International symposium ‘The Wall and the City: Visual Devices of Modernity’

The international symposium The Wall and the City: Visual Devices of Modernity, a critical reading of modernity through its material and visual devices—walls, facades, pavements, shop windows, posters and display structures—understood as active agents in mediation between art, design, architecture and perceptive experience. The symposium analyses how matter, light, montage and the arrangement of objects shape ways of seeing, inhabiting and understanding the city.

In the context of European postwar reconstruction and the cultural isolation of Francoism, the exhibition space and urban landscape worked as laboratories of modernity. Museums, pavilions, display windows and housing became experimental sites where architecture, design and display gave rise to a new visual and urban sensibility. In Barcelona, figures like Antoni Tàpies, Josep Antoni Coderch, Oriol Bohigas and Ricard Giralt Miracle articulated a contained modernity rooted in craft, highly dense in material and gestural terms, thus defining a kind of visual culture and model for display.

This symposium reexplores these languages from the 1950s and 1960s in order to explore their present-day validity and set them into dialogue with other European focal points of modernity, like Milan, Paris and London, conceiving the contemporary museum and city as spaces for critique, experimentation and aesthetic experience.

The symposium will feature, among others, Jordana Mendelson, art historian and Professor at New York University; Juan José Lahuerta, Professor of the History of Art and Architecture at the Barcelona School of Architecture (UPC); and Beatriz Colomina, architect and Professor of the History and Theory of Architecture at the Princeton University School of Architecture.

Researchers, artists, architects, designers and curatorial professionals are invited to submit proposals that address these issues from critical, historical or contemporary perspectives, and with interdisciplinary approaches. The call for papers promoted by the Antoni Tàpies Chair – UPF of Contemporary Art and Thought broadens and deepens the curatorial proposal of the exhibition, inviting critical investigation of these material and symbolic infrastructures from diverse historical and theoretical perspectives, taking as a starting point the exhibition that can currently be visited at the Tàpies Museum. Beyond the exhibition narrative, the symposium opens a space for academic debate to analyze how these devices have shaped aesthetic perception and experience, as well as the social and political dynamics inscribed in the modern city.

The complete programme will be published shortly.

With the collaboration and participation of the Antoni Tàpies – UPF Chair of Contemporary Art and Thought.

[Image: Antoni Tàpies, Porta metàl·lica i violí, 1956.  Museu Tàpies Collection, Barcelona. © Comissió Tàpies / VEGAP, 2026.]