Epilogue

[contra]panorama is the second edition of the triennial Panorama. It is intended as an extended exercise that interprets the title of the project literally in order to question both the relevance of the triennial (or biennial) format and its ability to offer a panoramic image of the present.

There is a desperate optimism in biennials’ and triennials’ repeated attempts to define the present and plant their flag in the future. Somehow, they are always late to the party. The accelerated pace at which the art system picks up and discards its chosen themes of interest only exacerbates that feeling that everything is getting old prematurely. Now that the future has ceased to be the repository of all the unfulfilled promises of modernity and become instead the source of our planetary anxieties, what is the point of continuing to organise biennials? As an institution that serves to arrange the modern and make it legible, does the museum have any legitimacy left?

What began as a Prologue is becoming an Epilogue, a series of add-ons. This new presentation of [contra]panorama brings together five works produced specifically for the project, which will unfold in the space in a series of ongoing transitions. The exhibition will open with pieces by Julia Montilla, Nicolas Malevé and Jara Rocha. These works under construction will coexist and keep the doors to the exhibition rooms open at all times, as well as operating in connection with the actions in the entrezonas, with Albert Gironès, Eva Paià and Marina Ribot, before finally giving way (and space) to Montserrat Moliner and Elena Blesa Cábez in collaboration with Violeta Mayoral. While seemingly disparate, all these projects perform gestures that denaturalise the museum space, drawing attention to the protocols, working conditions, norms and infrastructures that serve to construct the museum as stage. This highlights the continuous but largely invisible maintenance work needed to sustain the institution and its agents. It also suggests the possibility of a dismantling exercise that would open up to other forms of institutional imagination.

Nicolas Malevé and Jara Rocha, High Latencies, 2024

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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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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Julia Montilla, Noisy Spirits Shaking Tools to Declare that the Cleaning Service is Structural Work, 2024

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.

Activities

7 results

Tour/visit with interareas at [contra]panorama

entrezones

Activity

Thursday February 20, 2025

Tour/visit with interareas at [contra]panorama

interareas

Activity

Thursday, December 12, 2024

Study of Presence with Nerea Calvillo 

High Latencies

Activity

Wednesday, January 22, 2025

Study of Presence with Editorial Concreta 

High Latencies

Activity

Sunday November 17, 2024

Study of Presence with Ren Loren Britton (talk). Feeling-Knowing-Making: Unlining Techno-Stories 

High Latencies

Activity

Thursday October 17, 2024

Study of Presence with Ren Loren Britton (workshop). Non-Foreclosed Access Points: pluralizing virtuality

High Latencies

Activity

Thursday October 17, 2024

Resonances. Collective Tour Through Different Areas of the Museum

interareas

Activity

Monday July 1, 2024

participants

Elena Blesa

Nerea Calvillo

Albert Gironès

Jose Iglesias García-Arenal

Ren Loren Britton

Nicolas Malevé

Violeta Mayoral

Montserrat Moliner

Julia Montilla

Barcelona, 1970

Eva Paià

Marina Ribot

Jara Rocha

Laura Vallés Vílchez

In 2021, MACBA launched the triennial Panorama, which aimed to “deepen its collaboration and dialogue with local artists and cultural agents”. [contra]panorama, the 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.