That cities are complex organisms made up of bodies that interact –or not– with each other is a constant that is accentuated in the internet age: the digital bubbles in which many people take refuge, reinforced by the separating algorithm, multiply cities within the city, the barcelonas within this elusive Barcelona.
For this reason, if one intends to comment on the challenges of the rentrée culture, one must inevitably place the focus on increasingly numerous and dispersed scenarios. How to assess the health status and life expectancies of a sector that is so atomized? Can the sum of the Barcelonas be considered a city?
The question lends itself to evasive answers. Unless the attention is directed, precisely, to the movements that contradict this tendency to cultural feudalism and that for some time now have begun to proliferate in Barcelona. The most notable of them would be the one that connects art with science and technology, creating an intersection space in which the Catalan capital can build new capacities.
One doubt with which the new course begins is what will have more weight in the final balance: the positive effect of this multiplication of movements that connect disparate areas of culture or the possibility that the energy crisis and its derivatives lead to a recession that ends once again testing the resistance capacity of this precarious sector.
At the moment, as of September 11, the situation is uncertain and goes by neighborhood. According to various sources consulted, advance sales, although not as expected, generally remain at acceptable levels. What remains to be seen is whether or not culture consumers will end up buying their ticket in the days leading up to the show and whether the bookstores, which are now in a delicate moment, will take flight.
Crisis situations tend to favor connections between sectors that would otherwise remain isolated. It was seen during the pandemic or with the joining of forces to pressure the Government and achieve a decent cultural budget. In this case, one could speak of forced cooperation, as are the co-productions of shows designed to bypass the rigidity of some agreements.
But there is another type of cooperation, the creative one, which not only adds potential, but also multiplies it. And it is not only developed in the field of art and science. It's not that it hasn't existed in the past, but rather that now a generation of cultural managers seems to have emerged more willing than ever to go outside their natural environment in search of new ideas.
Still in the cooking phase, there are transversal initiatives that can give surprising results in the field of music and in the updating of historic buildings. Others, already announced, point to fruitful cooperation formulas. For example, the decision of the Fundació Catalunya La Pedrera to connect, through its exhibitions, with the Liceu, the Esmuc, the Fundació Suñol or the Biblioteca de Catalunya.
Macba, to give another example of this course, hosts an exhibition by the artist Carrie Mae Weems, organized jointly by two foundations based in the city dedicated to photography: Mapfre and Foto Colectania. And the Fundació la Caixa has conceived a season in which science fully enters the CaixaForum.
There are more examples, but perhaps the most relevant is the joint exhibition that the Picasso and Miró museums will offer next year, in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the death of the painter from Malaga and the 40th anniversary of the death of the Barcelonan. This exhibition offered an excellent opportunity for the Catalan capital to lead the celebration of these anniversaries (we must add the one hundred years of Antoni Tàpies and Victoria de los Ángeles), but it does not seem, for now, that the city has taken that step to front.
In the end, Barcelona may be diluted in a celebration that is being coordinated (in the case of Picasso) from Madrid and Paris. And that the opportunity is unique, since this celebration should allow us to weave a network to strengthen alliances with Miró cities such as Palma and Porto (it has an excellent collection of the artist) and Picassian cities such as Malaga or Paris. Without forgetting Madrid, which treasures abundant work of both in the Reina Sofía.
But 2023 could also be, as noted above, the year in which the dynamic community of artists, collectives, foundations, and institutions that work at the convergence of art, science, and technology make significant advances. The Ars Electronica festival that is being held these days in Linz, hosts a relevant Catalan representation.
The 30th edition of Sónar will prolong a prodigious spring in music (Coldplay, Bruce Springsteen, Harry Styles and Elton John alone will gather almost 400,000 spectators), but it will also serve as a meeting place for the activation of the art and science community.
The setting will be Montjuïc, where Sónar D is held every year. A space that the director of the Teatre Lliure, Juan Carlos Martel, has also claimed this week for the confluence of artists, scientists and technologists.
This Barcelona bet, if it is promoted with the necessary ambition, connects with the spirit of the new European Bauhaus, which has its symbolic center in the building that houses the Mies Van der Rohe Foundation.
Precisely tomorrow, an exhibition opens at Consentino City in which the artist Bea Sarrias and the filmmaker Morrosko Vila-San-Juan deconstruct the mythical pavilion piece by piece to rebuild it again using audiovisual and pictorial techniques. It is precisely this interconnection between disciplines that is the basis for Barcelona's main commitment in 2023.
