Exhibitions
Xavier Miserachs brings the streets of Barcelona to Can Fabra
A photograph of Els Encants is temporarily incorporated into the Ignasi Iglésias Library as part of the MACBA project A museum outside the museum.
Xavier Miserachs' photograph Els Encants, Barcelona (1957) temporarily leaves the usual spaces of art to settle in an everyday and close place: the Ignasi Iglésias – Can Fabra Library. The initiative is part of A Museum Outside the Museum , a project promoted by MACBA and curated by Martí Manen that seeks to bring the MACBA Collection closer to new audiences through spaces far removed from the traditional museum circuit.
The proposal, which can be visited from June 30 to November 30, 2026, brings around forty works from the MACBA Collection to different everyday spaces in Catalonia, thanks to the collaboration of the centers that are part of the Public System of Visual Arts Spaces of Catalonia and the Department of Culture of the Generalitat de Catalunya.
With A Museum Outside the Museum , MACBA proposes a reflection on the physical and symbolic limits of the museum institution and on the possibilities of generating new forms of relationship with contemporary art. The project is committed to proximity, everyday life and also to the element of surprise: finding a work of art in a space where we would not usually expect it modifies both the perception of the work and that of the place itself that hosts it.
Bakeries, markets, pharmacies, hairdressers, waiting rooms, funeral homes or football fields thus become unexpected settings for contact with art. The initiative questions the idea that the artistic experience must necessarily occur within a museum or an exhibition hall and proposes, instead, incorporating it into the spaces where everyday life takes place.
In this context, the Fabra Centre d'Art Contemporani has chosen a work especially linked to the view of the city. It is Els Encants, Barcelona , by Xavier Miserachs, a photograph taken between 1956 and 1957 that is part of the MACBA Collection. The image captures a fragment of Barcelona at the time and is now integrated into a space dedicated to knowledge, reading and community life such as the Biblioteca Ignasi Iglésias – Can Fabra.
Miserachs' presence at Can Fabra allows for a dialogue to be established between photography and the urban environment itself. The city documented by the artist is reunited, decades later, with a transformed Barcelona, in a context in which the historical image acquires new readings.
Thus, a work conceived to observe the city also becomes an invitation to look at the present. The project not only moves a piece outside the museum, but also modifies the conditions in which it is perceived: without the usual framework of an exhibition, the work comes into direct contact with people who might not have gone to a museum to meet it.
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