The science that hides behind Pixar films, the art of the 19th century portrait according to the Prado Museum, the experimental and avant-garde photography that anchors at the Pompidou, the fruitful relationship between cinema and espionage… The curtain rises on the new season of the Caixaforum centers, a course that has been put together from three key elements such as technology, science and sustainability and the first thing that is seen, the first thing that the eye perceives, is the ‘storyboard’ of ‘Brave’. Or the 3D modeling of the unloving bear from ‘Toy Story 3’. Or, for that matter, all the work behind the clumsy moves of Sulley, the good-natured scarecrow from ‘SA monsters’.
“We will ask ourselves how we can learn science by watching a Pixar film”, summarizes the director of the Culture and Science area of the La Caixa Foundation, Ignasi Miró, when presenting ‘The Science of Pixar’, one of the milestones of the season. This is an exhibition developed by the Boston Science Museum that allows you to discover the creativity and mathematics behind titles such as ‘Luca’, ‘Cars’, ‘Finding Nemo’ or ‘Inside Out’. One more step with respect to ‘Building Characters’, shows that could already be seen a couple of years ago, and that will arrive at Cosmocaixa in May to redouble the centers’ commitment to science.
Sully, the protagonist of ‘Monsters S. A’
So much so that, for the first time in its history, Caixaforum Madrid will open its doors to a scientific exhibition to surrender to the fabulous exhibition on Nikola Tesla that could be seen in Barcelona last year. In addition, Caixaforum Mallorca will recreate the gardens of Anglada-Camarasa from botanical studies, the photographer Michael Benson will explore the ‘nanocosm’, and National Geographic will showcase the world’s vast chromatic richness with an exhibition focused on colour. Technology, science and sustainability, taking the lead in the exhibition course. “They have always been present but now they constitute an important vector of what culture has to be in society,” claims Elisa Duran, deputy general director of the La Caixa Foundation.
Some of the great exhibitions from last year, such as those dedicated to comics, tattoos or the secrets of the mummies at the British Museum, are still hanging out in the various Caixaforums, but the premiere chapter is dominated, with permission from Pixar, by the relationships between cinema and espionage. A successful binomial that, from James Bond to Mata Hari and from Edward Snowden to Carrie Mathison, will arrive in Madrid in June 2023 under the suggestive title of ‘Top Secret’.
And no, it’s not about having a laugh at the expense of the delirious film starring Val Kilmer (you know: «Novelties, souvenirs, joke articles!»), but to go deeper, in collaboration with The French Cinematheque, in one of the most fruitful alliances in the history of cinema. “It is a hot topic in the current geopolitical context,” Miró highlights. Full of films, series, illustrations and objects of all kinds, the exhibition explores the role of film directors and spies as distorters of reality and looks for connections between fiction and reality and actors and spies.
From portraiture to experimental photography
The most orthodox part of the program will remain in the hands of ‘The Portrait Century’, an exhibition that will start shooting in Barcelona in February and that will bring together works by Goya, Sorolla or Zuloaga, all of them from the Prado, around the notion of portrait pictorial. The vanguard, on the other hand, will be divided among ‘Expanded Visions’, a journey through the history of experimental photography at the hands of the Pompidou in Paris; Y ‘Gods, wizards and sages’an incursion into the private collections of Miquel Barceló, Antoni Tàpies, Manolo Millares, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Joan Miró, among others.
De Miró, a double protagonist, will also be able to see, traveling through other centers, the tapestry he created for La Caixa in 1980, while the success of the immersive experience of ‘Symphony’ will translate into a new portion of musical virtual reality starring ‘El Bolero de Ravel’. To round off its commitment to technology, the platform will be launched before the end of the year Caixaforum+, a digital platform designed to become “the tenth Caixaforum”, in the words of Duran, and which will take the museum experience to a virtual level.