In June 2020, Berlin’s legendary techno club Berghain, closed during the pandemic, reopened to present the Studio Berlin exhibition, featuring work by 117 artists living in the city. One of them, Rirkrit Tiravanija, presented an installation outside the building with the phrase “Morgen ist die Frage” [Tomorrow is the question].

Four years later, this phrase and this reference to Tiravanija appear in the work Totentanz. Morgen ist die Frage, by the company La Veronal, a creation that was presented at the Teatre Lliure and that brings together an installation, a video and a performance that brings medieval dances of death into the present.

There are many parallels between the medieval era and the present. If the former was a time of wars, plagues, misrule, banditry, insurrection, religious divisions and schisms, in the present moment, called technofeudalism by the economist Yanis Varoufakis, the feudal lords are the owners of the “cloud capital” and the rest of us are serfs, a new system of exploitation that causes inequality to increase. Indefiniteness and uncertainty reopen wounds, frustrations, millennial fears and become fertile ground for simple and populist missives. The medieval dances of death were a way of overcoming fear. The fear of death and insecurity; a fear that in our societies is also associated with the loss of values and an overreaction to ward it off through excess (of images, productions, noises, activities, opinions…). The final video of Totentanz, with an avalanche of images of an overflowing present (wars, violence, parties, masses, protests, genocides…), leaves us breathless. Perhaps this is the current way of neutralizing fears, with an excess of images and noises that hypnotizes us. While this state of shock lasts, censorship reigns with total impunity (the one that asks not to make compromising political statements, point out injustices or, directly, cancels).

But the dances of death are also a catharsis after which new things can emerge. The Middle Ages were not a uniform period, but between the 11th and 15th centuries the foundations of the Renaissance were laid, as well as a scientific interest in the investigation of nature, empirical knowledge and the phenomena of the universe. In the present, aspects of different moments coexist, the difference being that all those changes that in the past took centuries can now take place in a few years. It is essential to be attentive to analytical analogies to understand the current international system, but unlike how scholars of international politics or sociology would do it, those who can best work on these analogies are the artists who, in a free way, generate spaces for thought and lucidity.

[Article published in Bonart, March 2025]

Making visible for change? About institutional critique, institutionalized critique and constituent practices

The twenty-five years that separate 1999 from 2024 constitute a period of time that has radically changed everything. The Internet and digitization have transformed the world we live in: how we move, how we relate, how we travel, how we communicate, how we receive and disseminate information. The world of art is not left out. The year 2000 meant the transition to an inescapable globalization and not without negative consequences, and we are suffering from it now. Countless possibilities have opened up to travel and access everything that is happening on the other side of the world but, at the same time, this openness has diversified, multiplied and made precarious the number of cultural agents operating around the world.

Artistic mobility

The internationalization or the presence of Catalan creation on the international scene, in the twenties and thirties of the last century, had as its main milestone, first, the trip to Paris, in order to learn about the most avant-garde artistic trends and be part of them and , later, in New York. In the sixties and seventies, the diaspora of Catalan artists took this same route, in Paris (Rabascall, Miralda, Rossell) and New York (Muntadas, Torres). From the 2000s, the mobility of the artistic sector is favored by the ease of travel (with the cheapening of airplane prices), a little more moderate nowadays.

In the mid-1990s, international curatorial programs emerged at Le Magasin, De Appel, Bard College or Goldsmith, which involved mobility and the creation of work and exchange networks. The same happens with artistic residencies, which continue to play a fundamental role for temporary situations of research and production.

Without intending to make an exhaustive tour here, we will stop at some specific moments in which the will to be and do within the international panorama, with more or less fortune, has played a relevant role.

Exchanges and international representation

In this sense, it is necessary to distinguish between institutional representation and the cultural policies that make it possible and organic exchange, concrete people who live and work in other geographical places and who play an active role in the international scene, either on a personal level (we remember the role of “hosts” in Berlin by the artist Chema Alvargonzález or in New York by Muntadas) or, from their institutions (such as the cases of Martí Manen in Stockholm, Chus Martínez in Basel or Marta Gili in France ), without ceasing to be part of the Catalan context while creating links and fabric.

When we talk about institutional representation we have to go back to the creation, in 1991, of the Catalan Consorci de Promoció Exterior de la Cultura (COPEC), which explicitly introduced the axis of internationalization to Catalan cultural policy. Since then, actions have been taken to promote this representation, either through specific exchange policies, aid or the appearance of institutions such as the Ramon Llull Institute, in 2002, with the aim of promoting the outside the Catalan language and culture.

A review of CONCA’s annual reports, since 2010, shows how in the years in which the economic crisis and precariousness have not occupied the central arguments, the focus is on the need for internationalization and keys are provided for new models based on institutional coordination, strategic events and impact on training.

Whether from the Ramon Llull Institute, the OSIC, the ICEC, city councils or the Ministry of Culture, it is essential to promote through grants for mobility both for artists, professional critics and curators or galleries for participate in international fairs or also for the translation into other languages of texts about artists.

Desperate optimism

Another important aspect is the presence of creation made in Catalonia at biennials, fairs and other international events. Since 2009, the Ramon Llull Institute has been promoting the Catalan Pavilion in Venice, “the great event” of contemporary art, often with risky and innovative bets. As an example, we remember The Unconfessable Community, curated by Valentín Roma (2009), or Llim, by the artist Lara Fluxà (2022).

But, when talking about strategic events to promote the internationalization of the context, organized from Catalonia, we often start with great expectations that are not always met. We remember the Triennial Barcelona Art Report, which had its first and only edition in 2001. Recently, the MACBA within the [contra]panorama program dedicated a study to it by Antonio Gagliano and Verónica Lahitte Reconstruction: Barcelona Art Report [ 2001], with a precise diagnosis: “There is a kind of desperate optimism in the repeated attempts of triennials or biennials to define the present and plant their flag in the future. They are always somehow late for the appointment. The accelerated temporality with which the art system adopts and considers its subjects of interest to be exhausted only increases this feeling that everything grows old quickly. Now that the future has ceased to be the repository of all the unfulfilled promises of modernity and has become a source of planetary anxieties, what is the point of continuing to organize biennials?”.

Strategic alliances

The desire to join international strategic events is accompanied by the consolidation of these through the creation of “franchises”. We constantly see this in successful festivals in other disciplines, such as Sónar or Primavera Sound. This is the case of the presence in Barcelona of Ars Electrònica (2021), a pioneering event in art and technology that expanded from its original location in Linz to different locations around the world. Surely, participation in this type of event contributes to better local coordination when developing joint projects that articulate part of the sector.

Another example is the celebration of Manifesta 15 in the metropolitan area of Barcelona (September – November 2024). From its previous nomadic contemporary art biennial format, it has become a project to propose models for the challenges that cities and regions face. Very pertinent, if it weren’t for the fact that its definition and execution is centralized from the management of the Manifesta Foundation in the Netherlands.

The evaluation of all these initiatives is linked to the management of resources. A balance is needed when allocating public resources to events that are considered strategic, as long as they do not go to the detriment of the weakest part of the sector, artists and other independent professionals who, let’s not forget, constitute the most important part in the generation and consolidation of the artistic and cultural fabric.

[Article published in Bonart 200, September 2024 – February 2025]

Writing as Space and Time
A Note on Hangar’s Text Collection

Who said panic?
Reflections on Sonar +D 2024

Sónar 2024: Expansive and Agglutinating
13, 14, 15 June 2024 in Barcelona

When we talk about censorship, we often think of prohibition or cancellation, of the knots that scandalized the Church in the past and that now continue to block the algorithms of Facebook and Instagram; in the criticism of religion, in Andrés Serrano’s Piss Crist or in the political revolt of Pussy Riot. But history also shows us that there are more sibylline ways of making invisible what is important that it is not known. In the unpublished foreword to Animal Farm [The Rebellion of the Animals], George Orwell wrote that “unpopular ideas can be silenced and unpleasant facts concealed, without the need for any official prohibition.” In our present overproduction of artistic and cultural proposals, it is easier to make invisible something that is not considered “appropriate” than to generate a great public gesture of denial that often ends up having an amplifying effect, the so-called Streisand effect.

Subversive memory

Sometimes, a cancellation can be the trigger for a new job. In 1988, TVE’s cultural program par excellence, Metropolis, invited Antoni Muntadas to produce a new work. The artist explored for a couple of years the archives of TVE (key witness of the most recent history of the Spanish State), and found them in an absolute state of abandonment and neglect. He also observed that the visual rhetoric dedicated to King Juan Carlos I was not very different from that of Franco. With all this material, Muntadas delivered his TVE work: first attempt, a 40-minute video that the program never aired without explanation.

That situation, which the artist identified as a flagrant case of censorship, was the trigger for The File Room, (www.thefileroom.org), a work still active that collects online cases of artistic and cultural censorship, from from Ancient Greece to the present, and which is nourished by new incidents that users incorporate. The archive, originally produced by the Randolph Street Gallery in Chicago and the University of Illinois (Chicago), has since 2001 been hosted and maintained online by the National Coalition Against Censorship, based in the United States.

Readings against the norm

Books, as symbols of the generation of knowledge, have been (and are) subject to censorship, prohibition and burning. It was collected by Ray Bradbury in his dystopia Farenheit 451, which spoke of control, the banning of books and the fear of thinking for oneself. There are artists who reflect on it, such as Marta Minujín in The Parthenon of Books (literally, a Parthenon made of censored books, which was presented at Documenta 2017 in front of the Museu Fridericianum) or Miquel García (List of books burned in Germany in 1933, whose titles could be read precisely by applying a source of heat to them; the fire that had made them disappear made them visible again).

Censorship frictions

There are artists who do not work directly on censorship as a subject but who delve into issues that create friction. This is the case of Núria Güell, when she explores aspects related to financing (in Arte político degenerado, protocolo ético, 2014, she created, together with Levi Orta, a limited company in a tax haven, with the production money of a center of public art, and some time later he gave the management of the company with all its advantages to a group of activists who were developing a project of an autonomous society at the margin of capitalist dynamics); with the working conditions of the artists (in Afrodita, in 2017, the production budget of an exhibition was used to pay Social Security contributions for seven months, in order to be able to collect the benefits during her maternity leave), and with the reintegration of prisoners (Human resources, 2022, in which German prisoners could access a job but, being in a cultural institution, it could not be remunerated but compensated in the form of an invitation to lunch with pizza and Fanta).

Self-censorship and other controversies

Other artists, such as Santiago Sierra, use controversy as a creative tool to generate a loudspeaker effect from their works. Sierra delves into very critical issues and does so from stories, which already in their titles, generate controversy: Wall of 137,400 liters of Mediterranean water, 2022; National coat of arms of Spain stamped in blood, 12/10/2021; No (King of Spain), 2019; Political prisoners in contemporary Spain, 2018; 697 state crimes, 2018; Afghanistan war veteran facing the wall, 2011; Burial of ten workers, 2010; among others.

But undoubtedly the worst censorship, the most effective, is self-censorship, the fear of saying or doing what is not appropriate, that may not be liked, that may be uncomfortable, that is not politically correct or that may be the object of criticism in the public sphere, that is, in social networks. The artist Ragnar Kjartansson spoke against self-censorship in the documentary Soviet Barbara, the Story of Ragnar Kjartansoon in Moscow: “I have exhibited in politically questionable places, because I think it is better to do something subversive than not to do it.”

[Article published in Bonart, 199 march-august 2024]

‘Green teams’ vs. ‘green washing’

We live in a world of contradictions: we talk about equality in societies that are increasingly unequal, we talk about empathy and we don’t stop producing weapons while we let people fleeing their countries drown very close to our shores … The world of art also experiences this paradoxical situation. The 2030 agenda is the road map and we hold exhibitions on sustainability and how to build a better world in community, while private jets attend openings of art spaces that promote the preservation of the environment, not to mention the destruction of resources that major artistic events (fairs, biennials or blockbusters ) or, in the day-to-day life of many museums, the amount of exhibition materials that are not recycled, the energy-inefficient lighting or air conditioning systems or how we get impatient when the results of an online search take more than a second.

With the aim of providing action guides for working in terms of environmental responsibility from the world of art, Gallery Climate Coalition is born, a non-profit organization that works from New York, Los Angeles, Taiwan, London, Berlin, Italy and since a few months also from Spain, promoted by Carolina Grau and Latitudes, among others.

And since nothing beats data to visualize what can be changed, the GCC website (www.galleryclimatecoalition.org) offers a calculator that shows how much CO2 we produce when we travel for work, organize a transport, we print documents or work from home.

An institution that has already incorporated concrete measures is the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, which has changed the lighting system, making the most of natural light, uses recycled paper walls for temporary exhibitions, uses rental boxes for to the transport of works, reuses museum elements and is starting a network to share them with other institutions (following the model of Barder.art in the United States). This is precisely the difference between green teams and green washing . Montse Badia

greenteams_vs_greenwashing_bonart.pdf