What happens when curatorial and artistic practices that have spent decades speculating about environmental crises are overtaken by them? Are they enriched or undermined? Beached or submerged?
At Barcelona’s Manifesta 15, a cluster of works centred on the colossal Three Chimneys ex-power station at Sant Andrea became a (semi-)intentional laboratory in which these questions were explored (sometimes regardless of artistic and curatorial intentions).
Two titanic forces dominate the site, one formally inert, and the other increasingly assertive. The first is the spent carbon of the colossal power station and its environmental legacy. Manifesta director Hedwig Fijen acknowledged in advance that the site (closed to the public since it became disused in 2011) “is already a performance and an artwork in itself.” It’s an industrial-architectural Gesamtkunstwerk, and the best of the art it hosted acknowledged this, knowing its place and actively working with its scale.
The second force exerting its presence was climactic — the implacable wind and waves. A harsh squall had strafed the area shortly before my first visit, painting the skies above the power station into a scene that a friend memorably described as a combination of De Chirico and Böchlin. Waves were breaking angrily on the shore in front of the building. This is a place known by locals as “Chernobyl Beach”, sitting as it does in the shadow of the chimneys that used to pollute the area. Even now on a calm day, the name and the industrial backdrop creates…
Read the full article in Trebuchet 17 (April 2025)
Manifesta 15 Barcelona Metropolitana opened on the 8th of September 2024 and ran to the 24th of November, 2024. Details of the upcoming Manifesta 16 can be found here.
Feature image by Alexei Monroe.
From Speak and Spell to Laibach.
