It is not a small adventure, a small testimonial landing of the City and Science Biennial of Barcelona in Madrid. It is a fully-fledged shared biennial, which next February, when it comes to life, will have a volume of activity, say those in charge, very similar between the two cities. The Barcelona cultural and scientific co-capital agreement will thus take on an unprecedented dimension, with an event truly shared between the two metropolises that was presented today in Madrid by the head of Culture of the Barcelona City Council, Jordi Martí, and the Círculo de Bellas Artes, Valerio Rocco Lozano, on the spectacular terrace of the Madrid institution.
From February 21 to 26, in parallel to the events of the biennial in Barcelona, the Círculo de Bellas Artes will host conferences, debates, exhibitions, film series, children's activities, concerts and walks through scientific Madrid. It will be a very different model from the one in the Catalan capital, where the activity is scattered throughout many areas of the city, but Rocco recalls that they have numerous rooms in the institution's enormous building and that for the first year he thought it was important not to disperse the activity to make it visible. In addition, it will be held the same week as the Arco fair because, he states, "we want to maximize the encounters between culture and science, art and science, and that week we are going to achieve it, we want to become a national reference in the relations between art, science and technology and I believe that with this biennial we are going to achieve it".
Rocco explains that they have finally achieved a budget of 200,000 euros -the Biennial, in total, has some 800,000, but the Barcelona model requires more expenses in setting up spaces that Madrid will not have- and has thanked the Banco Sabadell Foundation for has promoted the project from the beginning. A project about which a handful of speakers have already revealed themselves, such as Eduardo Camacho-Húbner, an expert in mobility and sustainable development who will speak about the concept of the city, like Mónica Bello, director of the art section at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research in Geneva, such as Marcus Watkins, director of the NASA management office, and biologist Ricard Soler, curator of the Brain(s) exhibition that could be seen at the CCCB in Barcelona and will shortly be seen at the Fundación Telefónica de Madrid. The neurobiologist Rafael Yuste will analyze the relationship between current knowledge of the brain... and Kant's philosophy.
In a Biennial that, recalled the curator Lluís Nacenta, "explores the concept of life, or that of living, rather, focusing on the conditions of possibility of life, the central question would be what it means to live on the planet today , and specifically what it means to live in our cities", without forgetting the rest of living beings whose lives "are deeply intertwined with ours and have a value in themselves" and without leaving aside "the lives of machines, because digital media are no longer just tools that we use, but with which we live".
A life explored in global terms for which the Barcelona conferences will have speakers such as Samuel Myers, a planetary health expert from Harvard, who will make a detailed diagnosis of the idea of planetary health in the current circumstances of the environmental and climate crisis. Lea Shanley, from Berkeley, and Muki Haklay, from the University of London, for their part, will make "an updated diagnosis of citizen science on the planet." And, Nacenta has pointed out, "with the desire to overcome barriers between disciplines, the researcher and curator José Luis de Vicente and the composer Maria Arnal will present the last chapter of the podcast in which they work, Each layer of the atmosphere. A journey through of the sounds of the planet, in science and art explore the footprint of climate change in the air and therefore in the ecosystems we live in and on which we depend".
Jordi Martí recalled that it is a single team of five curators "thinking of a great biennial for both cities" and thanked the Fine Arts circle for its enthusiastic reception when a year ago he presented the proposal to hold the third City and Science Biennial between Barcelona and Madrid. "If in some area the look has to be complementarity, teamwork, in common, is in the scientific field, citizen science, exploration of the relationship between art and science", he stressed, and wished that "the future is complicity, joint work and that this is the beginning of many co-productions between both cities".
