Elvira Dyangani Ose: "My commitment to the MACBA continues until the day I leave"

BarcelonaNo news of the reasons why Elvira Dyangani Ose leaves the management of Macbapresumably in the summer. In her first public appearance since announcing she will be the artistic director of the Abu Dhabi Public Art Biennial, Dyangani was very brief: "Changes must become normalized, and my commitment to the institution continues until the day I leave." The delegated committee will analyze at its next meeting, scheduled for February, whether the position of director of the MACBA is compatible with that of the Abu Dhabi biennial. "This is a matter that is on the table for the delegated committee, and until this is official, I cannot say anything more," she emphasized.

Dyangani answered questions about her situation at the museum after presenting The third twistA magnificent exhibition by the artist Anna Moreno (Barcelona, ​​1984) on the historical evolution of utopian architecture. The central piece is The terminal beach, a road movie Moreno and Brazilian filmmaker Bernardo Zanotta visited the nomadic settlement that Ricardo Bofill built in the Algerian Sahara in the 1970s, commissioned by President Huari Boumediene. "What interests me about architecture is that it projects an imagined future, a stage set in which we move, in which we live," says Anna Moreno. "But, at the same time, architecture is a discipline that arrives very late, because it depends on many permits and technical constraints. And when it finally happens, the future it envisioned has already passed."

The terminal beach It completes a trilogy that the Department of Culture has purchased for the national art collection and which will be housed at the MACBA. "Anna is a fundamental artist, and the unfinished, canceled architectural projects she addresses are part of a questioning of the radical architecture of the seventies, and her fabulation and her poetics lead us to other situations, some that actually took place and others that are speculative," says Dyangani.

The two previous works in the trilogy also feature Ricardo Bofill as the protagonist, through the Walden 7 and the failed housing project The city in spacewhich was to be implemented in the Moratalaz neighborhood of Madrid. As for The terminal beachWhen Moreno and Zanotta arrived at the African settlement, one of the first things that struck them was Bofill's talent for interpreting the site's vernacular architecture. "The settlement was meant to be a model that an office of architects from Algeria was supposed to replicate; that is, Bofill was supposed to go and plant a seed, but only one was ever built. When asked about this village, Bofill said that the dunes had swallowed it up," Moreno explains.

A photographer in crisis

The title The terminal beach It comes from a science fiction short story by J.G. Ballard about a man who, after losing his family, moves to an island where the US government has conducted nuclear tests, and soon begins to suffer the effects of radiation. "It's like a slow suicide," says Moreno, who had to work under strict surveillance by the authorities. "We had to go to the police station many times to explain what we were doing," she recalls. The video's connection to Ballard's story lies in the identity crisis suffered by the protagonist, an architectural photographer, when she becomes aware of the colonialist biases in her perspective. "A fictional character allowed me to take that critical distance. There's a very powerful line I really like: 'I'm not photographing ruins.' And then the idea of ​​a ruin that continues to function, the ruin of modernity, emerges," says Moreno, who also documented some sets for Bernardo Bertolt's film in the desert. The protective sky.

On the other hand, at the Macba, the glass facade of the hall is covered with vinyls that reproduce the details of the adjacent Chapel of Mercy, with the aim of superimposing a historical and local layer on the legacy of a gentleman of contemporary architecture, as can be considered that of archetypal modern and contemporary architects. The third twistThe exhibition, which can be visited until September 28, is part of Barcelona's World Capital of Architecture status.