How Manifesta 15 plans to decentralise Barcelona’s art scene

Despite recently suffering through over 1,000 days of drought, restrictions on water usage and soaring temperatures, in the first week of September Barcelona was beset by thunder and driving rain. This extreme weather is a pertinent reminder of the immediate and destructive nature of the climate emergency. And, as Hedwig Fijen, the founding director of Manifesta points out, it is also a timely illustration of the kinds of complex and interweaving challenges that the nomadic biennial this year seeks to explore.

Sprawling across 12 neighbouring cities and running until 24 November, Manifesta 15 presents works by 92 participants—39% of whom are from or based in the region—including more than 50 newly-commissioned works. This edition is designed to reach beyond the geographic, social and economic boundaries of Catalonia’s capital, employing a decentralised model that attempts to connect with the five million people who live within its reach. By drawing on the history of a landscape still scattered with the remnants of long-abandoned industries, the biennial hopes to influence sustainable and equitable cultural change that is reflective of diverse local communities.

“We really want to play a role in addressing the social depreciation in some of those cities,” Fijen, who founded the biennial in the early 1990s, explains. “What can the city become in 50 years? ​​How can we recreate it as a space which is liveable, reachable, accessible and socially defined as a very common space that everybody has access to?”

These are immense, important questions and, while Fijen highlights a focus on proposals as opposed to solutions, Manifesta has clearly set itself a gargantuan task. The true capacity of the biennial to create lasting change will likely only be measurable in coming months and years, when its interventions have been removed and its venues emptied. But across each of its themes and locations—known officially as clusters—it is clear that a focus on community engagement has been placed front and centre.

Pollution, industry and mid-century style

Balancing Conflicts, the first of these clusters, is headlined by the sprawling modernist villa, Casa Gomis, opened to the public for the first time by the biennial. Designed by Antoni Bonet i Castellana and once at the heart of Barcelona’s cultural avant-garde, the mid-century maze now often sits empty, and is beginning to show signs of age—although its original furnishings and charm remain untouched. Nestled uncomfortably in the flight path of Barcelona’s El Prat airport, the building has long been threatened by repeated expansion plans.

Freshly painted to cover the stains of pollution created by a near-constant stream of passing planes, Casa Gomis exemplifies Balancing Conflicts’ focus on the relationship between preservation and growth. On its walls, images of Spanish beaches by the photographer Carlos Pérez Siquier, taken in the 1970s at the behest of the ministry of tourism, in colours reminiscent of the British photograher Martin Parr, the beginnings of the mass tourism that haunts Barcelona today.

Elsewhere, at Can Trinxet, a former textile factory and the largest industrial complex in the city of L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, the Italian-Senegalese artist Binta Diaw hangs great swathes of braided, synthetic hair from wall to wall. Made by women from the local African diasporic community in sessions that the artist describes as “intense and touching”, the cartographic work offers a poignant reflection on the practice of hair braiding—both a process of resistance and, at times, a path to freedom for enslaved African women.

Soap, sculpture and healing through art

Manifesta’s second cluster, Cure and Care, offers up a similarly diverse range of works and venues—unsettling dance in a former bomb shelter and cartoon-like, anti-capitalised tapestry in a Benedictine abbey, to name a few. However, at the sixth-century Church of St. Michael, the artist Buhlebezwe Siwani moves away from the environmental and the overtly political, instead exploring cure and care through a familial lens.

Isaziso 1996, a sculpture depicting five generations of the artist’s female relatives is created from Sunlight soap—a green, multipurpose material synonymous with low-income households in her native South Africa. ”I’ve never felt unclean, it’s just that people look at you and they assume,” she says. “Growing up, when people smelt Sunlight, they thought ‘I know where you are on the scale of things’.”

The work draws on the artist’s “humiliating” childhood memory of washing in view of others in her grandmother’s one room home, as was common in her community. And yet, by harnessing the power of art to heal, she now likens the warm, intimate atmosphere it creates among the church’s pillars to a giant embrace.

Siwani’s interpretation of Manifesta’s themes is just one of many found within a framework that is almost as sprawling as the biennial’s web-like map. Spread across the 1,648 square miles of Barcelona’s metropolitan area and at a cost of €8.9m, the biennial’s organisers could easily face concerns about attracting visitors to its sometimes remote venues. Fijen, however, states firmly this is not the case, instead insisting that Manifesta has no intention of contributing to Barcelona’s well documented over tourism.

“We expect 200,000 visitors—180,000 from the Barcelona Metropolitan Region, and 20,000 from abroad, mostly professionals. We’re not promoting Manifesta through campaigns outside at all,” she explains. “We don’t think it’s even relevant to fly in from, for instance, Japan to see Manifesta.”

Fijen’s final point is illustrated by Manifesta’s pre-biennial research: 30 citizen assemblies through which local communities shared what they would like to gain from the biennial, allowing the director and her team—100% of whom are based in Catalonia—to tailor narratives accordingly. Once this edition comes to an end, 1,400 local people will take part in an externally run scientific study, designed to ascertain its impact. Interviews will also be used to produce what Fijen describes as a “manifesto for the future”, creating a plan for how knowledge exchanged can affect meaningful change in years to come.

While these measures sound thorough, they seem unlikely to entirely silence discussions around the validity of ‘parachuting’ such events into unknown communities—discussions that seem not to concern a confident Fijen. And perhaps her certainty is not misplaced—at Manifesta 15’s largest venue, there is a tangible opportunity for the biennial to address these critiques, and to leave behind a meaningful legacy.

Part of the Imagining Futures cluster, The Three Chimneys was, until 2011, a functioning power plant—simultaneously a source of employment and of suffering for those living in neighbouring communities. These communities now exist within a sacrifice zone: an inhabitable area whose population and surroundings have suffered severe, sustained damage at the hands of industry. These injustices have, over many years, made the 200-metre structure into a site of great ecological and political struggle, and in response, of community cohesion.

Now open to the public for the first time, but retaining the vast majority of its industrial features, the 21 interventions scattered throughout the building’s three cavernous floors interact seamlessly with their surroundings. On the building’s highest floor all window pains have been removed, allowing the drapes of Asad Raza’s newly-commissioned installation, Prehension, to move with the wind as it arrives from the Mediterranean Sea below. Dancing as intertwining rhythms, ecosystems and communities, the textiles create a deep sense of calm in what was once a divisive space.

Below, Carlos Bunga’s La irrupción de lo impredecible (The irruption of the unpredictable) creates a different set of emotions all together. Cocoons in varying shapes and sizes hang, pendulous, above a pit painted in an intentionally nauseating shade of acid yellow. “Cocoons can be a little scary because you don’t know exactly what will be born,” the artist says, “just like this building, no one knows what will happen here.”

The question of The Three Chimney’s future is addressed in a display titled Memory of the Smoke, which also takes on the essential role of bringing together the building’s socioeconomic and ecological histories. By compiling these archives for the first time, local organisers hope to conserve and reassert the historical significance of the space, keeping property developers at bay by turning it into a permanent cultural hub. If, in due course, it becomes clear that Manifesta’s presence and investment has helped to make this a reality, then surely the unusual biennial’s ability to create sustainable change will be beyond reproach at last.