CCCB 2025: Rodoreda, Didi-Huberman and Ware

The Center for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona (CCCB) presented this Wednesday its program for 2025, which focuses on three prominent figures: Mercè Rodoreda, Georges Didi-Huberman and Chris Ware .

With a budget increase of 7%, which reaches 16.6 million euros, the CCCB reaffirms its role as a benchmark in the field of contemporary art. The 2025 program, which will continue exhibitions already underway, such as 'Amazons: Ancestral Future' and the international exhibition World Press Photo, will focus on six main thematic axes designed to generate reflections and dialogues around current challenges: l 'Amazonia, the city, science and technology, Africa, the Philippines and multilingualism.

Chris Ware: the comic strip as an architecture of memory

Chris Ware (Nebraska, 1967) is an author who has redefined the boundaries of contemporary comics. With the collaboration of Galerie Martel and under the adaptation curatorship of Jordi Costa , this exhibition co-produced with FICOMIC , beyond showing Ware's work as a draftsman, it will propose a reflection on visual language as a tool of thought.

Ware, often compared to James Joyce for his narrative complexity, has transformed the comic into a ground of emotional and formal exploration. From his debut with Acme Novelty Library, to iconic works like Jimmy Corrigan or Fabricando historias, his production goes beyond the traditional comic book format to create narratives full of melancholy, loss and criticism. This retrospective will assess his ability to invent visual languages ​​and the political and emotional depth of his stories.

The exhibition tour will include original pieces, animations and sculptures. With references to ragtime music and memory-laden architectures, Ware's work is a dialogue between past and present, between aesthetics and social criticism. The exhibition will also include writer Zadie Smith 's reflections on her work, inviting us to question the boundaries between drawing and thinking.

The book of life, Chris Ware (2022)

'En el aire conmovido...': the political anthropology of emotion

'En el aire conmovido...' could be defined as an exercise in collective introspection. Curated by the renowned philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman (Saint-Étienne, 1953), the exhibition explores emotions as a transforming force, in a discourse that is both poetic and political.

Drawing inspiration from the texts of Federico García Lorca , such as Romance de la luna, luna and the conference Juego y teoría del duende of the year 1933, Didi-Huberman examines the concept of the duende, this visceral and intangible energy that crosses the flamenco singer and transforms the air and the emotion of those who listen to him. Through a dialogue between works by great masters such as Goya, Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, Nietzsche, Víctor Erice, Pasolini and Tatiana Trouvé , among many others, the exhibition is constructed as a visual essay where art, philosophy and poetry are found to question the nature of shock.

The project will offer a dialectical and deeply critical reading, organizing the pieces into constellations of meaning that evoke the complexity of human emotions. This co-production of the CCCB and the Museo Reina Sofía really invites you to be moved and reflect on the capacity of art to transform the world through the power of affection.

Vicente Escudero, Oriol Maspons (1958). Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya

Mercè Rodoreda. A forest': a tribute to the radicality and validity of his work

For the first time, the CCCB is dedicating an exhibition to a woman writer, paying tribute to Mercè Rodoreda (Barcelona, ​​1908-Girona, 1983), one of the most prominent voices in Catalan literature of the 20th century. Curated by Neus Penalba and Martí Sales , this proposal is a poetic and visual immersion that explores the multiple layers and contradictions of the writer's imagination.

Rodoreda not only wrote stories, but created complex worlds, rooted in a symbolic web that connected themes such as exile, war, death, transformation and the constant tension between innocence and cruelty. In this exhibition, the tree will be a metaphor: the roots will represent the origins and wounds of exile, the trunks will speak of the experiences marked by the war, the branches will refer to the great cultural references that influenced the author and the seeds, which germinate in new interpretations by contemporary artists such as Èlia Llach, Mar Arza, Oriol Vilapuig or Cabosanroque.

The itinerary, conceived as a forest, will combine original documents from the Mercè Rodoreda Foundation , photographs, cinematographic fragments and plastic works that will be mixed with its literature. This fusion between word and image aims to make tangible the poetic universe of an author who knew how to show the beauty and darkness of the human experience.

Fragment de la instal·lació Flors i viatges, Cabosanroque (2023). CCCB, 2023 / CC BY-SA-NC Toni Curcó

Beyond the exhibition programme, the CCCB reaffirms its commitment as a center for debate and reflection on the great challenges of the contemporary world, with a program that includes debates, seminars and talks around topics such as science, technology, the city , tourism and feminism. The Kosmopolis conference will bring together prominent figures from literature, philosophy, science, music, cinema, drama, comics and journalism to address key issues of the day, with a special focus in 2025 on the literature of South Korea

Fundamental works such as The Second Sex by Beauvoir or On Freedom by Timothy Snyder will also be explored. In 2025, figures such as Anne Carson, Rebecca Solnit and Pankaj Mishra will be present. As for the debates around the city, the role of architecture with Sarah Witing and the cities built by war with Julia Schulz-Dornburg and Thomas Keenan will be highlighted.

The international residencies program will continue to promote cultural dialogue, this year with the participation of Zimbabwean filmmaker Tsitsi Dangarembga , Filipino journalist Patricia Evangelista and Mexican linguist Yásnaya Aguilar , who will be involved in the cultural life of Barcelona for three months. At the same time, initiatives such as festivals of young thought and creation, schools in residence to connect the CCCB with the Raval neighborhood, scenic laboratories, experimental and avant-garde film cycles with the Xcèntric festival and mediation programs that aim to strengthen the link between artistic creation and the educational world.

'Observant la ciutat en flames, vaig plorar sense parar', Toshiko Kihara (1975). Col·lecció The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum