Llorenç Barber. L’espai alliberat [Liberated Space]

Extramurs is an artistic project by the Museu Tàpies that conceives the city as a space of intervention and mediation. With a pluralistic, multidisciplinary approach, the project encourages inter-institutional dialogue, along with dialogue with public space and the environment. Featuring the ongoing collaboration of EINA Centre Universitari de Disseny i Art de Barcelona and the Festival Grec, Extramurs contributes to a rethinking of the role of the institution from a more holistic perspective, through interventions and activities that respond to contemporary demands, encouraging new community narratives in urban space. Inspired by concepts of situated knowledge, this spirit advances reflection on how we mediate our surroundings, and how we might inhabit the world in a more conscious, integrating way. At the same time, the gesture of considering the walls of public space as the carriers of residents’ voices, spaces where collective discourses are materialised and where shared experiences find new meanings, connects us directly with the thought of Tàpies.

Held annually, each edition of Extramurs is presented in the public space, coinciding with the Festival Grec. For the 2025 edition, the artist Elena del Rivero has been invited to develop the project La Quema, curated by Mateo Feijóo. The proposal is grounded in an intense process of collaborative research and production on the topic of the burning of the artist’s first works, performed as a cleansing gesture. The installations conceived by Del Rivero as part of the Extramurs project, in collaboration with students from EINA Centre Universitari de Disseny i Art de Barcelona, will be shown on the façade and interior of the Museu Tàpies, as well as at Santa Maria del Pi, La Capella and the Teatre Grec gardens. The exhibition includes photographs, collages, objects and an illuminated sign. The cartography of these intervened spaces invites us to reflect on the resilience of human and social structures, as well as on the dialogue between past and present, accentuating the tensions and continuities that define history in the construction of the contemporary city.

The inaugural event of La Quema takes place at the Rubió i Lluch Gardens with the concert L’espai alliberat, by Llorenç Barber, a musician, composer, musicologist, bell-ringer and pioneer of sound art in Europe. This visual and sound artist, recognised for introducing minimalist music to Spain, has created a portable set of bells used for the development of his own performance technique. Barber’s bell concerts have been held in over two hundred cities in twenty different countries. He has done concerts for the closing ceremonies of three cultural capital years (Lisbon, Copenhagen and Stockholm), and his performances have featured at biennial exhibitions and art fairs in Japan, France, Thailand and Brazil, while inaugurating two separate Heads of State and Government Meetings (in Salamanca and Rome).

The sound of bells brings us to the world of Elena del Rivero, an international artist committed to the exploration of reparation and memory. We invite you to reflect with us on the resilience of human and social structures and on the dialogue between past and present, accentuating the tensions and continuities that define history in the construction of the contemporary city.

A coproduction of the Festival Grec de Barcelona 2025 and the Museu Tàpies

Extramurs is an initiative of the Museu Tàpies with the collaboration of EINA Centre Universitari de Disseny i Art de Barcelona and festival Grec, with the complicity of La Capella and LAB 36

Artist: Elena del Rivero

Curator: Mateo Feijóo

The realization of Elena del Rivero – La Quema at Galicia, promoted by A Casa do Pozo, had the support of: AECID and Fundación Cañada Blanch