What is a biennial supposed to achieve when the very centre of it seems to amass such a centripetal force that all else in the industrial, social and residential fringes – many of which are in the throes of an unstable political reckoning – seems disconnected and purposeless? Barcelona’s Manifesta 15 is an attempt to consider the power relations within metropolitan regions, a political challenge as much as a historical one, both artistic and institutional, both urban and peripheral. This is a stage for behind-the-scenes bargaining, victories and failures, which largely precedes the months prior to the event. Manifesta 15 provides a territorial blueprint and a vision of the future, daring to build and sustain several critical practices throughout the creative process and far beyond, not very different from a diplomatic relationship between municipalities, and autonomous and central governments.

However, ‘Barcelona’ is here a transitory spot.

Indeed, Manifesta 15 is an enormous mesh of cities and municipalities that have come together around this centre to present new ways of administering the territory, to engage in dialogue, to discuss political issues and to develop something that transcends the well-known modern Centre/Periphery formula. We are dealing with a polynuclear event, in which politics and art all seem to have the same mission (if art is to have one): to deal with time and space in the near future of the Barcelona metropolitan area, rife with conflicts on several scales and yet with an industrious track record for critically addressing them, becoming both a pedagogical approach and a great political, architectural and artistic laboratory. Barcelona is a hub of hypermodernity, distributing, connecting, acting, spreading and pushing new flows, new focal points, new features, whilst also attending to the specific circumstances of each neighbourhood and their diversity.

The whole metropolitan region is a testing ground for political experimentation. It contours differences without glossing over them, dealing with meeting points, settling disputes and eliminating any extremes that do not find a cosmopolitical resonance in all the different universes that not only make up this metropolis but also all the others in Europe.

Two key cases appear to encapsulate Manifesta’s mission: the conflict between the airport expansion and Casa Gomis; and the upgrading of what is perhaps one of the most staggering industrial legacies of the previous century, known as Les Tres Xemeneies. Contrasting territories, each at different ends of the sprawling metropolis, these sites indicate Barcelona as a pivotal point, a connecting or mediating element in conflicts, aspirations and uncertainties. They provide the concept behind the biennial’s numerous specificities and speculative webs. The context is mass tourism; Capital constantly snatching up more of the Catalan capital; independentism; the sweltering heat and the increasingly frequent, ever more prevalent drought.

Manifesta is a hyper-object turned into form, into matter, shaped by non-visible information (now palpable), moulded by the time and space ether of past and future, both compressed and overlaid in inalienable bodies.

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Three clusters structure the biennial: Balancing Conflicts, in cities southwest of Barcelona; Cure and Care, in northern cities; and Imagining Futures, in the northwest industrial surroundings. Directed by Hedwig Fijen, with the creative mediation of Sergio Prado (in the preparatory stage of the biennial) and Filipa Oliveira, this will, perhaps, be one of the most ambitious and complex editions to manage. The figure of the curator is replaced by that of the mediator, which is preferred to the first precisely because it gives new meaning to an activity that, upon entering the voracious and superficial logic of cultural capitalism, has become empty. In a network of 12 municipalities, each with its local representative, this ensures the correct and effective implementation of projects in the territory, involving cultural professionals who know the particularities and idiosyncrasies of each space, neighbourhood or city. This – it should be stressed – is the challenge, and this is the true European and itinerant cultural matrix of Manifesta.

Barcelona airport is a vast cosmos – a hub of globalised neoliberal capitalism. It grows from one decade to the next: more terminals, more parking, more services, more shops, more experiences, in one of those undifferentiated non-places, equal to so many others. A space that demands more space, that must grow further and further, because if it does not grow, then it will stagnate, and if it stagnates then it will collapse, endangering the regional economy and, consequently, the national one. But this boom is threatening biodiversity in one of the few natural parks in the Barcelona metropolitan area, the Delta, and the historical memory of Casa Gomis, once the hotbed of the Catalan avant-garde cultural elite.

Built by Antoni Bonet i Castellana, working closely with the homeowners and the surrounding land, Casa Gomis is a prime example of modern Catalan architecture in its use of industrial materials, concrete and the functional yet poetic layout of the rooms. The artworks play a low-key role, as if they had been there for ages and were part of the structure’s atmosphere. The photographed characters, the sculpted creatures, the artefacts and installations grouped together in more or less hybrid constructions seem to silently bear witness to a long-awaited conflict. There is something endearing in Chiara Camoni’s Cani; sinister in Anca Benera and Arnold Estefan’s No shelter from the storm and Ira Lupu’s Russian Missile; overwhelming in Elmo Vermijs’ Parliament of trees and Enrique Ramírez’s Para construir un jardín necesitamos de un trozo de tierra y la eternidade. The dialogue with nature happens inside and outside the house, with works by Fina Miralles, Moisès Villèlia, Larry Apichatpong and Ruta Putramentaite, whilst Manuel Chavajay’s ru k’uux kaaj / corazón del cosmo seems to restore the cosmic grandeur of Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space – each house a universe of voices, spectres, bodies and memories engraved on walls, windows and doors, recesses and corners, cupboards and drawers.

Having this as a centrepiece of the biennial, as part of the Balancing Conflicts cluster, reminds us of the need to protect heritage against the cyclopean rampage of neoliberal progress. The expansion of airport structures will find here a haven for history and art, whose leverage is often underestimated.

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The Cure and Care cluster represents an introspective occasion. This is perhaps the reason why so many works are displayed in isolation as if each one called for silence and dialogue with the viewer and no more. Ègara’s episcopal complex, the monastery of Sant Cugat and the Museum of Natural Sciences (MCNG) are all prime examples of this, as they bring the works and the aesthetic experience to a cleansing asceticism.

Buhlebezwe Siwani’s piece in Ègara is notable for the lightness and softness of the green soap sculptures. Isaziso 1996 is an ode to motherhood and the different generations of a family. We move around the work like satellites, bearing witness to a domestic scene of love, care and comfort. Under the subdued light of the funeral church of Sant Miquel, just inside the transept, the sculpture becomes a vital centrepiece between life and death.

Seyni Awa Camara’s sculptures take the place of the Catholic signs and symbols in the high altar’s small sacred niches. These seemingly mythical creatures are in fact a representation of the superhuman forces and bodies of motherhood. This is how Camara arrived at a place of belonging within her community when she came to realise that she could not have children. The representation and immortalisation of a brief but profound moment in the lives of the women with whom she shares her daily life provided her with purpose, whilst at the same time providing a respite from a biological trauma in a society where motherhood is a woman’s primary goal.

Sant Cugat is a place of introspection, a breather for the regenerative capacity of social and human bonds. The textile aspect is dominant with works by Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien, Fanja Bouts, Buhlebezwe Siwani and radio SLUMBER. The tapestries, the knots, the braiding and the weightlessness of the fabrics all inevitably suggest a female and feminist collaborative practice, as old as classical myths, when memory, time, healing and (re)productive labour fell within the realm of women and were depicted by them in mythological prose and poetry.

There is something deeply spiritual and dreamlike, however, running through all the works. A languid slumber seemingly envelops each piece in a convalescing sensation, as if they were healing from the wounds and ailments of a harsh, vile existence. This is a dreamt, imagined landscape; traces of characters snatched from the gloom of night and death, female individuals who keep vigil over the deceased, in Restos de sueño by Bea Bonafini; spellbinding, empowering fables, such as Banquet by Marianna Simnet; delirious visions, such as Diana Policarpo describes in Liquid Transfers, also reminiscent of the role of women in traditional medicine; colourful, flickering nebulae, like Immolation by Judy Chicago.

Attention to nature and its spirits, its primitive and telluric qualities capable of generating endless forms and objects is reflected in MCNG. Hugo Canoilas’ pieces feel like they have always been part of the museum’s garden. They are odd objects, artefacts salvaged from some kind of fiction, more or less mineral, or even more or less synthetic. Canoilas entrusts his works to nature’s intelligence and ecology and to non-human beings, he throws them into danger, into the unforeseen and the microbial lives of lakes and plants. Eva Chettle is trying her own hand at pseudo-archaeology or xeno-archaeology, as she takes over the museum’s cabinets and showrooms to position creatures made of various organic materials alongside the existing collection. The animal merges with the human, the mineral with the vegetable, shells with teeth, and horns with backbones. These creatures haunt the scientific speculations of literature and modern mass culture, between awe and terror. Jonathas de Andrade, meanwhile, plunges us into environmental catastrophe, the intricate dynamics of forests and the difficult relationships we share with animals, fragile beings that ought to be under human care.

This cluster also features MASBEDO’s performance in one of the shelters that have remained from the Spanish Civil War. Ghost soldier (gabbing away) is like a catharsis, a release from the fear of war, of death and of life told between bombings. After all, this is a rave in a bunker. The beats are replaced by firing and grenades. The bodies frantically churn in the darkness, until they collapse in the stupor of tiredness and exhaustion. MASBEDO draws on real-life cases of bunkers that serve as venues for techno music events, as breaks between the suffering of the past and what is to come. The reality of the underground is different. The subsoil reshapes our relationship with the world, with communities, with life and death. This is a different kind of healing. More placebo than a panacea, more escapism than confrontation – that which is possible when the downfall is inescapable.

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Imagining Futures is certainly the most politically charged of the clusters, not only because of the range of works but also because of the spaces hosting them. The Mataró Prison is the first case of prisons built according to the panoptic apparatus until it was shut down at the end of the 1960s. It is worth noting that Mataró served as a tragic destination for many of those who opposed the Franco regime. Domenèc’s research compiles several case studies of architecture used for punishment and surveillance, extremely useful for the different fascist and authoritarian regimes that ruled Europe in the twentieth century. This historical testimony, made of cells and tortuous areas, is the basis for the future of the building, converted in 2022 into a cultural centre, the M|A|C, so as to debate, potentially, the future of similar buildings and turn this palimpsest of activities into a site for democratic and humanist re-foundation.

Yet again in Mataró, one cannot help but talk about Eva Fàbregas’ blown-up parasite, penetrating and bursting through the surfaces of the former prison. Exudates contains something visceral, as if human guts had been laid bare in this symbolically ghostly area of violence and resistance. Korakrit Arunanondchai’s Songs for Dying is also an emotional moment – a speculative elegy filmed by the artist to honour and remember his father, who was murdered in Thailand’s 1948 Jeju massacre. The cell turns into an unrecognisable place – a limbo, a memorial, a hyper-aware place where grief becomes art and art is a catalyst for transformation.

But everything is converging on one point.

It all comes together in this gigantic, gargantuan structure, ripping through the Barcelona landscape and soaring into the sky as an icon of the industrial age and the overcoming of nature by humanity.

Les Tres Xemeneies is one of the last monuments of European industrialisation and one of the most recent mysteries concerning the post-industrial and late-capitalist era the continent is facing. Having no plans for the future and its fate uncertain, Les Tres Xemeneies is simultaneously a lost source of nostalgia and a yearning for progress and change among Catalans, particularly the inhabitants of Sant Adrià de Besòs.

When he was invited to Manifesta 15, Mike Nelson’s idea seemed simple: recognise Les Tres Xemeneies as a sculpture. This simple redesignation would be enough to alter the perception of this building and its surroundings. However, it also clouds our understanding of it and the entire future of the area. Renovation, rehabilitation or conversion projects would be pointless; there is no demand for a new cultural centre, a new congress venue, or a new wave in the economy of attention and intellectuality. This is a sculpture that cannot be exploited; a testament to the elementality of nature over human ingenuity; a legacy about concrete, modern materiality and the ecocide it embodies, as Ansel Jappe so aptly illustrates in Béton. Arme de construction massive du capitalisme; an object that simply endures and persists unchanged in the landscape and on the shores of the Besòs; a structure over the many winding structures of power, phallocentric, competing with others like it and not too far away, such as Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Família or Jean Nouvel’s luminous penis in the Glòries.

The interior is clearly an achievement in the way the artists and mediators approach and occupy it, striving for a difficult but curious dialogue between the pieces, the masses and gravity. By definition, this is ‘the exhibition’ that Manifesta has made us fond of, where the textuality and conceptual discursiveness of the works go hand in hand with materiality and sensorial nature.

Carlos Bunga, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Julian Charrière and Ugo Schiavi bring together a sort of apocalypse – shaped not in the world-ending sense, but in the original meaning of the term: revelation. They reveal aspects of nature, fragility, and the geological and biological strata of the earth, all of them rather different, but all based on a profound dialogue. Carlos Bunga’s La irrupción de lo impredecible, a cross between painting and installation, is a way of bringing the toxicity of the soil to the surface. The cocoons dangle from above, pending the metamorphosis of future species in this synthetic and sulphurous arena. Kia Henda and Charrière delve into the power of fire. Whereas the former is a tragedy of loss, of a burnt forest that human ingenuity is trying to rebuild, the latter highlights the purifying, generative and mythological allure of fire. Schiavi is speculating about the future plant life in what seems to be a capsule that could withstand all cataclysms, surviving alongside technology and the natural phenomena that are so essential for growth.

Maya Escher and Claire Fontaine’s works are also highly activist. Water and land are not only the basic materials of Escher’s work but also a key prerequisite for thinking about the Alentejo territory. Her voice is passionately expressive when she mentions the community in which she lives and the atomisation of its different nationalities. But Escher does not see herself as an activist. As she puts it, this is a word that has repeatedly been used to undermine environmentalist discourse. Mud drawings on textiles float around on reeds; passages from poems lend a voice to ancestral and local knowledge; and it all seems to take on life and agency – a work that stems from human action, but frees itself from it to fully exist. In Claire Fontaine, activism is embraced and refers to women’s labour rights and their position within global capitalism. When women stop, the machines and everything else do as well. In their wombs, women hold the possibility of a strike that disrupts the reproductive economy essential to capitalism and the market.

White sheets flutter on the highest floor of the nave. No windows exist in this sculpture/factory/monument. Air currents flow over, around and shake Asad Raza’s work. Whilst not the most original proposal or solution of the whole, this is nevertheless a remarkable moment, soft and light, in stark contrast to the stiffness of the building. A dance orchestrated by the wind blowing in from that salty, necrophiliac sea known as the Mediterranean; a purely sensory surrender to art, a most welcome desertion that soothes and reassures the spirit.

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Many of the dozens of artists have been omitted from this article solely on the grounds of space. However, this is the very gist of a biennial that defied established models and sought something new, capable of developing new understandings and ways of working with culture and institutional arenas.

Some will not be successful in visiting all the exhibitions. Many will be frustrated. But that does not mean failure. It just shows that we need another way of attending these events, one that perhaps is more about belonging than transience.

Until 24 November in the metropolitan area of Barcelona.

Umbigo travelled at the invitation of Manifesta 15.