Manifesta 15 arrives in Barcelona. This year’s Wandering Biennial puts its tents a little outside of fashionable and touristy Barcelona to highlight industrial infrastructure and historic places never before open to the public. The 15th edition, which will run until 24 November, promises beauty and amazement, reflection and commitment in a city constantly in step with modernity and research, between heaven and earth, between creation and roots.
In particular, various exhibitions inside the Tres Chimeneas, an impressive thermoelectric plant built in the 70s to provide for the electricity needs of Barcelona and closed down in 2011, involve visitors starting from the attachment to concrete and via the earth on the first floor up to the newfound freedom and lightness of the top floor: a concentration of multifaceted passion, at times heavy, at times wonderfully light, like a caterpillar that takes flight off the earth, now a butterfly. In front of boundless spaces, confrontation and struggle between humanity and nature, the desire for inevitable modernity and poetic decay are there for a Mediterranean spectator who scrutinizes them timidly and at the same time honors the works presented.
Installation View, Nnena Kalu, 2024 © Photo by Manifesta 15 Barcelona Metropolitana / IvanErofeev
This very successful combination of concrete, nature, usury, decadence, abandonment and lightness has its own, independent language. The rough relationship between heaven and earth, delicacy and strength, hardness of work and freedom in space unite thoughts of freedom through a grid that obstructs the view of the sea.
The concrete monster lets itself die despite the fact that life continues in its mother’s womb: the expressions of the various artists who wanted to pay homage to this monument — so particular, so expressive despite its monothematic language.
Autotrophic Spectra, Ugo Schiavi, 2022–2024 © Photo by Manifesta 15 Barcelona Metropolitana / IvanErofeev
Inside the building, various exhibitions, including The Frankenstein Tree by Kiluanji Kia Henda on the first floor, consist of pieces of trees broken and burned by fires that managed to survive despite everything, celebrating the power and force of nature beyond man.
The installation by the Portuguese Carlos Bunga also finds fertile ground within the Tres Chimeneas, and through La irrupción de lo impredecible, which consists of a monumental painting and worms attached to the wall, evokes the constant transformation of the planet and a deep faith in its ability to renew itself.
Claire Fontaine’s three-dimensional phrase on the top floor is also captivating, a tribute to women who fight for their rights and beyond, courageously denouncing the pollution of the thermo-electric plant in the name of the common well-being.
When Women Strike the World Stops, Claire Fontaine, 2020 © Photo by Manifesta 15 Barcelona Metropolitana / IvanErofeev
Also unforgettable is the dance of Asad Reza’s cloths on the top floor , which, caressed by the Mediterranean wind, float lightly with the fate of the world, as if nothing was really important after all and everything was just passing through.
The Heritage Secti © Photo by Manifesta 15 Barcelona Metropolitana / IvanErofeev
The fundamental soundtrack of the visit is Jookko’s audio-visual installation, Sonido Invisible, created in collaboration with Barcelona’s metal-recycling communities made up of people from Africa who are denied basic rights to work and housing.
Sonido Invisible [Invisible Sound], Jokkoo & cantdefine.me, 2024 © Photo by Manifesta 15 Barcelona Metropolitana / IvanErofeev
The creative process of sound recycling, combined with the dance of the sheets that twirl freely, forms an indissoluble bond that the visitor cannot forget and hypnotizes them from the first to the last moment.
Urchins, CHOI+SHINE Architects. 2024 © Photo by Manifesta 15 Barcelona Metropolitana / IvanErofeev
