Swiss architects Emanuel Christ (Basel, 1970) and Christoph Gantenbein (St. Gallen, 1971) trained at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich) and began collaborating shortly after graduating. They are known for their innovative spirit, and in Catalonia for being the architects, along with the firm Harquitectes, of the extensions to the MACBA and the MNAC. Christ & Gantenbein is a large firm with around one hundred architects and numerous projects in Switzerland, France, Germany, China, Norway, and Mexico. They haven't ruled out maintaining an office in Barcelona once the MACBA and MNAC projects are completed. "Barcelona is a great European city. We are very excited and grateful to have the opportunity to work here," they say.

Between tranquility and setbacks, we review the list of Catalan museum directors who are leaving and those who have just arrived in a 2026 full of changes.

No 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.

Elvira Dyangani Ose will not renew her contract as director of the MACBA when it expires in September, after five years at the helm of the museum. The announcement was not made by the MACBA itself, nor by the museum's consortium, which is institutionally led by the Barcelona City Council. Instead, it was implied in a message Ose posted on social media, where she stated that she would "support the museum team and its governance with her usual enthusiasm and energy until the summer." Museum sources confirmed to ARA that she will not continue in the position, but will remain to ensure a smooth transition. The director has not yet made any further statements.

Public museums belong to everyone, but ensuring everyone is represented remains a constant struggle. That's why the series of portraits by photographer Onofre Bachiller (Murcia, 1959), curated by the head of the collection at the museum, is such a breath of fresh air. MacbaClàudia Segura has chosen this space to welcome the public to the museum's new collection exhibition. It is the museum's 30th anniversary exhibition, entitled Like a dance of starlings. MACBA Collection: Thirty years and infinite ways of being and can be visited until September 28, 2026. Pasted onto the immaculate walls of the Meier building like posters, the subjects of Bachiller's portraits joined, during a night out, the game proposed by the artist: to have their own portraits taken in some of the photo booths and in a gay bar in the Eixample district between 1987 and 2000.

The director of the Macba, Elvira Dyangani Ose, receives the ARA award in the middle of the installation of the exhibition Projecting a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Pan-AfricaA co-production with the Art Institute of Chicago, for which she is also one of the curators, will be one of the year's major exhibitions in Barcelona and the centerpiece of the museum's thirtieth anniversary celebrations. After four years in the position, and taking advantage of the anniversary, Dyangani reflects on the museum's present and future. "When I'm asked if my museological project was to bring coloniality, LGBTQ+ individuals, and other histories into the museum, I say yes, but not because they are the main focus, but because we include these individuals and these episodes that were discriminated against and made invisible in the history we all know. We don't shy away from the idea that..."

The MACBA first opened its doors on November 28, 1995. This Wednesday marks the start of the thirtieth anniversary celebrations with the opening of the exhibition Projecting a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Pan-Africawhich has been quite an event. It is a monumental and pioneering exhibition on the Pan-Africanist movement, which pursued goals such as international fraternity and solidarity among peoples of African descent. Visitors can see some 300 works of art and about 200 documents and other works created over the last 100 years by some 100 African, European, American, and Latin American artists and intellectuals, from the 1920s to the present.

It was May 1991, and the National Palace, located at the foot of Montjuïc, was being remodeled to become the permanent home of the National Art Museum of Catalonia (MNAC). It was a time of transition and chaos. In a storage room, there was a metal cabinet containing a jewel: the Sijena peace-bearer, a unique piece of Gothic goldsmithing dating back to 1400. It was a small piece, about ten centimeters, made of precious materials, which, without anyone noticing, disappeared.

With the Macba, which will turn 30 on November 28th, the public, the art sector, the MACBA Foundation, and public administrations achieved the great milestone of providing Barcelona with a world-class contemporary art museum. "These 30 years have been, and continue to be, years in which we have worked with a very important responsibility, which is to disseminate the modern and contemporary heritage of Catalan art, and also of international art," says the museum's director, Elvira Dyangani Ose. "And we also have the responsibility to foster," she adds, "and we have done so a great deal, the critical spirit of a society that we want to be critical, conscious, and also supportive, and to generate new narratives to make visible and accommodate other knowledge and other ways of understanding the world."

On Wednesday, I saw a man nearly killed on the street. It was in Plaça dels Àngels, the home of the MACBA (Basque Country Music Association), in Barcelona's Raval district. A skateboarder, a fully-fledged adult, who had been balancing over the wall of the stairs (the final section of the wall is about 6 feet high), performed an acrobatic jump on the sidewalk a second after a pedestrian had crossed. If he touched his head or knocked it to the ground, he doesn't explain it. It's pointless to explain that when I expressed my outrage, he got off me like a madman and went off to try another jump.

Let me state the obvious. UA museum is an academic institution designed to collect the best and most significant works of art.heThe fields of study and research that explain who we are, how we behave, how we organize ourselves, and what we believe, both religiously and ideologically and politically. In short, everything that has to do with what makes us human. The museum is, above all, its collection; without it, there is no museum, and this heritage is preserved, restored, studied, displayed, and explained to the public, who are, in the case of a publicly owned museum (the majority in our country), the owners of said heritage. Therefore, its mission is social from the outset and is an essential part of its nature. The museum is an idea, a concept like democracy, to give an endangered example, into which different content can be injected and different ways of managing it can be employed. These contents and ways of explaining them change over time; they are healthily analyzable, criticizable, and changeable ad infinitum. But if the very concept that frames them and their primary function is questioned, be it democracy or the museum, goodbye democracy and goodbye museum. Nor is it advisable that, due to mental confusion, a cultural, historical, narrative, and heritage institution be anything other than what it was created for. It has never been intended that a hospital should assume functions, let's say, of the Ministry of Finance. It's a matter of pure common sense, and yet now, in Catalonia, the art museum is expected to assume functions of the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Social Equality, including the departments of Urban Planning and Housing, by adopting a "livable" museum model that no one knows for sure what the hell it means. All this thanks to Manolo Borja, an undisputed great professional of museography until he started believing his own press, "recovered" for Catalonia in the role of czar of its art museums (it was reported in the press, I'm not making this up) to reorient them without prior consultation with the directors of those institutions, who won their positions in public competitions based on the merit of their proposals. It was obvious that this idea by Jordi Martí (Secretary of State for Culture of the Spanish Government) was doomed to create problems, and it has. This also falls within the realm of common sense.

After being arrested several times on charges of desecrating patriotic symbols, Cuban artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara was imprisoned in 2021 in a high-security prison in Guanajay. He is one of the best-known dissidents of the Cuban regime: the magazine Time He considered him one of the 100 most influential people in the world that same year. Otero Alcántara can only make a couple of calls each week, and one of them is always to the Cuban-American artist Coco Fusco (New York, 1960), who records the drawing instructions Alcántara gives her and transmits them to other artists so they can execute them using the same means he has in prison: a bowl.

The bitter controversy that pitted Ada Colau's Barcelona City Council against the MACBA over the location of the museum's extension has long been history. Work has already begun on both the museum's expansion in the Convent of the Angels and the new CAP Raval Nord in the Chapel of Mercy, initially ceded to the MACBA. However, the future uses of the current CAP Lluís Sayé, located in the former tuberculosis dispensary designed by Josep Lluís Sert, Joan Baptista Subirana, and Josep Torres Clavé, all founders of GATCPAC, have not been fully resolved. Initially, the idea was to give it cultural uses linked to the MACBA itself.

The Macba begins to celebrate its 30th anniversary this Friday with the first major European exhibition of the Colombian artist based in New York Carlos Motta (Bogotá, 1978), entitled Prayers of resistance (until October 26). With more than 25 years of experience, Motta is known for his analysis of the weight of the Catholic religion in the foundations of colonialism in Latin America, and for his efforts to rewrite colonialist historical narratives and give voice again to the individuals and communities that were crushed. His works highlight that the impact of this entire colonial past is fully alive today. "There is a large part of my work in which I have reflected on ancient Europe, the Europe of the conquest of the American territories by the Spanish and Portuguese empires. The Eurocentric, hegemonic, imperialist discourse has been foundational for these works in which I challenge the categories of knowledge that were imported through the conquest," he warns. "I have not yet worked on contemporary European policies in relation to coloniality and racism," he adds, "but I have dealt with them a lot from the American context. In some way, the Eurocentric idea corresponds to the Global North, whether specifically European or American, and the North-South division remains quite marked."

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.