2025 will be the year of the millennium of Montserrat in Barcelona, while in 2026 the completion of the Sagrada Família will be celebrated in style, coinciding with the international capital of architecture. Meanwhile, in 2024, a long-forgotten trident-shaped concrete mass is emerging as a secular alternative to the Gaudinian icon. At least, as far as ascendancy on the Barcelona scale is concerned. It is the old thermal power plant of Sant Adrià de Besòs, popularly known as the Three Xemeneies.
Starting September 8, the Manifesta art biennial will take over the building to offer exhibitions and various activities for three months. The thermal power plant will return to life for the first time after ceasing its activity in 2011. A group of international journalists visited the site this week with Manifesta. The Vanguard was among them.
The biennale's organizers (the majority are women) will only be allowed to use 30% of the headquarters for artistic activities, but that includes more than half of the spectacular turbine hall and the immediate surroundings of the building.
After having attended the previous edition of Manifesta in Pristina and seeing the mastery with which those responsible adapted post-industrial ruins to set up an artistic installation or a party, it is clear that the Three Xemeneies squat promises to be one of the great events next summer in the city.
The work to minimally condition the premises has begun these days. It involves installing elevators, securing floors and stairs and reinforcing railings, among other minor works. Access will also be improved from the Sant Adrià train and tram stations, very close to the venue.
The director of Manifesta 15, Hedwig Fijen, explains at the foot of the three imposing chimneys (two belong to Sant Adrià and one to Badalona) that, in recent years, the biennial has incorporated purposes such as serving as an incubator into its artistic proposals. of a future with more social justice and more arguments against the climate crisis.
At his side, the architect Josep Bohigas, member of the Manifesta council, encourages us to imagine the environment that this ruin will have when the plan agreed upon by all the administrations materializes: a large park facing the sea (the first thing that will be prepared) and a new neighborhood in which economic and residential activity will coexist.
To imagine the future, in any case, you have to know the past well. Thus we enter the bowels of the beast, of such enormous dimensions that they are intimidating. This may be one of the great challenges of reusing the plant: mitigating with architectural solutions the distressing disproportion of this pharaonic work.
With the art still absent (the chosen creators will be announced in April) the place remains paralyzed in the days when an attack of premature obsolescence turned it into ruin. In no space like the thermal control room can you see how dizzying the recent leap in technology has been.
The telephone, monitors and switches were still used in the 21st century, but they evoke a sci-fi movie from the 60s. This command table deserves to be preserved, whatever the use of the premises.
In principle, it is planned to locate Catalunya Media City here, an audiovisual, digital and video game hub that requires an investment as exorbitant as the size of the mamotreto itself: 450 million euros. 60 are now available to take the first steps.
In Catalan audiovisuals there are great expectations placed on the three chimneys, although realism prevails. Sources from the sector recall that the same project includes the Parc Audiovisual de Catalunya, in Terrassa, which is developing at a good pace. The reform of the Three Xiemeneies (and the not ruled out total or partial transfer of 3Cat/TV3 to the venue) must continue its course.
For now, those responsible for Manifesta have achieved something that seemed impossible: tear down the walls of the castle and recover it in the name of art, even for three months. One of them says that the person who has helped them the most to achieve this is the architect Carme Ribas, manager of the Consorci del Besòs.
It would be desirable that, while waiting for the hub, the cultural use of thermal energy continues with ephemeral performances when Manifesta heads to its next destination, Ruhr 2026. True, expectations must be moderated. Neither Barcelona is London nor the Three Xemeneies will ever be the Tate Modern, no matter how many turbine halls they share.
But no human manifestation is more capable than art to give meaning to this crazy truncated conical corpse almost 200 meters high stranded on a Mediterranean beach. Where once the black rain flowed and ruined the neighbors' hanging clothes, let the ideas at least flow.
