The Center for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona today presented its programming for 2025, which includes exhibitions on the North American cartoonist and cartoonist Chris Ware and the great Catalan writer Mercè Rodoreda. For his part, the French thinker Georges Didi-Huberman will curate a co-production of the CCCB and the Reina Sofía Art Center (MNCARS) titled In the moved air and that it will have an “expository essay” format.
In the debates section, a section that usually serves as the center’s axis of thought, they highlight the commitment to a cycle on radical science and its role in a world in which scientific denialism is growing. Another cycle will address the relationship between the city and tourism and, finally, the Kosmopolis literature biennial will dedicate the contest to South Korean literature. In previous years, the recent Nobel Prize winner Hang Kang visited the CCCB as a speaker.
However, the exhibition Amazon. The ancestral futurewhich premiered in November, will continue in force for much of 2025 and, with it, the extensive cycle of debates and conferences that address ecological and cultural sustainability policies not only in the region but throughout the world. Finally, in the residencies section, this year three women will collaborate with the CCCB: the Zimbabwean filmmaker Tsitsi Dangarembga, the Filipino writer Patricia Evangelista and the indigenous Mexican linguist Yásnaya Aguilar.
Budget increase and recovery of assistance
To carry out the new season, the CCCB will have an initial budget of 16.6 million euros, which means 7% more than in 2024. In this way, the budget record in history is broken for the second consecutive year. of this cultural institution. Regarding the balance of the year that ends, Judit Carrera, director of the CCCB, highlights the recovery of attendance levels prior to the pandemic.
There are more than 470,000 visitors until December, 23% more than in 2023, who have come to see the different exhibitions that the center hosted last year, among which Suburbia stands out, dedicated to the culture of American residential suburbs, or Varda , about the filmmaker Agnés Varda.
Carrera also emphasizes the good health of the digital aspect, since 400,000 views of the videos displayed in the web version were reached. In terms of visits to the page, they stand at 1,670,000, with more than 480,000 followers on social networks.
Chris Ware, April to November
The first exhibition novelty of the new cycle will premiere on April 2 and will continue until November. It will address the work of original cartoonist and cartoonist Chris Ware. Under the title Chris Ware. Drawing is thinkingthe exhibition, curated by Jordi Costa – also director of exhibitions at the CCCB – is a co-production of the center and the Barcelona comic fair, FICOMIC.
The exhibition will take a chronological tour of the work of this now legendary comic figure with a wide selection of his original work in which Ware himself has participated. In addition, it will feature the participation of the English writer Zadie Smith, who will outline the most important aspects of Ware’s graphic universe.
According to Costa, “Chris Ware has laid the theoretical foundation for considering comics as a great art.” The curator describes Ware’s work as “frozen music, architecture, ragtime, stream of consciousness, memory, subjectivity and objectivity” and concludes that he is “a creator of a great and complex language.”
Didi-Huberman, from May to September
The starting points of In the moved air…the exhibition that the philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman will curate from May 7 to September 28, 2025, are, as Jordi Costa explains, “The Romance of the moon that opens the Gypsy ballads –a poem from 1928 – and, later, the conference that García Lorca gave in Buenos Aires in 1933 on the game and the theory of the duende.”
With these wickers, Didi-Humberman chooses a series of works with which she will reflect on the capacity of images to move. There will be more than 300 works by artists such as Goya, Miró, Pasolini, Brecht, Goethe, Picasso, Man Ray, Nietzsche, Víctor Erice, Juli González, Giacometti, Harun Farocki, Henric Michaux or Baruch Spinoza.
The exhibition vindicates the utopian and emancipatory power of emotions, understood as a force capable of leading to a transformative collective upheaval. Additionally, like every year for two decades, the CCCB will host the twenty-first edition of World Press Photo in November 2025.
Mercè Rodoreda will close in 2025
In December and with our sights set on 2026, as the exhibition will run until the end of May of that year, it will premiere Mercè Rodoreda. A forest. The exhibition, curated by literary critics Neus Penalba and Martí Sales, proposes a tour of the great themes of their work. Penalba is precisely the author of Fam als ulls, cement to the mouthan innovative essay on the author of diamond square.
According to Judit Carrera, the exhibition on Rodoreda “connects with the great tradition of the CCCB of dedicating exhibitions to writers such as Borges, Joyce, Kafka, Calders or Salvador Espriu.” “I really wanted, for some time now, to dedicate a great exhibition and a great project to one of the main authors of Catalan literature and, probably, one of its most universal authors,” adds the director of the center.
Finally Carrera concludes that “Rodoreda has traditionally been interpreted either as a luminous, bourgeois and corny author, or as an author linked to the world of war horror, but what this exhibition demonstrates, through the curation of Neus Penalba and Martí Sales, is that, in reality and from the first work, there exists in Rodoreda a calculated ambivalence between light and darkness.”
Visits from Anne Carson, Rebeca Solnit
In the residency section, in addition to the Zimbabwean filmmaker Tsitsi Dangarembga and the Mexican linguist Yásnaya Aguilar, the presence of the Filipino writer stands out Patricia Evangelistaa great expert on the period of Rodrigo Duterte’s government in her country, which was characterized by social order policies based on state violence and the violation of human rights.
Also in the literary section, it is worth highlighting the presence of the Canadian poet Anne Carson, Princess of Asturias Award 2020. Carson, in collaboration with the Barcelona Poetry Festival, will visit the center for the first time with a show that combines dance and music with the reading of their texts.
Finally, among many other thinkers and novelists, it is worth mentioning the presence of the essayists Timothy Snyder or Pankaj Mishra, as well as the North American writer Rebecca Solnit, who explores topics such as climate change, feminism or democracy in her books. In his latest work, soon to be published in Spain, The alternative path (Lumen, 2025), reflects on the liberating possibilities of accepting uncertainty as the only way to exercise action and thought.
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