What would it be like to live here? The question lingered at the back of my mind while exploring Manifesta 15 Barcelona Metropolitana, at least the part of the exhibition placed in the industrial suburb of Sant Adrià de Besòs. Having walked along a seemingly endless brick wall where a painting of blue sea and marine life was gradually replaced by graffiti, I finally reached the entrance to the industrial ruin called The Three Chimneys. With the wind whipping in my face, I looked up at a vast structure, one that living bodies must once have toiled to build and operate. I felt small and vulnerable, but deeply fascinated.
It is no coincidence that The Three Chimneys is prominently featured in the marketing material for the nomadic European biennial which, for this instalment, has settled in and around Barcelona. Even though the biennial is decentralised, scattered around the suburbs and towns that surround the Catalan capital, the presentation in the disused power station comes across as a main exhibition – not only because the opening event with speeches, drums, flamenco, and DJs took place there, but because the experience of the place and the art exhibited there outshines the rest of the biennial. And I dare say that without having visited all of the sixteen venues featured in the programme.
Using former industrial premises to display art, or, conversely, using art to call attention to a place is by no means a novel idea, but I have never seen it so convincingly executed as here. The powerful impact is partly due to the very distinctive backdrop established by the strange ruin: three giant dystopian concrete towers reminiscent of something from Star Wars, Dune or Lord of the Rings. This landmark – clearly visible from afar, including from the beach of the neighbouring town of Badalona – has been nicknamed the “workers’ Sagrada Família,” as if it were a Brutalist response to architect Antoni Gaudí’s towering masterpiece, the still-unfinished cathedral and tourist magnet in downtown Barcelona.
Standing one hundred and sixty metres high, the chimneys were added to the power plant in the early 1970s after women in the local community arranged large-scale demonstrations against the pollution settling over the area. However, the upgrade did not put an end to the pollution. In a room dedicated to the history of the power plant and the local environment around the Besòs River, it emerges that the price for this method of electricity production was the emission of tons of sulphur dioxide and black soot. The power plant was closed in 2011, but the surrounding soil is still toxic. In a television documentary screened in the collective installation Memory of the Smoke. Eco-social conflicts in sacrifice zones, Sant Adrià de Besòs is described as a slum where the cities of Barcelona and Badalona used to dump their rubbish. In the same documentary, however, former workers at the so-called ‘factory’ speak with nostalgia about a working environment infused by friendship and fellowship. After the closure of the power plant, the local community has fought to keep what is left of the buildings after the furnaces and turbines were removed.
Now that Manifesta 15 has taken over the huge turbine hall and the large fenced beach area around the power plant, the public once again has access to the site for the first time since the closure. For the local population, this is obviously quite a different experience than for those of us who are visiting. For someone like me, who has no knowledge of how it used to be, the disused power plant nestled against the Catalan coast seems a grim and striking symbol not only of the darker aspects of industrialism, but of a more general, fundamentally violent, and, at its heart, colonialist and dehumanising logic willing to sacrifice nature and people in order for someone else to enjoy prosperity and privilege elsewhere. In other words, the same logic that has propelled us into a climate disaster but nevertheless prevails, making it possible to blithely continue all sorts of horrors, from oil extraction to child labour in cobalt mines and the bombing of civilians who have sought refuge in tent camps.
Showing art in such heavily charged contexts is no straightforward task. But in this case, excellent use is made of the opportunities for displaying large-scale works and of the opportunity to explore various thematic connections. The exhibition falls under the segment of the biennial titled Imagining Futures, inviting visitors to see The Three Chimneys as the scene of an eco-social shift – albeit without providing any clear answers as to what such a shift would look like. Just inside the gate hangs Colombian artist Carolina Caycedo’s Our Mineral Intensive Futures (2024), a multi-perspective tapestry that shows, among other things, scenes of mining, wind turbines, and space travel, with a small group of people in the centre of the image protesting for Indigenous rights and against lithium extraction. The work sets the tone for the rest of the exhibition, with adjacent fields of text asking the question “Is our future hostile or beautiful?” and referencing to the need for transition.
The turbine hall’s three storeys are connected by internal steel stairs and an external lift for wheelchair users (the latter having been custom built for the occasion to make the exhibition universally accessible). One of the things that makes the venue special is the large openings between the floors. As a result, many of the works are visible from all three levels. Among them, we find Angolan artist Kiluanji Kia Henda’s installation The Frankenstein Tree (2024), a forest of dead trees planted in square wooden boxes in the basement and extending up through the first floor. Like botanical Frankenstein monsters, the trees have been put together from recycled pieces of planks, broken twigs, and the remains of blackened trees from forest fires that ravaged El Pont de Vilomara, an area on the outskirts of Barcelona, in 2022 and 2023.
Another work that can be seen from all floors, and which very much informs the entire experience of the place, is American artist Asad Raza’s Prehension (2024). Offering a startling contrast to the dense, heavy architecture, the installation comprises a series of gossamer white textiles suspended from the ceiling. The windowpanes on the top floor have been removed, letting in drafts and wind to set the textiles in motion. The first time I visited the exhibition, the wind was strong and the hall filled with violent flapping and swirling, while on my second visit the fabrics swayed only gently. Of course, the wind affects the visitors too: facing the wind and elements directly, you can look out through the lattice that covers the windows, towards the beach and the Mediterranean on one side, and towards the lower part of the three chimneys on the other side. Raza’s work is simultaneously overwhelming and subtle. The accompanying wall text points to the Franco-Caribbean poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant’s concept of pensée de tremblement (trembling thinking), a strategy that cherishes the hybrid and unstable in the face of imperial systems, terror, and domination.
If Raza’s installation is open to interpretation, the message of the work with which it shares the space is unambiguous. On the end wall, a white neon sign proclaims “When women strike the world stops.” Dating from 2020, the work is by Palermo-based Claire Fontaine, the artists’ collective behind Foreigners Everywhere (2004–ongoing), which plays a central role in this year’s Venice Biennial. The slogan presented at Manifesta is a paraphrase of “If we stop, the world stops,” a battle cry used in a number of contexts by women’s movements internationally, including in connection with a general strike in Spain in 2018. In the context of this exhibition, the phrase can be seen partly as a salute to the women-led protest against pollution from the power plant, and partly as a reminder of an unfulfilled potential.
Among the notable large-scale works, you also find Yield (2024), German artist Diana Scherer’s organic and darkly earth-scented ‘rug’ with a network of roots forming manipulated patterns on the front and dense grass growth on the back; the entire piece hangs like a huge tongue from the ceiling down to the ground on the first floor. The pattern is not only decorative, but also incorporates various elements from Barcelona’s history. We are informed that the carpet’s spine motif is a reference to both Gaudí, who had a fondness for spines and bones, and Gaudí’s patron Joan Güell, who made a fortune from the slave trade. Part of those funds were invested in Barcelona’s textile industry.
Other works that merit special mention are: Lithuanian artist Emilija Škarnulytė’s Arrow of Time 2, a site-specific installation of a 2022 film revolving around a decommissioned nuclear power plant; London-based Nnena Kalu’s large, brightly coloured, and cocoon-like sculptures made out of VHS tapes, paper, plastic, tape, various textiles, plastic pipes, and rope; and French artist Ugo Schiavi’s Autotropic Spectra (2022–2024), a kind of organic-technological sci-fi installation for which he has gathered plants from the polluted area around The Three Chimneys. British artist Jeremy Deller’s dark green banner urging us to “Speak to the earth and it will tell you” (2024), a call taken from biblical scripture (Job 12:8), gets the first and last word: it hangs at the entrance/exit, the text presented in either English or Catalan, depending on where you see it from.
The fact that the exhibition in Sant Adrià de Besòs seems self-sufficient does not mean that the other parts of the biennial are uninteresting. However, seeing everything is virtually impossible, not only because of the geographical extent of the area, but also because each place hosts different events during so-called “focus weeks” over the course of the autumn. Manifesta has only one exhibition venue in central Barcelona: the former Gustavo Gili publishing house, which has been the biennial’s headquarters since 2022. Three archive-based exhibitions are on display there: one on the history of the city’s many different alternative schools and educational trends, which supposedly inspired the biennial’s education and mediation programme; one that deals with Afro-European culture and life among the black population in Barcelona; and one that offers insight into various popular and cultural resistance movements in the city. If you do not have access to a car, you need to spend quite a few hours on public transport to see the various parts of the biennial, which, in addition to the aforementioned Imagining Futures, are grouped under the headings Balancing Conflicts and Cure and Care.
The other exhibitions I managed to attend included those in the old monastery in the pleasant small town of Sant Cugat del Vallès and in the former episcopal see La Seu d’Ègara, a collection of buildings and archaeological ruins from the 6th to 8th centuries in the middle of the modern satellite town of Terrassa. Wu Tsang’s 2015 video Girl Talk, in which a dress-clad Fred Moten dances to the languid vocals of serpentwithfeet, sets the tone in the monastery, establishing a kind of hopeful presence. Other than this, the highlights there included Palestinian artist Dana Awartani’s textile work Let me mend your broken bones (2024), Ghanaian Martin Toloku’s wooden sculpture installation Immortal Smell (2024), and Dutch artist Fanja Bouts’s fantastic tapestry A Largely Distorted yet Surprisingly Ordered Map of Regular Irregularities: A Dense Description of The Present Day History of The Future (2023). In The See of Egara, Malaysian artist Marcos Kueh’s woven works, presented in an engaging interaction with the local church art, were among the most interesting contributions.
Being ‘forced’ to spend time on the outskirts of Barcelona rather than in its most congested areas undoubtedly gives a better feel for the region, and many of the selected destinations are well worth visiting in their own right. But even if this decentralisation eases the pressure on Barcelona compared to a scenario where everything took place in the centre, most of those who visit Manifesta will obviously also take the opportunity to visit some of the most popular tourist attractions. Importantly, being a biennial tourist also means adding to the pressure on Barcelona’s airport, which is now facing a controversial expansion that threatens the area around Casa Gomis, a Rationalist villa designed by the Catalan architect Antonio Bonet and currently the main arena for the part of the biennial set in El Prat de Llobregat.
Manifesta does not completely escape the most problematic aspect of the large biennial format, namely, the climate footprint, even if it does seem to be more aimed at local audiences than many other biennials, and even if it doesn’t bring the international art industry crowd out in droves the way the Venice Biennial does. It is also difficult, at least for an outsider like me, to voice an opinion on what kind of impact Manifesta 15 will have on the Barcelona area, and to what extent the biennial actually gives something back to the local population and the city. In any case, it provides a good example of the role that art can play outside of the white cube, and I have no doubt that it will be a point of reference in the time to come.
