Insurreccions (Uprisings)

An uprising – saying no to the established power – is an act as natural as an accident. It is a rather broad subject for the prestigious philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman to have built a kind of atlas-shaped discourse about it. A discourse more important than the images that make it up, which change according to the space where this travelling exhibition is held. This time we're lucky, since Barcelona practically carries uprisings in its DNA.

Didi-Huberman is the great interpreter, in a postmodern version, of the image atlas as an iconographic methodology established by Aby Warburg in the first third of the 20th century. This exhibition gathers together some 300 works – paintings, drawings and prints, photos, movies and manuscripts – 90 of which come from Catalan public collections: prints from the French War, posters and photographs from the Spanish Civil War, reports of demonstrations during the Transition, scenes from the Tragic Week, and works and testimonies of the Paris Commune in May 1968, as well as from other places the exhibition will visit – the Mexican Revolution, the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, etc.

Everything is divided into five major sections, five moments of revolt: triggering elements (meteorology), gestures (raised arms, mouths mid-shout), words (posters, graffiti), conflicts (strikes, barricades) and desires (hope and continuity). A dissection of the uprising as a phenomenon through iconography.