Exhibitions
Capsa núm 23
Aleix Plademunt
Curated by Mercè Alsina
BARCELONA
Museu Marítim de Barcelona
Av. de les Drassanes s/n
From October 23, 2025, to January 11, 2026
Hours
Monday to Sunday from 10 am to 8 pm.
In Capsa núm 23, Aleix Plademunt reflects on the acceleration that characterises the 21st century through the slowness of certain archival processes. For this, he works with the photographic archive of the Maritime Museum of Barcelona, where he found that, as often happens in institutional archives, part of the material may remain unregistered for years: invisible documents, momentarily suspended outside the administrative system.
The artist revives one of these cases: box 23, the last on the waiting list to be registered. It contains the donation of Juan Bautista Buades, chief engineer and naval inspector born in 1936. The images, taken between 1964 and 1980, oscillate between the intimate and the technical: scenes of everyday life aboard various ships alongside expert records of damage and naval accidents. By showing them, Plademunt reactivates the visibility of these images and deactivates the pause that kept them frozen for seventeen years.
Aleix Plademunt
Aleix Plademunt (Hostalric, 1980) is a photographer and co-founder of the editorial project Ca l’Isidret. He trained as an engineer before studying photography at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and Universidad de las Américas Puebla (Mexico). His work, marked by meticulous composition and an analytical gaze, reflects on the human presence in territory, both in its physical and symbolic, historical, and ecological dimensions. Using an objective and detached visual language, he questions notions of space, place, dominion, and intervention.
Since 2003, he has held over twenty-five solo exhibitions and more than seventy group shows, including the solo exhibition Matter at Sala Canal de Isabel II and Centre de la Photographie Genève, his participation in Notes for a Fire of the Eyes. Panorama 21 at MACBA, as well as exhibitions of the project Almost There at Le Bal (Paris), IMA Gallery (Tokyo), and Photoforum PasquArt (Biel, Switzerland), among others. Matter, one of his nine published books, has been awarded by PhotoEspaña, Stiftung Buchkunst, Deutscher Fotobuchpreis, and the Swiss Culture Awards as Best Book of 2022.
Panoràmic File
Panoràmic File is a section of the festival curated by Mercè Alsina, which invites artists to develop new projects based on various photographic archives. This year, they were asked to work in response to the edition’s theme: Break. A new visual order, which reflects on the first quarter of the 21st century and the profound geopolitical, technological, and governance shifts that have taken place.
The term break refers both to the idea of rupture and to that of pause —a necessary pause to process these changes and question whether this is truly the future we had envisioned, doing so through the image.
In this edition, seven artists delve into different archives to explore the concept of pause in devices where this temporal suspension is, in some way, inherent.
The projects featured in Panoràmic File 2025 are:
- 3 Tesel·lacions, Erick Beltrán. Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona.
- Tot el que pot passar: La inactivitat com a motor de l’inaudit, Laura Aranda Lavado. Roca Umbert Fàbrica de les Arts, Granollers (amb la col·laboració de l’Arxiu Municipal de Granollers).
- Pausa, Camping o Campament, Dani Montlleó. Arxiu Fotogràfic de Barcelona.
- Habitar el co_lapse, Irene Pe. Arxiu Tobella.
- Capsa núm 23, Aleix Plademunt. Arxiu Fotogràfic del Consorci de les Drassanes Reials del Museu Marítim de Barcelona.
- Hold on, Laia Solé. Arxiu Fotogràfic del Centre Excursionista de Catalunya.
- Sobre el descans, Natalia Lazaro Prevost. Arxiu d’Etnografia i Folklore de Catalunya.
Mercè Alsina
Mercè Alsina (Barcelona, 1966) holds a PhD cum laude in Art History. She is an independent curator and journalist. Her research has addressed issues such as the impact of globality on artistic productions and their circulation; questions of identity and historical representation; speculative materialism and the nature of objects; the video essay as a practice of resistance; critical photography and the representation of violence; and the relationship between writing and art, among others.
Since 2020, she has been part of the curatorial team of the Panoràmic Festival. She is the author of the essay Massacre (2025). In 2024, she received the ACCA Award for Best Contemporary Art Exhibition Programme in Catalonia, granted by the Catalan Association of Art Critics, for the programming of the cycle santcorneliarts(2) in Cardedeu, which she has directed together with the artist Enric Maurí since 2017.
