporary art funding point to a clear moral failure of cultural politics and the need to seek collaborative solutions to tackle this problem.
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Laura Benítez Valero, Class Will Tear Us Apart, Again, 2025
Laura Benítez Valero, Class Will Tear Us Apart, Again, 2025
Lecture Presentation of an ongoing non-academic research into working-class academics and the power of biography as a political project. The proposition consists of critically analysing the material conditions of these figures who move between terms that might at first sight appear opposites: working-class academics. It also considers who is behind these figures: the mothers of those first generations to go to university and are now lecturers. Generations of cis women relegated to subordinate status. 
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Elena Blesa Cábez in collaboration with Violeta Mayoral, Interval, 2024
Elena Blesa Cábez in collaboration with Violeta Mayoral, 'Interval', 2024. Photo: Juande Jarillo
Elena Blesa Cábez in collaboration with Violeta Mayoral, Interval, 2024
Listening situation and online documentation This project by Elena Blesa Cábez, an experienced educator who has worked at MACBA, brings together her artistic practice as a researcher and educator (without creating a hierarchy) while opening up a critical, fertile reflection on the role of education and mediation in museums. During the course of the project, Elena Blesa Cábez decided to work with the artist Violeta Mayoral in order to shape her research in the rooms of the museum. This switch of positions Elena initiates with her project gives rise to a multitude of questions and movements regarding how different practices and ways of inhabiting the museum fit and relate to one another. With this in mind, the project unfurls through a sound proposal and mediation of it in the museum’s rooms, which make us become aware of attention and listening. This way, mediation reveals itself to be inextricable from dialogue and interdependence.
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Lorena Cervera and Isabel Seguí, #PrecarityStory, 2020
Lorena Cervera and Isabel Seguí, #PrecarityStory, 2020
Vídeo #PrecarityStory tells the experience of Isabel, who teaches, does research and cleans all at the same British university. Her story is presented as an example of the growing informality of university work and its human consequences. Filmed during the United Kingdom university staff strikes between 2018 and 2020, this documentary exposes the little-known reality of the academic precariat and addsto the current public debate about the effects of neoliberal policies on British higher education.
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Verónica Lahitte i Antonio Gagliano. Reconstrucció: Barcelona Art Report [2001] (2023)
Verónica Lahitte i Antonio Gagliano. Reconstrucció: Barcelona Art Report [2001] (2023)
Installation. Various dimensions The single-edition triennial Experiències, Barcelona Art Report [2001] is the case study from which Antonio Gagliano and Verónica Lahitte were commissioned. Their joint practice carefully engages with all kinds of archives, were invited to take it as their case study. Their work displayed here not only recalls the memory of a “suspended” triennial, but through what might be called a ‘documentary ventriloquism’ they mediate, navigate, and speculate on Reconstruction: Barcelona Art Report [2001] from the remnants, documents and voices that still remain in a handful of forgotten filing cabinets in the city.
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Dora García. The Kingdom (2003-present)
Dora García,
Dora García. The Kingdom (2003-present)
Performance, publication, webcam and video recording Twenty years after its first presentation, the extended performance devised by Dora García in 2003 continues to uncover “holes in the institutional logic”1 deploying strategies like play, real-time writing, the paranormal and the blurring of the limits between reality and fiction, space and time. Moreover, The Kingdom has been in continuous operation through a security camera that has been streaming online since it was first set up. This webcam – a central element in the work – prefigured regimes of surveillance that have now become ubiquitous, allowing itself to be taken over by any user who wanted to play with and/or control its gaze.
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Albert Gironès, Eva Paià, Marina Ribot. interareas, 2024–2025
Albert Gironès, Eva Paià, Marina Ribot. interareas, 2024–2025
A living, open work process, a meeting space and a publication interareas is an unusual project within an art institution. A space of temptation marked by a continued dialogue with what is happening in the museum. This project has emerged from the desire to seek and activate meeting spaces for the different agents and multiple narratives that constitute [contra]panorama, thus highlighting the conversations and synergies generated during processes of artistic research, which often remain outside the exhibition format. How can we make what happens within internal processes visible?
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Nicolas Malevé and Jara Rocha, High Latencies, 2024
Nicolas Malevé and Jara Rocha, 'High Latencies', 2024. Photo: Juande Jarillo
Nicolas Malevé and Jara Rocha, High Latencies, 2024
Diagrams, public programme and podcast series In the transdisciplinary project High latencies, by visual artist and programmer Nicolás Malevé and activist and researcher Jara Rocha, the museum’s infrastructures and socio-technical dependences operate as a case study. For this purpose, the pair have self-instituted a temporary department in the museum: the Department of Presence Studies. In this space, and in constant conversation with different teams at MACBA, they propose three areas of interest for thinking with and from digital logistical operations.
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Montserrat Moliner, Value production. Years worked  ≠ Years of contribution, 2024
Montserrat Moliner, 'Value production. Years worked ≠ Years of contribution', 2024. Photo: Juande Jarillo
Montserrat Moliner, Value production. Years worked  ≠ Years of contribution, 2024
Installation The idea that presents throughout this project is to show that we exercise a trade in which our existing protection systems do not guarantee basic care when we reach retirement age. Many artists cannot regularly make social security contributions, as they cannot pay the freelance quota, and they end up without a decent pension. We are not the exception; this is common in non-regulated professions that depend on extreme variability in demand, which requires workers to improvise all sorts of extra complementary activities according to their chosen discipline or sector. Most artists who want to live off their work are financially unstable, unless they can live off passive income or, in other words, have guaranteed financial support.  
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Julia Montilla, Noisy Spirits Shaking Tools to Declare that the Cleaning Service is Structural Work, 2024
Julia Montilla. Esperits sorollosos agitant eines per reclamar que el servei de neteja és treball estructural, 2024. [contra]panorama. Foto Juande Jarillo
Julia Montilla, Noisy Spirits Shaking Tools to Declare that the Cleaning Service is Structural Work, 2024
Installation Julia Montilla presents Noisy Spirits Shaking Tools to Declare that the Cleaning Service is Structural Work, an installation that asks how to bring workers who permanently inhabit the museum but usually go unnoticed during opening hours back into the institution’s public life. This pattern fosters a disconnect with the essentiality and value of these workers’ tasks and knowledge.
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Radia Cava-ret, Immigrant Karaoke: Now I am here, 2024
Radia Cava-ret, Immigrant Karaoke: Now I am here, 2024
Performance Karaoke conducted by Radia Cava-ret and accompanied by Sindillar/Sindihogar with the project Saberes y Sabores. The Immigrant Karaoke created on 2017, is a live art device that dissents from the migratory and “racialising” policies of Fortress Europe, which mistreat and expel those who sustain life.
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María Ruido, Las reglas del juego, 2022
María Ruido, Las reglas del juego, 2022
Video The Rules of the Game is a conversation-performance in sequence shot between the writer and activist Brigitte Vasallo and the artist, filmmaker and researcher María Ruido about declassification, institutional violence and class performance. The Rules of the Game dives into the difficulties, conflicts and contradictions of class and gender related to the world of labour within the artistic and cultural sphere, and how, from a personal and intimate perspective, we attempt to respond to them.
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The White Pube, Poor Artists, 2025
The White Pube, Poor Artists, 2025
Lecture At a time when working as a professional artist is an increasingly unattainable luxury, art criticism duo The White Pube investigate why so many artists try anyway. Poor Artists follows aspiring artist Quest Talukdar as she embarks on a surreal journey into the creative industry, where she must decide whether she cares more about success or about staying true to herself. 
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Itinerary

Artistic practice as work: how to collectively organise or give up in the attempt

This selection of podcasts from the Radio Web MACBA archive collects conversations with local artists, curators, mediators and cultural workers who, aside from detailing their respective practices, lay out their material working conditions. Self-exploitation, project-based work, intermittent employment, precariousness and all kinds of strategies for resilience and subsistence recur again and again in these interviews as an integral part of everyday life and conditions of possibility. Their stories not only denounce structural barriers and systematic inequalities, they also inspire debates about alternative models that could guarantee a fairer and more sustainable working environment for creative communities.
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