Anna Moreno. The Third Twist
By Charlotte Stace
MACBA welcomes Anna Moreno: The Third Twist, an exhibition that uses utopian architecture as a time machine, asking what happens when big modern dreams meet messy reality. Moreno works like an artist-cum-detective, tracing how places built for the future age crack, and start telling different stories.
At its centre is The Terminal Beach, a road-movie-style film that follows the remains of a nomadic settlement commissioned in 1979: an ambitious project in the Algerian Sahara designed during Ricardo Bofill’s utopian era, when his studio operated as a kind of interdisciplinary collective. The site was never completed, and Moreno uses its unfinished state to explore the tension between idealism and the aftermath of colonial modernity.The show brings together three recent works, linking Bofill’s projects with the speculative imagination of J. G. Ballard: part archaeology, part sci-fi mood-board, and a quietly haunting look at how the future can slip out of reach.