Interview with Carmen Corbera for the podcast El Mundo del Arte.
March 2026.
I am Montse Badia, art historian and curator of exhibitions and projects. I am co-founder and director of A*DESK.
I am concerned about the standardization we are experiencing and the loss of rights. I believe that analysis of the past is crucial to understanding the present. I transfer all this to the curatorial practice and to the editorial field based on research and transdisciplinary work.
Interview with Carmen Corbera for the podcast El Mundo del Arte.
March 2026.
Salary scales for visual arts professionals aims to establish a framework document on the remuneration of curators and artists for the work carried out in contemporary art centers integrated into the Public System of Visual Arts Facilities ( SPEAV ).
The main objective is to propose indicative salary scales that promote the dignity of cultural work and that the centers commit to applying.
The proposal is an initiative of the General Directorate of Cultural Rights, Creation and Libraries of the Department of Culture of the Generalitat of Catalonia and has been developed jointly by representatives of centers of the Public System of Visual Arts Facilities (SPEAV) , and the professional associations PAAC (Platforma Assembléària d’Artistes de Catalunya) and ACCA (Association Catalana de Crítica d’Art). Montse Badia has carried out the reporting of this document.
The Kitchen Network. Episode 4 by Luiza Prado
Antic Teatre, Barcelona
Date: 24/3/2026, 8 pm
Welcome to The Kitchen Network!
The Fourth episode takes place in Barcelona!
Unfolding as an episode in the last reality TV food competition on earth, this performance uses humour to examine the divide between online food cultures and their disconnection to wider issues of class, gender and geography.
In this episode we step into a future where the European Union has dissolved, climate policy has failed, and old trade agreements have fractured. The promises of the European Green Deal remain unfinished across a continent marked by material scarcity, even as digital culture continues to project images of abundance.
Across Spain, farmland competes with data centers built to sustain cloud computing and AI. Water is diverted between crops and cooling systems; rural regions strain, cities expand, and digital infrastructure reshapes the landscape. In the absence of coordinated governance, spectacle becomes policy.
Food distribution is now governed by the Eurovision Exchange Agreement (EEA): each year, the country that wins Eurovision gains temporary authority over continental food allocation. Spain, the most recent winner, occupies a precarious position of relative abundance within an unequal and unstable Europe.
Water is tightly controlled, commodified, and unevenly distributed. This episode is sponsored by Blue Reserve, a premium hydration brand. Each contestant receives just two bottles to last the competition, as the AI host reminds viewers: “Because Not Everyone Gets a Second Pour.”
With elderly residents from the surrounding neighborhood serving as judges, The Kitchen Network stages cooking as performance in a time of scarcity, reflecting on inequality, digital expansion, and the politics of food in a fragmented Europe.
About the The Kitchen Network & Luiza Prado
The Kitchen Network is a theatrical performance that continues Luiza Prado’s ongoing investigation of the necropolitical infrastructures around reproduction, nourishment, and planetary collapse.
The event taking place at Antic Teatre in Barcelona on March 24, 2026 corresponds to the fourth episode of the series, which continues and completes the research developed by the artist while adapting to each specific context. The first episode, presented within the framework of Transmediale in Berlin (January 2024), emphasized the technological aspects of the project. The second, held in Nottingham (April 2024), focused on the kitchens of migrant communities. The third, presented at the restaurant of the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin (October 2024), addressed labor and movement through the universe of the sandwich—a food associated with work rhythms and whose culinary origins point to non-native traditions.
In The Network Kitchen. Episode 4
Concept and direction: Luiza Prado
Master of Ceremonies: Albert Sánchez
Cook # 1: Monica Escudero
Cook # 2: Agnes Essonti Luque
Cook # 3: Irene Arcas
Jury: Old ladies from the community of the Antic Teatre
The Kitchen Network. Episode 4 is a produced by A*DESK.
Text on the field of visual arts for the Annual Report: State of Culture and the Arts 2025
The CoNCA Annual Report is a public document that analyses the state of culture and the arts in Catalonia, reviewing the main trends, data and cultural policies of the previous year. It also evaluates the action of public administrations in cultural matters and identifies structural challenges in the sector. Finally, it proposes strategic recommendations to strengthen the Catalan cultural ecosystem and guide future policies.
Recently, curator Àngels Miralda published in Frieze magazine (February 2026) the article Who Killed the Independent Curator?, a text that takes me back to the early 2000s (not without a certain feeling of vertigo) when, in the context of the Curatorial Program of the De Appel Foundation in Amsterdam, the figure of the international independent curator occupied a central place and names such as Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Maria Lind or Hou Hanru were common references.
This figure, heir to the legacy of Harald Szeemann and projects such as When Attitudes Become Form (1969), placed the emphasis not only on artistic concepts and processes, but above all on complicity with artists and critical dialogue with the institution. Without being part of the institutional organization chart, the independent curator played a mediating role between artists, institutions and audiences, generating spaces of productive tension.
Today the scenario is very different. Independent professionals (artists, curators, curators or mediators) become small one-person businesses that must simultaneously assume management, communication, dissemination and production, in addition to conceptual and research work. This multiplicity of roles responds less to a choice than to a structural precariousness of the sector. At the same time, contemporary art competes for attention in societies saturated with stimuli, where the visual impacts of social networks and the entertainment industry often displace the slow temporality of research and critical thinking. Although to what extent Bad Bunny’s performance at the Super Bowl can be as or more political than full museum programs talking about decolonization is another matter. Economic resources exist, but they are distributed unevenly: they are abundant for major museum expansions or emblematic institutions, while they arrive in trickles to the independent cultural fabric, often in the form of subsidies that generate budgetary uncertainty until well into the middle of the year.
In his article, Miralda also points out the consolidation of a model in which the artistic direction of major biennials falls to those responsible for large institutions, favoring the repeated circulation of artists and discourses and producing a homogenization that limits plurality.
However, consolidated institutions share with independent initiatives the desire to think about the present, preserve heritage and imagine fairer futures, although this aspiration is often strained by their own structures. The solution would not be so much to oppose the institution, but to activate numerous instituting practices between art and politics that allow the implementation of multiple institutional forms that can be complementary and truly transformative.
[Text published in Bonart magazine number 203, March 2026]
Montse Badía
