Barcelona, ​​European capital of artwork | Culture | EUROtoday

Shortly earlier than dying in Portbou fleeing from Nazism, the German thinker Walter Benjamin wrote his Thesis on the idea of History, a set of writings that query History as a succession of linear occasions that inevitably result in the current: a gift that isn’t actual for the defeated as a result of it incorporates the types of domination of the victors.

Today we reside in a turbulent historic second that exhibits us that the way forward for humanity shouldn’t be all the time a linear development. Today we’re conscious that there’s a threat of regression and that the long run shouldn’t be predictable.

In this context, by which a vital spirit and a reinterpretation of the previous are important within the cultural and political debate, Barcelona is redoubling its dedication to tradition as host of the fifteenth version of Manifesta, the European nomadic artwork biennial.

Barcelona has made a robust comeback to consolidate its place on the worldwide artwork map and likewise because the cultural co-capital of Spain, bringing top-level modern artwork to its residents.

Manifesta is among the most necessary occasions on the worldwide artwork calendar and takes place each two years in a unique metropolis in Europe. In this version, the occasion is specializing in metropolitan Barcelona to discover, via artwork, the relationships between the constructed and pure environments of cities, between individuals and, above all, between these and the planet.

For the primary time, and after visiting cities resembling Marseille, Zurich, Palermo and Pristina, Manifesta covers a territory that goes past the boundaries of a metropolis, turning the metropolitan area of Barcelona right into a canvas and theme for modern creative creation. The creative creation accompanies and underlines the metropolitan actuality of Barcelona.

The headquarters of the previous Gustavo Gili publishing home shall be an important hub for the academic and creative mediation programmes that characterise this biennial, which is able to re-read our current historical past with an exhibition on the archives of the Catalan pedagogical renewal of the twentieth century.

The texts of the Catalan instructional renewal motion have by no means earlier than been translated into English. Now, they’re positioned on the identical stage as internationally recognised strategies resembling Montessori, Waldorf or Freinet, in order that the world can study concerning the different instructional fashions that many people have grown up with.

Manifesta was born in Rotterdam just a few years after the autumn of the Berlin Wall, with the goal of creating a dialogue between Eastern and Western Europe and amplifying the voice of artists in modern debates. In the approaching weeks, Barcelona would be the nerve centre of European and, due to this fact, international artwork. I invite you all to get pleasure from this collective expertise that can provide a brand new cartography of tradition within the metropolitan area, an inventive take a look at the seek for social and ecological transformation by which the town is engaged.

Manifesta will generate information, sensitivity, questions, networking, reflection, motion and legacy. It is a novel alternative for the worldwide promotion of Catalan artists and can make clear reinterpretations of historical past and tales which have by no means been defined: these tales of the defeated that Benjamin identified. Stories which might be crucial to construct a greater future by which we will definitively overcome the ghosts of the previous.