Exhibitions
Buried Utopias: Anna Moreno revisits Ricardo Bofill's architectural dreams at MACBA
With 'The Third Twist', Anna Moreno closes her trilogy on Ricardo Bofill's most ambitious projects, turning the desert and sand into a metaphor for forgotten modern utopias at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona.
Upon entering the ground floor of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (MACBA), the visitor encounters something unexpected: a sand dune where they are allowed to sit. It is not a simple scenographic element —although its structure is visible— but the starting point of The Third Twist, with which Anna Moreno closes her trilogy dedicated to the most ambitious and problematic projects of the architect Ricardo Bofill.
The heart of the exhibition is The Terminal Beach, a feature film co-directed with filmmaker Bernardo Zanotta and shot in Algeria that mixes documentary and fiction. In 1979, Bofill's workshop built a nomadic settlement there at the behest of President Houari Boumédiène: a project almost erased from official history, literally buried by the sands of the Sahara. Moreno starts from this void—not even Bofill remembered it precisely—to construct his own narrative. Where archives are missing, he introduces speculative fiction: a European photographer travels to the site decades later and confronts the ruins of that collective dream.
PHOTOGRAPHS FROM "THE TERMINAL BEACH" (2024-2025), COURTESY OF ANNA MORENO AND BERNARDO ZANOTTA. EXHIBITION: ANNA MORENO.
The film also questions the Western view of the desert, with echoes of Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky, and how these landscapes became a tabula rasa for European architectural experiments.
What is interesting is not only the story, but how it is told. Moreno uses fiction to revisit the utopias of the 1970s, when many architects believed they could redesign society from scratch. The sand works as an obvious metaphor: everything that is built ends up eroding over time.
The artist does not judge Bofill. He prefers to show his contradictions with a serene, even melancholic gaze: from revolutionary idealism to subsequent stardom; from the desire for social transformation to the desert that covers everything.
PHOTOGRAPHS FROM "THE TERMINAL BEACH" (2024-2025), COURTESY OF ANNA MORENO AND BERNARDO ZANOTTA. EXHIBITION: ANNA MORENO.
The Terminal Beach closes the trilogy that began with The Drowned Giant (2017), inspired by the happening that Bofill organized to promote the La Ciudad en el Espacio project in Madrid, abandoned by Francoism, and continued with Billennium (2018), centered on the Walden 7 building in Sant Just Desvern. The titles of the three pieces refer to stories by the writer JG Ballard, a key influence in his way of mixing speculation and memory.
The exhibition is completed with a stained glass window that takes up the geometries of the old Chapel of Mercy, integrating the exterior of the museum into the work. With this gesture, Moreno expands his reflection towards the architectural vestiges of the city and the uncertain fate of certain modern utopias in urban centers.
VIEWS OF THE EXHIBITION "ANNA MORENO. THE THIRD TWIST", 2026. PHOTO: MIQUEL COLL.
The installation works because it forces you to physically inhabit this idea. Sitting on the sand, watching the light fall on the real and imagined dunes, you understand that utopias do not disappear completely: they simply change form. Sometimes, in art.
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