The true protagonist of Manifesta 15 – Barcelona Metropolitana 2024, beyond a recognizable story and even —as a political representative admitted at the opening press conference— beyond the selected artists themselves, is the territory in which it unfolds. As has already been explained in much greater detail elsewhere, the project for this edition of Manifesta brought together common interests on the part of the previous consistory and the Manifesta team in reflecting on the biennial project itself, emphasizing its relationship with the metropolitan area. That is, the belt of industrial cities surrounding the city of Barcelona, working with a total of 12 municipalities. It has even been said that it is, therefore, the largest Manifesta to date, although perhaps it would be more accurate to qualify that it is the most extensive, in the same way that, rather than aspiring to the decentralization of the project, it is a biennial with polycentric articulation. A polycentric logic that, on the other hand, characterizes the urbanistic model of many cities in Europe today —and certainly in the United States of North America— where the vehicle is indispensable.

These other centralities, which in turn articulate other nodes, are Casa Gomis, the Monastery of Sant Cugat and the expected project of The Three Chimneys of the river Besòs. All of them centers that can be visited for a single ticket of 15 € during the entire period of the biennial, unlike the rest of the facilities involved that have refused to impose an entrance fee, according to what the coordinator of one of them told me. For its part, the Gustavo Gili’s former publishing house, still functioning as the main venue and catalyst of the biennial, does not articulate other experiences in the context of the city of Barcelona, ceding the protagonism to the metropolitan area. In this way, the biennial puts the spotlight on a whole series of cultural spaces not always appreciated from the capital, most of which are already in operation with their own programming, in addition to opening other facilities, such as La Caldereria in Cornellà, normally closed to the public or destined to other uses. It should also be said that in the case of the city of Sabadell, as Óscar Abril (artistic representative of that municipality for Manifesta) told me, the deployment of Manifesta 15 coincides with the programs organized as Capital of Catalan Culture 2024, so that the projects “with Manifesta seal” presented at the Vapor Buxeda Vell factory, coincide with a whole research developed by a team of curators, with Maia Creus at the head, which can be visited at Ca l’Estruch, the Museu d’Art and the Acadèmia de Belles Arts (a very different dynamic from the one implemented in the biennial itself, as we will see below).

For all these reasons, as it could not be otherwise when territorial extension is the protagonist, Manifesta 15 has especially stimulated the imagination of maps. Maps that articulate all this polycentric network of spaces and that are deployed in all cartographic typologies in the communication and mediation materials, but also in the works themselves. This is the obvious case of the interactive installation #lamevaripollet (2024) from Nora Ancarola in Cal Quitèria, produced for the biennial through the open call for local projects, in which she carries out an interpretation of Ripollet’s urban plan from a gender perspective. But it is also the case of Dïàspora from Binta Daw (2021–2024), a braid of braids that condition our movement inside the hall of Can Trintxet in L’Hospitalet. Hair braiding was a practice that African slaves used as a clandestine method to represent escape routes and that guided, for example, the Maroon communities to places like San Basilio de Palenque (Colombia), where this memory is still preserved today.

Maps can also be cosmological, juxtaposing space, time and beliefs, like Fanja Bouts’ tapestry in the cloister of Sant Cugat Monastery, Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien’s installation or the canvas by artist —and Palo Monte priest— José Bedia which are all in the same venue. The monastery thus becomes a sort of ecumenical temple of a ritualized totum revolutum that is projected to the rest of Cure and Care cluster which includes big names like Judith Chicago, Antoni Miralda y Ana Mendieta (also exhibited in Casa Gomis along with Fina Miralles) and in which an artist represented by the Galeria Continua (Jonathas de Andrade) has not been absent. However, beyond understanding the compulsive eagerness implied by the will to represent the cosmos —and assuming that the success of Cecilia Alemani’s claim at the 2022 Biennale is consolidated— it seems that the selection of artists around this expanded idea of “care”, a wide category where to fit even the environmentalist proposals of the Balancing Conflicts cluster, or the brilliant idea itself of using Casa Gomis as a venue despite the possibility of its disappearance.

Returning to maps —which at least give us the peace of mind of leading us physically and metaphorically to some concrete place: Gustavo Gili’s former publishing house, has tested various visualizations of data that approach the cartographic in many ways. This visualization approaches cartography in many ways, since reorganizing is, after all, mapping new forms of knowledge, and, inevitably, new relations, as usually seen in the works of the Spanish platform Transductores. This idea has also been developed by Anïs Florin, Diversorium & Ariadna Guiteras or Massa Salvatge & Lluc Mayol, without the resulting materials, of course, provide guaranteed access to the content of each of the processes. The search for new forms of knowledge, relationships and data visualization has also motivated diverse research into the idea of the archive, although not all of them have ended up being included in the final exhibition. Among those that did, Tania Safura Adam’s research Arxius Negres: fragments of an anticolonial metropolis (2024) are exhibited through several displays in the Gustavo Gili’s rooms, constructing a counter-narrative of the city of Barcelona through its black communities. A specific reflection on the construction of narratives from the exhibition display runs through Eva Chettle’s game at the Granoller’s the Museum of Natural Sciences Museum (2012-2024) —a joke, it is worth remembering, that Damien Hirst also made in his day.

But if we can be exquisite when it comes to finding maps: is there anything more cartographic than an organizational chart? To really understand the Manifesta 15 project, it seems that it is necessary to read its list of credit. I will not be the one to insist, as many have already done, on the more than 8 million euros that have fed the machinery, but —more particularly— on its symbolic capital. In this “organizational map” we find a peculiar predominance of the terms “artistic representative” (one for each municipality) and, especially, “mediation” (as foreseen by Lars Bang Larsen and Soren Andersen in 2006), while the concept of curatorship has been omitted. It’s obvious that controversial experiments in recent years —based precisely on organizational polycentrality— have borne fruit. And of course it’s not about defending curatorship here (we have brought this upon ourselves), but that, in that list of credits, the concept of business does appear unabashedly. Perhaps, what remains of the curatorship nowadays is precisely is a mix between the idea of mediation and the idea of business (it must be said that in the list of partners certainly there are no big corporations as in other international events, however, in addition to public investment, the biennial intends to be self-financed with a wide list of services offered to visitors —tourists?— including guided tours around the metropolitan areas and car rentals).

Whatever the case, the “disappearance” of the curatorship in Manifesta 15 is manifested in at least two problems. The first and foremost is the blurring of the real responsibility of those who have made the main selection of participating artists and partaking collectives and have delimited the basic conceptual framework in which they had to operate: regardless of whether the process has been well-intentionedly collaborative or polycentric, there are always power relations, after all. The second is the difficulty for the public to make a coherent reading of everything that is offered and evaluate what has been the underlying conceptual proposal (hence we have to resort to maps of all kinds to orient ourselves a little), especially considering that we live in an era in which social networks and the dizzying flow of information contribute every day to disperse and atomize any kind of story or thought. In spite of the successful work of involving “artistic representatives” in each municipality, with the exception of some centers, such as the MAC of Mataró, that made their own selection, many of the proposals located in each of the venues suggest a certain gratuitousness with respect to their context and the general framework of the biennial, which could have been solved involving a team of local curators in the conversation.

Perhaps, from that conversation would have brought forth the idea that the biennial was an opportunity to elaborate a joint narrative —common and not dispersed— of that metropolitan Barcelona that more than “nice” locations, is crossed by the shadows of its industrial past: its social organization, the conflicts between workers and the local bourgeoisie, the gender division at work, migration, democratic aspirations, deindustrialization, the Informe Petra (Petra’s Report) and the cultural reconversion of the former factory spaces, the danger of gentrification… There is no doubt that many of these issues are addressed in Manifesta 15 by artists like Lara Schnitger, Marta Sentís, Fernando Sánchez Castillo, Lola Lasurt, Felipe Romero Beltrán, Lorenzo Sandoval, Emilija Škarnulytė, Domènec, and of course Dziga Vertoz or the collective Claire Fontaine, by initiatives like the magazine Ajoblanco or La Entesa per a un Gran Parc Litoral al Besòs (an initiative to keep the natural spaces around the zone of The Three Chimneys). But it seems to have missed the opportunity to develop a common and honest story with Barcelona. A fact accentuated by the lack of participation of many crucial agents who have long been committed to these issues, such as the iDENSITAT platform which has put so much effort into the Besòs river or a whole cast of crucial photographers.

History has taught us that maps serve —and are produced— especially in times of war. Despite the fact that Manifesta 15 barely alludes to the war situation in which we find ourselves, as Brecht said, art inevitably speaks to us about it. That is why the decision to summon 3,000 cultural professionals to the “opening ceremony” of Manifesta 15 – Barcelona Metropolitana 2024 in the Besòs for a mere celebration under the logic of consumption of a great festival, without offering the possibility of visiting the main exhibition of Imagining futures cluster, can only be understood as a worrying gesture. Since we are celebrating, why not make it public so that the neighbors of Sant Adrià can partake in the ceremony being held in a territory that belongs to them (not only that of The Three Chimneys, but also that of the culture itself) on dates as important as those of the festa major (the biggest annual festival in the neighborhood). Stripped of its emancipatory potential, the mere party leads us to the frivolous society that Elias Canetti described in Party in the Blitz. A party in which, similarly to the performance Ghost soldier (bagging away) produced by MASBEDO for the bunker of Plaça Maluquer i Salvador, in Granollers, we dance in a bunker to the technological sound of bombs, while over our heads death is produced in an industrial scale.

(Featured image: Russian Missile, 2022 © Ira Lupu. Photo © Manifesta 15 Barcelona Metropolitana, Helena Roig)

Manifesta 15 – Barcelona Metropolitana 2024, until the 24th of November, 2024