[counter]panorama. Prologue

This thing we are calling a prologue, could well be an epilogue, or an afterthought. We are not starting from scratch, we are not even starting, we are turning back. There is a desperate optimism in the triennial (or biennial) repeated attempts to define the present and plant its flag on the future. They are always, somehow, late to the party.  The accelerated temporality with which the artworld picks up and discards its themes and topics only increases this sense that everything becomes prematurely old.

Now that the future has ceased to be the repository of all the unfulfilled promises of modernity to become the source of our planetary anxieties, what is the point of continuing to organise biennials? As an institution that serves to organise the modern and make it legible, what legitimacy does the museum still have?

This prologue gathers two interventions that deal with these questions better than we could do ourselves. Dora Garcia’s The Kingdom (2003) is part of the permanent collection at MACBA, Reconstruction: Barcelona Art Report [2001] by Antonio Gagliano and Verónica Lahitte was commissioned specifically for this event.