SPAIN: ORIOL VILANOVA AND THE ABOLITION OF THE MUSEUM AND THE ARCHIVE

The Spanish Pavilion at the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia hosts Los restos, a project by Oriol Vilanova (Manresa, Spain, 1980), curated by Carles Guerra, which is conceived as an approach to the meta-museum and to the relationship with the building’s architecture. The proposal unfolds from these two premises within a pavilion that underwent a comprehensive renovation last year, updating its infrastructural conditions.

Thus, Los restos transforms the interior space into a so-called anti-museum or pseudo-museum grounded in an accumulative archival logic. Over more than twenty years of practice, the Spanish artist has been collecting postcards sourced from flea markets. These images refer to the circulation of global tourism and to obsolete forms of personal communication.

Drawing on his architectural training, Vilanova constructs a wall-based installation that reverses linearity and hierarchy, in which accumulation replaces narrative. His aim is to propose an alternative to conventional archival models, where repetition, fragmentation, and the progressive material erosion operate as structural principles. The postcards emerge as remnants imbued with memory and loss, questioning traditional systems of classification, documentation, and preservation.

Los restos also extends beyond the physical boundaries of the pavilion. In this gesture of disrupting the museum as a closed institution, the project is accompanied by a publication featuring contributions by several authors. It also incorporates a performative action titled El fantasma de la libertad (2026), inspired by Luis Buñuel’s surrealist comedy, which will unfold across the Giardini and the Arsenale through unannounced chance encounters, expanding the work into the realm of the body and space beyond the exhibition site.

Los restos can be seen until 22 November 2026 at the Spanish Pavilion, Giardini della Biennale di Venezia, Venice (Italy).