The artist Oriol Vilanova, born in Manresa and resident in Brussels, will be the representative of Spain at the next Venice Biennial. Will do it with the project The remainscuired by Carles Guerra. “Vilanova embodies with her artistic practice a collecting eagerness who, judging by the referents of the past, is obsessed with putting the entire world in a museum. Luckily, the world is unbeatable and its work makes failure a remedy to which the remains are enough. Those remains materialize in the innumerable postal cards that they acquire in traces and markets of flea International Development Cooperation (AECID), in charge of the selection.
“My effort is to escape the cliché,” he confessed in an interview with Bea Espejo in 2017 for . By then it already had more than 34,000 postcards, an object that, for him, are “a means of both tourist and political propaganda.” Vilanova collects these postcards since before devoting themselves to art, and have become a conceptual basis for their plays, facilities and performancessays the Aecid statement. The note also emphasizes that this enormous amount of postcards is “similar to an antimuseum that responds to current concerns with respect to the institution that exercises as a model of accumulation, preservation and valorization of the past.” In the case of Oriol Vilanova, a “metabolic” museum arises, which is held on a habit maintained thanks to a modest but constant investment: its incessant traces walks and its obsessive purchases. The Spanish pavilion at the Venice Biennale will deploy the sum of all these accumulated materials for more than twenty years.
The jury has been composed of Santiago Herrero Amigo, director of Cultural and Scientific Relations of the AECID; Immaculate Ballesteros, Director of Programming of Spanish Cultural Action; Manuel Segade, director of the Reina Sofia National Art Museum; Agustín Pérez Rubio, Commissioner of the Pavilion of Spain at the Biennial of Venice 2024; Imma Prieto, director of the Tàpies Museum; Tania Pardo, director of the Dos de Mayo Art Center; Santiago Olmo, director of the Galego Center for Contemporary Art; Rosa Olivares, director of the magazine Exit; and Ignasi Aballi, artist of the Pavilion of Spain at the Venice Biennial 2022. The Biennial will take place from May 9 to November 22, 2026.