Seismograph
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The founder of the contemporary art biennial, Hedwig Fijen, has announced that she will be handing over the reins after the Barcelona edition. But Manifesta, which has since become an international institution, will continue to engage with the most burning geopolitical issues.
For thirty years, Manifesta, a contemporary art biennial like no other, has been taking its luggage all over Europe. “I am not a politician but I deal with politicians,” sums up its founder, Hedwig Fijen, 63, who, after reinventing herself every two years, “in another culture, another language”, announced that this would be its last edition. And, in fact, this Dutch curator has become an essential interlocutor of European cultural soft power. “When the mayor of Palermo calls me to ask me to solve the mafia danger, I say no,” tempers, amused, the one who first connected her biennial to the East-West seismograph – fall of the Wall obliges – then to the North-South relations.
Each edition is an opportunity to formulate a certain number of political issues for the host city: mining and post-industrial past in Genk, isolation for the Kosovar scene, congestion of the megalopolis and ecological problems for Barcelona. The next edition, announced for 2026 in the Ruhr, will not fail to “ask the question of The rise of the far right in Germany and in Europe in general,” Hedwig Fijen believes she knows. But for her, it is undoubtedly Manifesta 6 (2006), organized around a project
