The Art Explora Festival and its unique museum boat have arrived in Spain, making their first stop at the Port of Barcelona. The vessel will be in Barcelona until April 6th before continuing its journey to Ibiza, where it will dock from April 23rd to 29th. This free-access, itinerant festival transforms each port it visits into a vibrant cultural hub, offering exhibitions, immersive experiences, and live performances both onboard and on land.
In Barcelona, the event is hosted at the Muelle Barcelona Nord, a public area of Port Vell recently opened to citizens, marking Art Explora as the first major cultural event to be held there.
Launched in its current format in 2024, Art Explora aims to broaden access to the arts by collaborating with local curators and creators. After visiting eleven Mediterranean cities last year (including Durrës, Nice, and Athens) and attracting over 350,000 visitors, Catalonia and the Balearic Islands are its latest destinations.
The sailing catamaran, designed by architects Axel de Beaufort and Guillaume Verdier, can accommodate up to 2,000 visitors daily. Onboard, the public can enjoy an immersive sound journey created by IRCAM (Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music from the Centre Pompidou in Paris). This experience features a Mediterranean soundscape—rural, urban, and cultural—accompanied by a virtual reality journey transporting viewers back to the splendor of ancient Alexandria, Athens, and Venice.
On land, three additional exhibition pavilions extend the cultural experience:
- The Present Pavilion, created in collaboration with the Louvre Museum, hosts a large-format immersive exhibition dedicated to female figures of Mediterranean civilizations, from the Winged Victory of Samothrace to anonymous women.
- The Central Pavilion features “Under the Azure,” an exhibition curated by Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel and Blanche de Lestrange. It explores the Mediterranean as a space of myth, memory, and tension through compositions by historical and contemporary artists. Notable works include Marguerite Humeau’s monumental sculpture The Dead (A drifting, dying marine mammal), Joan Miró’s Gens de la mer, and the underwater films of Jean Painlevé. A heritage object from the Museum of Archaeology of Catalonia also anchors the exhibition in the city’s maritime history.
- The Photography Pavilion presents “Against the Current,” an exhibition by artists from the Arab world delving into themes like migration, exile, and hospitality in the Mediterranean. It showcases works such as Bouchra Khalili’s Anya (Straight Stories – Part 2), Akram Zaatari’s site-specific installation Mass Struggle, and Forensic Oceanography’s Liquid Traces – The Left-to-Die Boat Case, curated by Amanda Abi Khalil and Danielle Makhoul.
Furthermore, Art Explora offers a rich program of performances, talks, screenings, and concerts, developed in dialogue with the Mediterranean context and local art scene, in collaboration with Rosa Lleó. Highlights include the international performance El feo Todo by Poncili Creación and Bartira, concerts by artists such as Nadah El Shazly and Nkisi, and DJ sessions with Ikram Bouloum and Jokkoo Collective.
