Oriol Fontdevila i Subirana (Manresa, 1978) is the new director of the Bòlit Centre for Contemporary Art in Girona. A curator, professor, and art critic, he has combined the management of cultural centers throughout Catalonia, such as the Sala de Arte Joven (Young Art Gallery) of the Generalitat (Catalan Government), with a solid academic career at the university. This autumn, Fontdevila has taken over the Ingrid Guardiola's replacement at the head of the three rooms of the Girona contemporary art museum, inaugurating the first exhibition Woman, Life, Freedom by the artist Tere Recarens from Arbúcies. The exhibition, which can be visited until February, respectfully addresses, with community involvement and a global perspective, the struggle of Iranian women for gender justice, featuring extremely powerful pieces, such as the painted carpet on the floor of the Rambla headquarters. It's a clear statement of intent that encapsulates the key principles of the new management: promoting local artists, education in democratic values, and alliances with social actors, all aimed at establishing Bòlit as a vibrant, accessible space committed to the realities of its surroundings.

This month of May Ingrid Guardiola (Girona, 1980) will close her period as director of the Bòlit Centre for Contemporary Art in Girona. She will do so after four very intense and fruitful years, in which she has carried out a host of exhibitions and activities on different burning issues of contemporary society, always exhibiting interesting pieces and with a very critical and powerful discursive line. Despite the unequivocally positive results, Guardiola has decided not to opt for renewal: exhausted by bureaucracy, procedures and the enormous amount of paperwork she has to deal with on a daily basis, she prefers to step away, at least for a while, from the management of a public institution of this magnitude. Her last months as director of the Girona contemporary art museum coincide with the publication of her second essay, The servitude of protocols (Arcadia), in which she reflects, forcefully but not fatalistically, on how the system of rules, conventions, patterns and algorithms determine our conduct and perception. Drawing on a wide range of philosophical and sociological references such as Foucault, Deleuze, Marcuse, Kracauer and Shoshana Zuboff, the book lucidly addresses the ecosystem of daily and specific protocols that, in the era of social networks, information technology and technology, affect us and affect us.

We have just entered a five-year period at the end of which we will have two expanded museums, MNAC and MACBA, and a new one in Barcelona. I would like to elaborate on the established fact that the museum of modern or contemporary art has ceased to be only a receiving box for historical sediment that studies, preserves, explains and displays art at the end of the journey – traditionally you arrived at the museum when you had already gone through all the previous filters, not the other way around – to gradually transform itself from the middle to the fact that artists, not all of them, but a very significant part, come first and foremost to the museum to work, to “manufacture” what they exhibit. This implies in some way that the museum space is, de facto, the study of these artists before being transformed into their exhibition space. This is what characterizes production-based art as it has always been understood in the performing arts, in cinema, or even in the musical arts. How all this happened almost half a century ago is a fascinating story that is still incredibly unwritten and represents the most radical change that has occurred within the art museum since its modern version emerged in the 18th century. What I am going to comment on in this article are the consequences and shortcomings that this now implicitly accepted situation has generated, but without being addressed or debated, surprisingly, in a technically serious way.

We have just entered a five-year period at the end of which we will have two expanded museums and a new one in Barcelona. I would like to elaborate on the established fact that the museum of modern or contemporary art has ceased to be only a receiving box for historical sediment that studies, preserves, explains and displays art at the end of the journey – traditionally you arrived at the museum when you had already gone through all the previous filters, not the other way around – to gradually transform itself from the middle to the fact that artists, not all of them, but a very significant part, come to the museum first and foremost to work, to "manufacture" what they exhibit. This implies in some way that the museum space is, de facto, the study of these artists before being transformed into their exhibition space. This is what characterizes production-based art as it has always been understood in the performing arts, in cinema, or even in the musical arts. How all this happened almost half a century ago is a fascinating story that is still incredibly unwritten and represents the most radical change that has occurred within the art museum since its modern version emerged in the 18th century. What I am going to comment on in this article are the consequences and shortcomings that this now implicitly accepted situation has generated, but without being addressed or debated, surprisingly, in a technically serious way.

The Serbian authorities acted terribly when they took control of Kosovo in the late 1980s: in terms of education, they put an end to teaching in Albanian with measures such as the widespread dismissal of Albanian teachers and the closure of schools. One of the most bloody episodes of this persecution took place in March 1990 when between 4,000 and 8,000 students and teachers were poisoned throughout Kosovo. Those events provoked a wave of collective mobilisations. An icon of this is the ruins of the Hertica school, one of the 400 that were created in private homes in Kosovo's capital, Pristina, in order to be able to teach in Albanian, albeit clandestinely. Until October 30, this school opens its doors to the public as one of the twenty-five spaces of the 14th edition of Manifesta, the travelling biennale which will be held in Barcelona in 2024.