Evil, violence and freedom. The limits and dangers of the sovereignty of desire, seen through the tremulous flesh and the always polemical gaze of Donatien Alphonse Francois Sade. A full-time libertine whom the Napoleonic regime tried to decapitate (his head was miraculously not left in the guillotine) and on whom the Center for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona places the microscope to try to determine “if his writings represent a philosophy of freedom, emancipatory and subversive, or a philosophy of evil, which shows the excessive and violent dimension of human experience».
The latter will be the raison d’être of ‘Sade. Freedom or evil’, exhibition that will open the 2023 academic year at the CCCB and that will outline some of the main lines of the season. “In a world marked by the destruction of life and the planet, culture is creation and thought,” claims the director of the center, Judit Carrera, when framing a course “that will revolve around major philosophical issues such as paper of evil and violence and the future of the human condition in times of algorithms”.
‘Woman Carrying the Unpleasant Object’ by Alberto Giacometti, from 1931
Hence the approach to a writer and philosopher who, in addition to naming the most famous of perversions, fascinated avant-garde artists and surrealists and left a cultural trace that the show traces through Robert Mapplethorpe, Joan Fontcuberta or Susan Meiselas, among others. And from there also a second exhibition bet that, pulling at the seams of freedom, questions whether artificial intelligence is really intelligence, and explores the cultural roots of a technological advance that shapes lives and conditions public and private behavior.
The ‘Other Russias’
Thus, with the Marquis de Sade and artificial intelligence testing the limits of freedom, the CCCB faces a new season marked by the echoes of war, the scars of climate change and the future of cities. A course that will give voice to the ‘Other Russias’ by Liudmila Ulítskaya, Vladimir Sorokin, Anna Starobinets and Maria Stepanova; it will pay tribute to four capital figures of thought such as George Orwell, Albert Camus, Hannah Arendt and Jorge Semprún; and he will approach Mercè Rodoreda through an installation by Cabosanroque that reflects on the role of women during the war.
the literary festival cosmopolis, Focusing on water and oceanic literatures, it will explore everything between the ‘Odyssey’ and ‘Moby Dick’ to cover “marine mythologies, nautical fictions and deep-sea voyages”, while the center’s debates will focus on defending the Democracy in the face of authoritarianism.
In 2023, the CCCB will continue to strengthen ties with the neighborhood through workshops and educational programs and will seek to give a voice to young people and adolescents, traditionally neglected audiences in this type of space. For them, Boca has been launched, an initiative with which the center invites a group of adolescents to program a music festival, and Bivac, a “young thought laboratory”, has been recovered.
Like the Macba, the CCCB is also facing the new course with a notable budget increase (from 11.8 million euros in 2022 to 13.6 in 2023, 15.7% more), but, as is the case with most institutions and facilities, the amount allocated to invoices and supplies is also increasing. “Only the light is already 700,000 euros a year,” says Carrera. And that, she laments, “are two less exhibitions.”