{"id":44038,"date":"2026-02-20T13:31:40","date_gmt":"2026-02-20T12:31:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/museutapies.org\/?post_type=tribe_events&p=44038"},"modified":"2026-05-21T17:55:50","modified_gmt":"2026-05-21T15:55:50","slug":"international-symposium-the-wall-and-the-city-visual-devices-of-modernity","status":"publish","type":"tribe_events","link":"https:\/\/museutapies.org\/en\/event\/international-symposium-the-wall-and-the-city-visual-devices-of-modernity\/","title":{"rendered":"International symposium ‘The Wall and the City: Visual Devices of Modernity’"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The International Symposium The Wall and the City: Visual Devices of Modernity<\/em> is conceptually related to Antoni T\u00e0pies: The Perpetual Movement of the Wall<\/em>, an exhibition currently being shown at Museu T\u00e0pies, curated by Imma Prieto and Pablo Allepuz, and exploring the artist\u2019s work through his contexts and exhibition modes. It focuses on four solo shows from the 1950s, which were characterised by groups of work and highly diverse display solutions, making it possible to situate T\u00e0pies\u2019 production in relation to broader debates on modern architecture, design, industry, urban space and ways of life in the period.<\/p>\n

Drawing from this conceptual framework, the international symposium The Wall and the City: Visual Devices of Modernity<\/em> proposes a critical reading of modernity through the material and visual devices that made it possible: walls, facades, pavements, shop windows, posters, exhibition structures and domestic spaces. These apparently functional features become active agents of mediation between art, design, architecture and perceptive experience, given that matter, light, visual display and the arrangement of objects influence in aesthetic perception and define new ways of seeing, inhabiting and understanding the city.<\/p>\n

In the context of European reconstruction after the Second World War, and during the postwar and cultural isolation of Francoism in Spain, the exhibition space and urban landscapes worked as laboratories for modernity. Museums, pavilions, shop windows and housing became experimental spaces where architecture, design and display gave rise to specific forms of perception, setting apart the visual and urban sensibility of the postwar.<\/p>\n

In Barcelona, figures like Antoni T\u00e0pies, Josep Antoni Coderch, Antoni de Moragas Galliss\u00e0, Oriol Bohigas, Ricard Giralt Miracle and America Sanchez would come to postulate a common syntax: a contained, artisanal modernity, with material density and manual gesture, articulating architecture, design and visual display. Their practice would not only define visual culture, but also a model of display that conditioned the aesthetic perception of space and the object.<\/p>\n

This symposium analyses these mechanisms as active practices of discourse and perception shaping imagined models of community, memory and the relationship between body and architecture. It looks back at exhibition, architectural and graphic languages of the 1950s and 1960s, querying their currency: what remains nowadays of that way of conceiving walls, homes or the city itself as spaces for thought, resistance and perception? What are the continuities or ruptures between the visual devices of modernity and current practices in museography and urban design?<\/p>\n

In this symposium, Barcelona is set into dialogue with other centres of modernity\u2014Milan, Paris, Brussels, Zurich and London\u2014tracing out a comparative cartography of possible modernities, examining how material and visual discourses built a European idea of modernity. This revision makes it possible to think of the contemporary museum and city as spaces for critique, experimentation and aesthetic experience, where the memory of modern display continues to be a strategy of thought and perception.<\/p>\n

Researchers, artists, architects, designers and curatorial professionals were invited to submit proposals that address these issues from critical, historical or contemporary perspectives, and with interdisciplinary approaches. The call for papers<\/a> promoted by the Antoni T\u00e0pies 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 T\u00e0pies 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.<\/p>\n

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PROGRAMME<\/strong><\/p>\n

Wednesday 27 May 2026<\/strong><\/p>\n