The act of filming: video in the MACBA Collection
From 9 July 2026
This new presentation of the MACBA Collection focusing on video brings together three projects from different moments and contexts linked to the moving image: Counter-information: Video-Nou / Servei de Vídeo Comunitari, Echoes: Videos from the Han Nefkens Foundation Donation and Pere Portabella: The Committed Gaze. These three projects make up a constellation of practices in which video is a means of engaging with reality that not only records but also activates presences, narratives and ways of seeing often marginalised in official histories.
In Counter-information: Video-Nou / Servei de Vídeo Comunitari, video operates both as a recording tool and as a situated, collective practice inseparable from the social contexts in which it emerges. This material critically re-examines layered social and political realities from a key moment of historical reconstruction and accumulation of information in the early years of Spain’s transition to democracy. The camera becomes a space for dialogue and shared responsibility in which communities actively engage in producing their own images and in constructing an archive that is both memory and process.
The works presented in Echoes: Videos from the Han Nefkens Foundation Donation address these same issues through contemporary artistic practices. By employing contemporary languages and counternarratives, video becomes increasingly experimental, with more experiential textures, nonlinear narratives and languages of juxtaposition. Through a range of formal strategies, they explore intimate, social and political worlds as sites of experience, shaping video as a place for critical listening and thought.
The programme of screenings dedicated to the films of Pere Portabella: The Committed Gaze as part of “Acció Portabella” broadens the range of approaches to video and the moving image present in the Collection by offering an insight into his radical filmmaking, which subverts traditional narrative forms through a distinct political lens.
Counter-information: Video-Nou / Servei de Vídeo Comunitari, Echoes: Videos from the Han Nefkens Foundation Donation and Pere Portabella: The Committed Gaze can be understood as three capsules from different contexts and moments that explore the critical potential of the moving image as a means of rethinking the relationship between document, testimony and experience. Understanding video as a platform for documentation—including in its most expanded forms—also implies recognising its relational condition. All recording practices are grounded in forms of collectivity, which is what this presentation of the MACBA Collection seeks to champion.
In Counter-information: Video-Nou / Servei de Vídeo Comunitari, video operates both as a recording tool and as a situated, collective practice inseparable from the social contexts in which it emerges. This material critically re-examines layered social and political realities from a key moment of historical reconstruction and accumulation of information in the early years of Spain’s transition to democracy. The camera becomes a space for dialogue and shared responsibility in which communities actively engage in producing their own images and in constructing an archive that is both memory and process.
The works presented in Echoes: Videos from the Han Nefkens Foundation Donation address these same issues through contemporary artistic practices. By employing contemporary languages and counternarratives, video becomes increasingly experimental, with more experiential textures, nonlinear narratives and languages of juxtaposition. Through a range of formal strategies, they explore intimate, social and political worlds as sites of experience, shaping video as a place for critical listening and thought.
The programme of screenings dedicated to the films of Pere Portabella: The Committed Gaze as part of “Acció Portabella” broadens the range of approaches to video and the moving image present in the Collection by offering an insight into his radical filmmaking, which subverts traditional narrative forms through a distinct political lens.
Counter-information: Video-Nou / Servei de Vídeo Comunitari, Echoes: Videos from the Han Nefkens Foundation Donation and Pere Portabella: The Committed Gaze can be understood as three capsules from different contexts and moments that explore the critical potential of the moving image as a means of rethinking the relationship between document, testimony and experience. Understanding video as a platform for documentation—including in its most expanded forms—also implies recognising its relational condition. All recording practices are grounded in forms of collectivity, which is what this presentation of the MACBA Collection seeks to champion.
Exhibitions
3 results
Counter-Information: Video-Nou / Servei de Vídeo Comunitari
The Act of Filming: Video in the MACBA Collection
Exhibition
From 9 July 2026
Pere Portabella: The Committed Gaze
The Act of Filming: Video in the MACBA Collection
Exhibition
From 9 July 2026
Echoes: Videos from the Han Nefkens Foundation Donation
The Act of Filming: Video in the MACBA Collection
Exhibition
From 9 July 2026
Activities
4 results
Group and educational centres visits to The act of filming: video in the MACBA Collection
Led by Avalancha
Activity
From 8 November 2026 to 23 May 2027
Guided visits to Counter-Information: Video-Nou / Servei de Vídeo Comunitari
Led by Albert Gironès, Ana Gnagui and Eva Paià
Activity
Every Sunday, from 19 July to 8 November 2026
Group and educational centres visits to Counter-Information: Video-Nou / Servei de Vídeo Comunitari
Led by Albert Gironès, Ana Gnagui and Eva Paià
Activity
From 20 July 2026
Narratives from a Collection: Memories, Violence, and Resistance
Secondary school, upper secondary school, vocational education and training (VET), special education, and groups with disabilities
Activity
From 4 November 2026 to 28 May 2027
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.
