From the legendary International Art Exhibition in solidarity with Palestine, which took place in 1978 at the Arab University of Beirut (the building and the 200 works that were preserved, including pieces by Tàpies, Miró, Chillida and Rabascall, were destroyed in 1982 in an Israeli offensive) to the Pan-African Festival of Algeria of 1969 immortalized by William Klein or the traveling International Museum of Resistance that kept alive between 1973 and 1989 the Museum of Solidarity of Salvador Allende, the Macba brings together in Song for many movements experiences and case studies that have to do with forms of collective creation and the involvement of art in social transformation.
Song for many movements, which beyond its exhibition format wants to turn the Macba into a “public agora”, with conferences, talks, poetry or live radio programs, also investigates the new forms of activism and cultural agitation carried out by groups like Act Up during the AIDS crisis, when those affected not only had to face an almost certain death sentence, but also homophobia, the indifference of governments and the greed of laboratories.
The project is curated by María Berríos, director of Conservation and Research at Macba, and Sabel Gavaldon, its new Head of Programs, and the title comes from a poem by the African-American poet and activist Audre Lorde, for whom it is important to make noise ” because silence will not protect us” or “without community there is no liberation.” The exhibition also includes the experiences of Video-Nou (1977-1983), community television, or that of the Collectif Mohamed, formed in the late seventies by teenagers from a suburb of Paris who appropriated a Super 8 camera to tell their stories. stories and star in his own revolt in films such as Le garage, Zone Immigrée or Ils ont tué Kader.
Song for many movements (until April 1) coincides with the start of [contra]panorama, second edition of the triennial Panorama project started in 2021 with the aim of showing the work of the local artistic context, but now no longer as a panoramic of the present “seen from above, but looking from other sides.” “They are two very special projects, not only because of their importance but as a sign of a transformation,” says Elvira Dyangani Ose, director of a museum that, she claims, “must be a plural reflection of the society in which it is immersed.”
[contra]panorama will last a whole year and for now you can see a prologue, with an existing work, The Kingdom (2003) by Dora García, and a new creation by Antonio Gagliano and Verónica Lahitte; Reconstruction: Barcelona Art Report.
