Interview with Carmen Corbera for the podcast El Mundo del Arte.

March 2026.

La entrada Podcast El Mundo del Arte: The curatorial rol and art criticism with Montse Badia se publicó primero en Montse Badia.

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]

La entrada Precariousness and homogenization. Contradictions of the curatorial present se publicó primero en Montse Badia.

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.

La entrada A*LIVE 2026: The Kitchen Network. Episode 4 by Luiza Prado se publicó primero en Montse Badia.

In various projects he has addressed the opacity of a state body, the Civil Guard, understood as an operational system of police control (Fuerzas y cuerpos [Forces and bodies], 2016-2018); the exploitation of the natural environment and the forms of regulation exercised by large oligopolies (Energía sumergida [Submerged energy], 2018-2024; El caudal del río [The flow of the river], 2021-2025); or the VIP space in a sporting context as a place of agreements with great political and economic impact (Palco de honor [Honorary box], 2025), to mention only a few.

Firma, [Sign,] (2017-2019) is not her most recent work, although the passage of time has added new layers of meaning. Begun as a final year project under the supervision of Tanit Plana and Marta Dahó, Firma, marks a turning point in Artés’s work by giving central weight to research as a constitutive part of the piece. Firma, is structured around a series of direct and profoundly political questions: What does the State know about us? How much personal information does it manage? From where does it exercise control? What use does it make of this data? These questions serve as catalysts to sharpen our position as critical citizens.

The exhibition, titled Firma, focuses on official spaces that collect and manage our data—medical centers, civil registries, funeral homes, libraries, post offices—which the artist photographs using a large-format camera and an analog process. The images depict anonymous, prototypical, and perfectly interchangeable places, devoid of any trace of human presence. The carefully chosen framing evokes dead ends: spaces without exits, corridors without vanishing points, permeated by a Kafkaesque atmosphere. These are images that reflect the bureaucratic aspects of our lives, now indistinguishable from the vital ones.

In parallel, Artés compiles a large number of documents from these same spaces, forms requesting personal information that repeatedly culminate in the same imperative verb: “sign.” Sometimes accompanied by a comma intended to soften the command, other times followed by a colon, but always stated as a mandate. A seemingly banal gesture that condenses the transfer of rights, data, and responsibilities into a single act.

Photographs and documents thus create a portrait of the state’s administrative structure as a contemporary panopticon. Bentham’s prison design (a central tower from which inmates are watched without their knowledge) and its reformulation by Michel Foucault, as a technology of power extendable to the whole of society, acquire new significance in the context of accelerated digitalization, especially since the 2020 pandemic.

The artist’s book(1) that is part of the project includes a revealing conversation between Paula Artés and Gemma Galdón Clavell, PhD in security and technology policy and public policy analyst. It reflects on how the modern state is founded on data management as a form of organization and control, and how bureaucracy plays a key role in its historical constitution.

With digitalization, this capacity for control increases exponentially. The data we voluntarily provide is intertwined with that collected involuntarily, generated by our daily activities, from the purchases we make to the routes we take, the services we use, and the platforms we consult. We are more monitored, but less aware of it, and paradoxically, we have less control over our own data.

The technofeudalism (2) described by Yanis Varoufakis is no longer a theoretical abstraction but a palpable reality. The primary purpose of digital data infrastructures is not to make our lives easier or expand our rights, but rather to maximize the profitability of large global technology corporations.

The spaces photographed by Paula Artés still exist, although their functions have been radically transformed. It is no longer necessary to physically travel to complete a transaction: one or a few clicks are all it takes. Data then ascends to what we call “the cloud,” a poetic and seemingly innocuous term that masks the proliferation of physical data centers, which are highly resource-intensive, especially in terms of water and electricity, with an increasingly evident ecological and geopolitical impact.

The disappearance of physical space does not imply the disappearance of control, but rather its intensification. Power no longer needs monumental architecture or a visible presence; it operates in a distributed, opaque, and automated manner. Bureaucracy, far from diminishing, becomes more efficient, faster, and more difficult to challenge. The act of signing, now transformed into accepting, checking a box, or swiping a finger, occurs more frequently and with less awareness of its consequences. This signature places us before a central paradox of contemporary democracies: the more streamlined administrative systems become, the less room there is for dissent. Consent becomes a formality, and responsibility shifts to the individual, while the infrastructures of power remain outside our field of vision. Invisibility thus becomes a fundamental political strategy. What is not seen is not questioned, and what is not questioned becomes normalized.

In this sense, Paula Artés’s project traces a critical cartography of the present, in which control is not imposed by force, but rather managed through protocols, interfaces, and administrative languages ​​that we have learned to accept as inevitable.

Understanding these mechanisms, making them visible, and naming them is a profoundly political act. It does not guarantee emancipation, but it is an indispensable condition for imagining it. Because only that which is understood can be questioned, and only that which is questioned can, eventually, be transformed.

(1) Artés, Paula, Firma. Cuaderno de la Kursala, nº 90. Universidad de Cádiz, 2025.
(2) In Varoufakis, Yannis’ Technofeudalism: What killed Capitalism (Bodley Head, 2023), the author identifies the owners of what he calls “cloud capital” as new feudal lords, turning us into serfs. The consequence is increased inequality.

[This text accompanies the exhibition Firma, by Paula Artés at the Centre Cultural Melchor Zapata, Benicássim. 19 February – 26 April 2026]

La entrada Obedience protocols. The State of Data in “Firma,” by Paula Artés se publicó primero en Montse Badia.

La entrada Laboral Conditions in the Arts (symposium) se publicó primero en Montse Badia.

A documentary about Espai 10 / Espai 13 at the Miró Foundation, Barcelona

La entrada El risc radical se publicó primero en Montse Badia.

The renewable water available—from rain, aquifers, reservoirs, or tanks—depends on a complex infrastructure for collection, transportation, and treatment: wells, canals, desalination plants, and wastewater treatment plants. All of this forms a vital network that sustains human life, but also industrial, agricultural, and energy resources. It is no coincidence that the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale placed water at the center of the debate: while the Catalan Pavilion championed radical imagination as a tool to address its crisis, Benedetta Tagliabue’s project, The Architecture of Virtual Water, made the invisible water footprint visible.

Drinking, eating, producing, and moving around require water. Therefore, almost all countries have Water Laws that regulate usage rights, quality, services, and tariffs, as well as the protection of rivers and lakes. Despite being a free resource, its treatment and distribution entail high costs. In many territories, scarcity and unequal access have generated tensions (water wars) that cross borders: this is the case with the conflicts around the Tigris and Euphrates, the Crimean Canal, Lake Chad, and the Eastern Mediterranean, as well as of abuses by transnational corporations in strategic economic sectors, which cause a negative impact on the environment and the affected communities[2].

Given this scenario, it is necessary to imagine hydro-social pacts[3] that integrate scientific, community, and environmental knowledge to ensure sustainable and fair management. As Yayo Herrero[4] argues, recovering the memory of the five elements—water, air, earth, fire, and life—is essential to rethinking our relationship with the world. Water is a resource, a metaphor, and a memory; a force that shapes territories, bodies, and relationships.

Within this framework, Water Cartographies proposes a journey through four artistic practices that transform water into a device of perception, a historical trace, a genealogy of the body, and a tool of resistance. The exhibition unfolds as a confluence of perspectives that link ecology, spirituality, technology, and care. The works invite us to pause, to listen to the passage of time and the body, to perceive liquidity as a space of relationship and shared memory.

Anna Dot. Libacions [Libations] (2022–ongoing)

Libations is a project consisting of a series of ceramic pateras and collective actions. It is inspired by Greek libation rituals, in which water or wine was poured in honor of the deceased. The vases, decorated with local flora and fauna, have been activated in Paris, Villava, and Sant Martí d’Empúries. In this latest action, included in the exhibition Waters, Languages, and Forgetfulness (Museo del Mediterráneo, 2024), the libations followed the historical path of the Ter River, from Colomers to the Mediterranean, paying homage to an ancient branch of the river now reduced to irrigation canals. Libations combines research, poetic gesture, and community, reminding us that every drop contains a story.

Caterina Miralles Tagliabue. 0.5 (2025)

0.5 is an audiovisual installation that contrasts the technological intelligence of climate research centers with the wisdom of the fishermen of the Venetian Lagoon. The title, “0.5 cm,” alludes to the annual rise in water levels, a symbol of the impact of the Anthropocene. Divided into four thematic sections, it combines data, stories, and landscapes to reflect on ecology, memory, and the coexistence of human and non-human forms of knowledge. The work becomes a space for observation and listening where scientific information and traditional wisdom converge in a single flow.

Fina Miralles. Mar, cel i terra [Sea, Sky, and Earth] (1973) and El retorn [The Return] (2012)

Key figure of the Catalan conceptual art, Miralles has explored the direct relationship between body and nature through actions with earth, grass, stones, and water. Sea, Sky, and Earth is a collage that combines words and images—sea, sky, cloud, rain, sun—to allude to the ecosystem as a living unit. The Return is the photographic record of a later action that directly connects with those carried out in the 1970s (Relationships. The Body’s Relationship with Water. The Body in the Sea) and also relates to his work on the figure of women, the fountain, the sea, and women of water as forms of ancestral memory. As the artist says: “What is important is the water that sings, the living water. The water sings, the birds sing, the mermaids, the whales, and we sing.”[5] His work invites us to relearn how to listen to this primal song, as an act of affirmation and grounding.

Stella Rahola Matutes. La Cronometradora [The Timekeeper] (2023)

The Timekeeper is an installation that turns glass into a metaphor for water and time. Through a translucent and breathing architecture, the work reflects on the artisanal and scientific process of the material, its porous and mutable nature. Rahola proposes a “drinkable” art, made of steam and light, that reminds us of the interdependence between matter, medium, and body. Her research connects tradition and innovation, manual knowledge and technology, and champions an artistic practice committed to sustainability and caring for the planet.

Thus, Water Cartographies traces an itinerary that combines sensitivity, knowledge, and commitment. The works assembled speak to the need to imagine a new water culture—a culture that recognizes water not as a resource to be exploited, but as a shared way of life. In times of climate emergency, these practices invite us to think from the perspective of flow, to understand that, like water, we too are part of an endless cycle of transformation and return.

[Water Cartographies is a group exhibition curated by Montse Badia, with the artists Anna Dot, Fina Miralles, Caterina Miralles Tagliabue, Stella Rahola Matutes, and presented at the Fundació Úniques 11/6/25 – 2/14/26]

[1] Paniagua, Jesús M. Agua. Historia, Tecnología y Futuro [Water. History, Technology, and the Future]. Ed. Guadalmazán, Madrid 2023.
[2] Arenal Lora, Libia (ed.), Negocios insaciables: Estados, Transnacionales, Derechos humanos y Agua. [Insatiable Business: States, Transnational Corporations, Human Rights, and Water]. Ed. Fundación para la Cooperación APY Solidaridad en Acción, 2015.
[3] Cerarols Ramírez, Rosa. “Hydrosocial Pact” at 100 words for the water: a vocabulary. (Ed. Eva Franch i Gilabert, Mireia Luzárraga, Alejandro Muiño). Catalog Catalonia in Venice. Water Parliaments. Collateral Event of the 19th International Architecture Exhibition _ La Biennale di Venezia. Lars Müller Publishers, Institut Ramon Llull and Col·legi d’Arquitectes de Catalunya (COAC), 2025
[4] Herrero, Yayo. Los cinco elementos. Una cartilla de alfabetización ecológica. [The Five Elements: An Ecological Literacy Primer] Arcàdia Editors. Barcelona, 2021.
[5] Fina Miralles in conversation with Mireia Sallarès. “The water sings, we  sing”. Video-interview. Fons #06  MACBA, 2021

La entrada Water cartographies se publicó primero en Montse Badia.

Date: Thursday, 16 October 2025, 19:30 h
Location: MACBA, Auditorio Meier, Barcelona 

The lecture “Bodies of Evidence” with Adam Broomberg & Ido Nahari analyzes the circulation and functioning of violent images of past and present genocides.

From Gaza to Namibia, Nahari and Broomberg review the visual techniques of demonization and glorification in war imagery to address their fundamental role in defining and representing the moral limits of violence. The debate revolves around the new fundamentalist grammar created by this documentation, which visualizes affliction—the shattered bodies of vulnerable victims facing seemingly invulnerable invaders—and thus sanctifies certain ways of life while devaluing others.

This presentation follows and expands on the reflections we introduced last July (links to articles below), continuing our exploration of how images circulate, codify, and shape the perception of violence.

Cover image © Adam Berry

Ways of Unseeing

Trading Cards With Lives

Performative Rape

Gaze Deprivation

Evidence of Bodies

“Bodies of Evidence” is an event organized by A*DESK and PEI OBERT – MACBA.

La entrada A*LIVE 2025: “Bodies of Evidence” with Adam Broomberg & Ido Nahari se publicó primero en Montse Badia.

In recent months we have lost two people to whom we owe a lot. Montse Guillén lived in New York in the 1980s and suffered the loss of many of her friends. One of them, Keith Haring, had her help in managing the permits and finding a location in Barcelona for the mural Tots junts podem parar la sida (Together we can stop AIDS) (1989). Miralda’s partner and accomplice, Montse Guillén made a unique contribution with her way of linking culinary innovation with artistic creativity. With Miralda they created the restaurant El Internacional in New York and the FoodCultura project, a visionary proposal that explores the interrelationships between cuisine, art and science, and that collects, archives and activates aspects of human identities, rituals and culinary traditions. Montse was an active, energetic, laughing person and always ready to embark on new adventures.

Just a few weeks later, Antoni Mercader, a pioneer of multimedia art in our country and member of the Grup de Treball, where he met Muntadas, among others, also left us. He was co-author, together with Eugeni Bonet, of the first book on video art published in Spain: En torno al vídeo (1980). For a couple of years, he was in charge of the Dilluns de Vídeo in La Virreina, programming representative tapes of the evolution of the medium. He played a key role in defining the Mediateca de la Caixa, directed by Carme Garrido, conceived as a large accessible archive that focused on the social use of new media. But, above all, Antoni Mercader was a generous person who shared his experience and knowledge while building bridges between generations of artists, critics and curators.

The generations that came after us, and also those that have come —and will come— after us, owe an immense debt to Montse Guillén and Antoni Mercader. For them, for Montse and Antoni, we are left with a deep feeling of esteem, homage and, above all, gratitude.

Article published in BONART 202. Autumn-Winter 2025

La entrada The legacy of those who paved the way for us se publicó primero en Montse Badia.

But this is not the time to analyze gallery models. Rather, we turn to the two exhibitions currently on view at this unique venue—solo shows by two artists with firmly established careers: Mika Rottenberg and Cindy Sherman.

Cindy Sherman. The Women

Encountering Cindy Sherman’s work is always noteworthy—especially considering that her last solo exhibition in Spain took place back in 1996 at the Museo Nacional – Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, co-organized with the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam.

On this occasion, The Women brings together a compelling selection of works created between the 1970s and 2010s. Among them are some of her most iconic series, such as Untitled Film Stills (1977–1980), where Sherman stages fictional film stills that evoke the nouvelle vague, 1960s French cinema, Italian neorealism, and even Hitchcock.

This is the only series to which Sherman has assigned a title. As she explains in a documentary produced by Art21—screened as part of the exhibition—she generally avoids titling her works, feeling she isn’t particularly skilled at it and preferring instead to leave room for ambiguity and multiple interpretations. The show in Menorca also includes early pieces from her student years, already foreshadowing the aesthetic and conceptual approach of Untitled Film Stills. In these early images—as in much of her work—Sherman uses makeup, wigs, masks, and costumes, performing as model, director, and photographer by triggering the camera herself from within the scene. Also featured are selections from the Murder Series, where she embodies mysterious, everyday characters that anticipate some of the figures later seen in her commercial film Office Killer (1997).

The heart of the exhibition, however, lies in her later explorations of women—middle-aged, from diverse social and economic backgrounds—placed in enigmatic settings. Sometimes these are dramatic, painterly landscapes that starkly contrast with the haute couture garments worn by the characters (in collaboration with Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar); other times, the works rely on layered compositions and double exposures.

The series informally known as The Flappers revisits different archetypes of women from the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s—figures who embodied empowerment and a desire to modernize society. These works also introduce themes of aging and the passage of time. One of the highlights of the documentary mentioned before shows Sherman in her studio, where she reveals drawers filled with dental prosthetics, ocular accessories, and masks. We also see her enthusiastically thrift-shopping for outfits—animal prints, sequins, and all manner of glittery attire—which often inspire the emergence of new photographic characters.

Her ongoing investigation into identity construction through self-representation—a central theme of her practice—feels particularly prescient in today’s era of social media, especially Instagram. Fittingly, one can find the cindyshermanlegacyproject on that very platform—an initiative by Hauser & Wirth devoted to preserving her photographs and ensuring the longevity of her artistic legacy.

Mika Rottenberg. Vibrant Matter

Mika Rottenberg’s Vibrant Matter blurs the line between reality and fiction to explore post-capitalist life systems and how they shape our existence. Her immersive installations and video works often confront viewers with absurd mechanisms of labor, production, and consumption. Two major pieces featured in the show are Cosmic Generator (2017)—first presented at Skulptur Projekte Münster—and Spaghetti Blockchain (2019).

Cosmic Generator weaves together real and imaginary scenes linking distant places such as Mexico, California, and a plastic goods market in China. Spaghetti Blockchain, meanwhile, focuses on materials—from raw substances to artificial textures, or the tiniest particles documented during a research stay at CERN. This three-channel video installation includes a meticulously crafted soundscape, incorporating everything from plastic ball manipulation and ASMR-style effects to traditional Siberian throat singing, generating immersive connections to both space and nature.

This sonic dimension also enriches the visit to her latest installation, Lampshares (2024–2025), in which Rottenberg transforms her New York studio into a kind of circular economy. Created in collaboration with Inner City Green Team and Gary Dusek, this series of lamps is made from invasive vines gathered in upstate New York and recycled plastic sourced from local dumpsters. In doing so, Rottenberg builds functional sculptures from materials often considered waste or toxic. Yet these substances, derived from petroleum, originate from once-living organisms millions of years ago. By repurposing such detritus, the artist performs a gesture of transformation—redefining the negative connotations of these materials and postponing their environmental impact through renewed utility.

Cindy Sherman. The Women y Mika Rottenberg. Vibrant Matter are on view at Hauser & Wirth Menorca through 26 October 2025.

La entrada Cindy Sherman and Mika Rottenberg at Hauser & Wirth Menorca se publicó primero en Montse Badia.