Museu Habitat presents ‘Fabular paisatges’, a research exhibition for designing other worlds.
The exhibition presents the museum as a space of production and collective responsibility, with a critical memory and a commitment to contemporary creation.
- The exhibition will take place in two spaces, the Palau Victòria Eugènia and the Palau Moja in Barcelona.
- The exhibition is curated by Manuel Borja-Villel, Lluís Alexandre Casanovas Blanco and Beatriz Martínez Hijazo.
As part of the Museu Habitat project, the “Fabular paisatges” exhibition will open on June 27, a proposal that, in addition to showing new works of art, aims to make us think, question and transform the museum as we know it. The proposal invites us to conceive of museums from a reflective and transformative perspective, and will run between the Palau Moja and the Palau Victòria Eugènia in Barcelona, from June 27 to October 5, 2025, with free admission. At the Palau Moja, advance booking is required.
“Museu Habitat” is a project promoted by the Department of Culture of the Generalitat de Catalunya, with the participation of the Diputació de Barcelona, which aims to create a space for research, experimentation and reflection on what the museum institution can be in the 21st century. Museu Habitat is a reflection both on history and on the complex social and sensitive relationships that make up contemporary society.
“Fabular paisatges” (Fabulous landscapes), the title of the exhibition, is an open-ended journey through historical and contemporary works. It offers a critical reading of the genealogy of encyclopedic museums, their role in the construction of a colonial, bourgeois and extractivist narrative, and their possible futures.
Fabular paisatges (Fabulous landscapes) draws on the idea of landscape as a central element of culture and as something distinct from us. Enlightenment thinking revealed itself as the separation of subject and object, the latter understood as something different from the individual, capable of being exploited.
The Palau Victòria Eugènia presents a series of artistic interventions that reflect on the great international exhibitions that reached their zenith in the last decades of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th, and their influence on our understanding of the world; it also addresses visual representation through the interrelation of notions of landscape, movement and identity. At Palau Moja, the exhibition revolves around the idea of memory, monument and public space.
The exhibition is the result of a long process of reflection that began with the conference "Musée de l'habitat. Capgirar encanteris" held in November 2024 at the Ateneu Barcelonès, which brought together international figures, critical collectives and various museum and cultural organizations to imagine new institutional models. The conference explored how museums can move beyond their traditional role as curators of a unique perspective and inherited structures. The meeting fostered a framework for exchange that is now taking tangible form through the exhibition.
List of participating artists
The exhibition includes a varied and transnational selection of artists, among whom the following stand out: Associació de Dones Adrianes del Barri de La Mina, Efrén Álvarez, Paula Artés, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Sammy Baloji, David Bestué, Marilyn Boror Bor, Ahmed i Touda Bouanani, M'barek Bouhchichi, Claudia Claremi, Colectivo Ayllu, Cian Dayrit, Domènec, Lucía Egaña, El Palomar, Equipo Jeleton, Ikram Essaghir, Antonio Gagliano i Verónica Lahitte, Daniel García Andújar, Paula García-Masedo, Pocho Guimaraes, Lola Lasurt, Dan Lie, Aline Motta, Antoni Muntadas, Paulo Nazareth, Mabel Palacín, Carlos Pazos, Mercedes Pimiento, Jorge Ribalta, Philip Rizk, Adrián Schindler i Eulàlia Rovira, Dierk Schmidt, Llorenç Soler, Ceija Stojka i Oriol Vilanova, among others.
