In 2024, the CCCB will celebrate its thirty years of existence with a program that, faithful to the conceptual principles that animated its opening in 1994, once again puts the city at the center of the debate, in this case the North American urban planning model, those suburbs of houses detached houses surrounded by a garden that summarize the American dream, but are ecologically unsustainable due to continuous travel by car and, whose power of seduction reaches the here and now, when the covid crisis has once again awakened the longing for a life in a quiet environment, outside the chaos of big cities. The history of American suburbs, so present in our imagination thanks to films, television series and novels, will unfold with all its problems and contradictions in Subúrbia. The construction of the city based on the American dream, an exhibition curated by Philipp Engel that will arrive in March, coinciding with the anniversary celebration events.
“The city needs it more than ever. The city has become a hostile place due to its climatic, economic and technological tensions. We think that it is very important to intellectually rearrange it and value its main political virtue, which is its ability to make diverse people live together and in peace,” says the director of the CCCB Judit Carrera, who highlights that the center’s will to “imagine new ways of inhabiting the planet and building alternative worlds through culture” is also what encourages another of the scheduled exhibitions, the one dedicated to the Amazon, which wants to put indigenous knowledge and scientific knowledge in dialogue, as equals.
“Ursula K. Le Guin, the great science fiction author, warned in a 1972 book that if the forest was destroyed, the world would be destroyed. Unfortunately, we are no longer talking about science fiction, but reality. The Amazon, in this sense, in the midst of the climate crisis, is the center of the world, it is the place where the geopolitical struggle for raw materials and energy is being waged most starkly, and it is the space that regulates the climate of everyone,” Carrera argues. Putting it on the table is not to make a requiem for the Amazon or cast on this immense territory where 30 million people live, two thirds of whom are indigenous people, “an apocalyptic view, but rather a song of love for nature.” and towards the planet, which is always above nation-states,” he clarifies.
Amazon. The ancestral future, from November 2024 to April 2025, will be curated by Claudi Carreras and has been conceived as an immersive itinerary in which you can listen to the sounds of the jungle and enter the installations that will be created in situ by various artists and indigenous groups, such as Olinda Silvano, Elías Mamallacta, Santiago Yahuarcani or MAHKU..
The CCCB, which expects to close 2023 with 366,000 visitors (which means an increase of 12% compared to the previous year) and will have the largest budget in its history, fifteen and a half million euros) will dedicate a third exhibition to Agnès in the summer Varda (1928-2019), the great filmmaker of the French New Wave, author of films such as Cléo from 5 to 7, Without Roof or Law, The Gleaners and the Gleaners or The Beaches of Agnès, whose installations will also be shown artistic, as well as her side as a feminist and political activist. “Agnès Varda’s cinema is a cinema made of rhymes, militancy and dialogues. She spoke many times from the game, but her camera was always placed in front of another, and that other, who was a we, automatically became an interlocutor,” explains Jordi Costa, the head of exhibitions at the CCCB. And closing the year, A new edition of World Press Photo will arrive in November.
In the field of thought, the center will dedicate a cycle curated by Jordi Carrión around the revolutions of artificial intelligence, which will run parallel to the current exhibition (AI. Artificial Intelligence, until March 17), will address topics such as climate change or tourism in cities.
