After the city of Pristina, in Kosovo, in 2022, Manifesta has set course for the Barcelona metropolis, the largest territory in which it has had to deploy, in thirty years of existence. Each edition of this biennial of nomadic art, which has made Europe its field of exploration, is a half-experimental, half-diplomatic UFO, whose final result is only the visible part of a process with blurred contours. To the point that we can ask ourselves the question: is Manifesta really an art biennial, or rather a sort of Trojan horse that would put art at the service of committed urban engineering?
“Manifesta is an incubator for social and urban change, which uses culture to create new public spaces. Our symbolic interventions aim to open perspectives”confirms Hedwig Fijen, president, director and founder of this unique event. At the origin of each adventure, a city applies to the Dutch foundation, based in Amsterdam, motivated by the opportunity to shine a spotlight on its territory, but also by the opportunity to be helped to project itself better. in the future.
Manifesta is therefore above all a method: from the initial dialogue a whole network of meetings and exchanges with local communities is woven to revisit the past, understand the needs and question the cultural and urban dynamics of a city. Once this scan of the problems of a territory has been established, the structure orchestrates a tailor-made art journey, which examines the spirit and possibilities of the places through the poetry of contemporary works.
Sixteen sites in twelve cities
This time the invitation came, three years ago, from the team of the mayor of Barcelona at the time, Ada Colau, from the radical left. The collaboration was then somewhat thwarted by the last elections, in 2023, and the arrival of a new mayor, the socialist Jaume Collboni, who inherited the project. With a budget already committed by the city of 5.2 million euros (out of a total of 8.9 million, with other public financiers, sponsorship and ticketing).
“The idea was to collectively think about the outskirts of this city under pressure from tourism since the 1992 Olympic Games, and delimited by two rivers, the sea and the mountain”summarizes Fernando Paniagua de Paz, the coordinator of the municipalities participating in the project. The challenge of this Catalan edition was therefore to map a territory subject to an industrial past which polluted the waters, to an extension of the port which shifted the mouth of a river by 3 kilometers, to drought and flooding linked to climate change.
You have 60.6% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
Related News :