Ferran Barenblit, Director, MACBA – Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona

Ferran Barenblit (b. 1968, Buenos Aires) is a museum director with extensive curatorial experience. Since 2015 he has been the Director of MACBA, where he leads the strategic plan that has taken the organization to a new era, expanded its exhibition spaces and created ambitious intellectual, academic, artistic and audience development initiatives.

Barenblit’s fields of research include: rethinking contemporary institutions under the notion of the “constituent museum”; contemporary art history, with a focus on the 1990s; the role of irony in culture; museum programming strategies; the relationship between art and popular culture – including music and the punk movement. He has a deep interest in generating an intense dialogue among the European countries, and with his native Latin America. He has generated many projects that have travelled from Barcelona/Madrid to Mexico City (MUAC – University Museum Contemporary Art) and Buenos Aires (Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Fundación Proa).

His previous institutional experience includes CA2M, Madrid (Director, 2008-2015), CASM, Barcelona (Director, 2002-2008), Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona (Curator, 1996-2001), and The New Museum, New York (Curatorial Assistant, 1994-1996).

Cristina Lucas, Artist

Cristina Lucas is an artist who lives and works in Madrid. Her work has been included in solo shows, such as “Trading Transcendence” at MUDAM, Luxembourg; “Tod Bringendes Licht” at Kunstraum Innsbruck; “Light Years” at Centro de Arte 2 de Mayo, Móstoles; as well as in group shows, festivals, and biennials, such as Yokohama Triennial, 12 Shanghai Biennale, Manifesta 12 in Palermo, Liverpool Biennial, X Bienal de La Habana, 28 Bienal de Sao Paolo, 10 Istanbul Biennal, among many others.

1 Edwin Honig (ed. and trans.), The Unending Lightning: Selected Poems of Miguel Hernández (Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY: Sheep Meadow Press, 1990), 15.

2 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education, 1762

3 Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2017)