The CCCB lands on Mars

With­out in­tend­ing to, NASA has run the best pro­mo­tion cam­paign pos­si­ble for the new ex­hi­bi­tion at Barcelona’s Cen­tre of Con­tem­po­rary Cul­ture, the CCCB. While the world watched the rover Per­se­ver­ance land on Mars, the CCCB was prepar­ing its am­bi­tious ex­hi­bi­tion about the Red Planet, which will run until July 11.

It is a mag­nif­i­cent co­in­ci­dence, as the ex­hi­bi­tion was sup­posed to open last au­tumn but was de­layed due to the pan­demic. Un­like Nasa’s ex­pe­di­tion, Mart. The Mi­rall Ver­mell (Mars. The Red Planet) “is not a sci­ence ex­hi­bi­tion,” warns the CCCB’s di­rec­tor, Judit Car­rera. Not that the ex­hi­bi­tion avoids sci­ence, but rather it in­ter­re­lates with other dis­ci­plines, such as phi­los­o­phy, lit­er­a­ture and art. If there is no one way to un­der­stand the world, there is also no one way to un­der­stand the planet that was born 4.6 bil­lion years ago.

The ex­hi­bi­tion aims to be a “nar­ra­tive of nar­ra­tives” that feed into each other, in­sists the cen­tre’s head of ex­hi­bi­tions, Jordi Costa, who points out that hu­man­ity has al­ways looked to the sky to find an­swers to the enig­mas of its ex­is­tence.

“Under dif­fer­ent names, all an­cient cul­tures in­voked Mars,” says cu­ra­tor, Juan Insua. Mars was Ner­gal to Mesopotamia, Har­makhis in Egypt, Man­gala in Hindu mythol­ogy, Guan Yu in the Chi­nese tra­di­tion, and Ares to the Greeks. “All refer to a di­vine power as­so­ci­ated with war and vi­o­lent mas­culin­ity,” adds Insua.

Yet it was the Ro­mans who gave Mars the name we know it by today, and they also added a new as­pect. Mars may have been a ter­ri­ble and fright­en­ing deity, but he also acted as the pro­tec­tor of Roman har­vests when he awoke in March, the month that bears his name. From then on, Mars would be­come syn­ony­mous with both death and life. This is one of the main themes that the CCCB’s ex­hi­bi­tion draws on its vi­sion of the Red Planet.

The pos­si­bil­ity of whether Mars, with­out oxy­gen or liq­uid water, can be colonised by fu­ture gen­er­a­tions is also in the ex­hi­bi­tion, al­though that is not what it is about. What it is about, say the or­gan­is­ers, is look­ing at how we have men­tally and emo­tion­ally ap­proached the planet’s sin­gu­lar pres­ence in the solar sys­tem and turned it into an icon. “Does Mars ex­plain us?” is the ques­tion that this pro­ject asks, says Costa.

More than 400 works (books, sculp­tures, draw­ings, pho­tographs, comics, movies...) have been used for the ex­hi­bi­tion to trace this “cul­tural his­tory”, a his­tory in which the bound­aries be­tween past, pre­sent and fu­ture are con­stantly di­luted, in the same way as are the lim­its be­tween fan­tasy and re­al­ity.

art vi­sual cul­ture