Oriol Vilanova and Carles Guerra, the tandem that will represent Spain at the Venice Biennale 2026

The same day that Spain’s participation was made public in the next edition of the Venice Biennial of Architecture that opens its doors this May 10, the jury that has chosen, one year in advance, who will be the representatives of our country in the same international event, but in its artistic version, and that will take place from the spring of 2026.

The chosen ones have been the creator Oriol Vilanova (Manresa, 1980) and the Catalan commissioner Carles Guerra (Amposta, 1965), with the project ‘The remains’, which will occupy in full and hand in hand with a single author the stays of the Spanish pavilion in the city of the canals.

The choice of Vilanova, a half race born in Manresa in 1980, but who lives and works from Brussels, represented in Spain by the Elba Benítez and àngels Barcelona galleries, deals with his facet as ‘collector’, a work that has become for more than two decades based on his work as a plastic artist. Thus, the Catalan author has been gathering postcards in markets for years that have generated a ccapaz size corpus of now filling a space like the Spanish pavilion in Venice. From him, its owner reflects on concepts such as real image or projected image, the passage of time or the validation machinery of reality from apparently harmless artifacts.

A jury composed of Ignasi Aballí, artist and representative in Venice in the 59th edition, the director of the CGAC Santi Olmo, the director of the CA2M Tania Pardo, Agustín Pérez Rubio, the last Spanish commissioner in the international appointment, Imma Prieto, responsible for the Tàpies and Manuel Segade Museum, from the Reina Sofía Museum, the editor Rosa Olivares and Santiago Herrero and Santiago. De Aecid, an organism that depends on the pavilion, in voice but without vote, has been responsible for selecting this name, which will have the commission support of Carles Guerra.

In short, ‘The Remains’, name of the project, will consist of the total occupation of the exhibition space of the Spanish pavilion fodging its walls with the collection of more than 50,000 postcards that the artist has made for decades and always acquires one in one. The result will be an immersive field in which the viewer will be surrounded by a false representation of the real world reproduced in thousands of fragments, in which his group for topics will turn the pavilion into a kind of study of pictorial areas.

The proposal could have a performative complement that will be made both at the headquarters of Spain in I Giardini and in other spaces in the city, taking advantage of the author’s performe and dramaturgical facet.

Vilanova thus joins a payroll of creators formed in his last installments by Sandra Gamarra (2024, who was the first author not born in our country who occupied the pavilion), Ignasi Aballí (2022), or Itziar Okariz and Sergio Prego, in 2019. You have to go back to 2017 to meet two men in the appointment, when Jordi Colomer and Manuel Member of the jury of the Catalan duo, they represented our country in Venice.