Don’t let money be an excuse. Barcelona is full of free museums and exhibitions that open the door to culture without having to spend a euro. And we are not just talking about rare, small (or even street) museums: in the city there are large centers with high quality exhibitions that do not give everything, for the simple effort to approach them.
Museums of contemporary art, photography and audiovisual culture, theater, architecture and even jewelry. The offer of culture in Barcelona is great, and if it’s free, even better. So now you know, if your pocket is with cobwebs, but your head asks for culture, these are the great free exhibitions that you can visit now in Barcelona.
Filmoteca de Catalunya. “Precursoras: feminisms, camera in hand and archive on the shoulder”.
Les Insoumuses was a feminist film collective created in France in the 1970s. Its name comes from the combination of the words insoumuses and muses. This exhibition at the Filmoteca de Catalunya shows the videos of these filmmakers, along with those of other related collectives, with which they fought for the right to abortion, sexual freedom or anti-psychiatry.
“Precursoras” offers us a journey through the cultural and visual history of French feminism in the 70s and 80s through film. It is an alternative history where activism is the main engine of struggle and cinematographic creation.
📍Location: Plaça de Salvador Seguí, 1
📆Dates : until November 17, 2024
Arxiu Fotogràfic de Barcelona. “Family, friends and photography. Around the photographic space of the home.”
Surely you have a tíx, hermanx or abuelx pesadx with taking pictures whenever you meet the family (and if you do not have it, it is you). But what is the value of family photographs? Why do we take them?
“Family, friends and photography. Around the photographic space of the home” wants to highlight the special meaning we give when we take a family photo and explore its symbolic and documentary value.
The exhibition recalls that before smartphones in every home there were photographs and that when we went to our grandparents’ house, we always saw the photo of the day they got married and images of all their children and grandchildren in the living room, the kitchen or the hallway. So we will see everyday scenes, from amateur, novice and professional photographers, very different from each other, but where the home is the center of everything.
📍Location: Pl. de Pons i Clerch, 2, 2nd floor.
📆Dates : until October 20, 2024
MUHBA Oliva Artés
An old factory in Poblenou survives in the middle of a park and surrounded by tall office buildings, and invites us to enter (for free) to wonder how a city evolves. It is the MUHBA Oliva Artés, a space that, according to its website, is “a laboratory and participatory museum about the history, legacy and heritage of the contemporary city”.
Currently, in the MUHBA Oliva Artés space you can visit the permanent exhibition Interrogar Barcelona. From industrialization in the 21st century, an exhibition that examines the trajectory of Barcelona from the eighteenth century to the present day and that faces it from different angles such as labor, demographics, immigration, social conflicts, territory or industrial development.
It also hosts temporary exhibitions that can be consulted on its website.
📍Location: C/ de Espronceda, 142-146
MAE. Museum of Performing Arts of the Institut del Teatre.
Yes, the Institut del Teatre has, in addition to the school, a theater museum with which you can go through a good part of the history of the performing arts in Catalonia and that you can visit for free, perhaps while you make time to enter a play at the Teatre LLiure or the Mercat de Les Flors.
This is the Documentation Center and Museum of the Performing Arts, which has two spaces (La Sala and El Vestíbulo) where it shows both its own exhibitions and, sometimes, those of collaborating entities. The permanent exhibition is La memoria de las Artes Efímeras el Museo de las Artes Escénicas, which highlights the work of conservation, documentation and dissemination that it has been doing for almost a hundred years.
📍 Location: Margarida Xirgu s/n. Third floor.
Palau Robert. “S’Agaró 1924-2024. Architecture and culture on the Costa Brava”.
The jewel of Passeig de Gràcia is in great shape, and this former palace that is, among many other things, an exhibition center, regularly hosts exhibitions of a high level of free access .
It is currently hosting the free exhibition “S’Agaró 1924-2024. Arquitectura i cultura a la Costa Brava” which traces the 100 years of history of this modernist jewel of the Costa Brava. S’Agaró, unlike the other towns on the Costa Brava that were old fishing villages, was created a century ago with the aim of building a modernist garden city. It wanted to combine architecture, landscape and tourism.
This exhibition traces the life of this jewel of the Costa Brava and how in a few years it became one of the stages of culture, politics and economy of the country.
📍Location: Pg. de Gràcia, 107
College of Architects
Surely you already know the mural of Picasso that is in Plaça Nova (the Cathedral square) well, in that building is the College of Architects of Catalonia and on the first floor there are always exhibitions related to architecture with free admission. They also have a bookstore specialized in architecture.
📍 Location: Plaça Nova, 5
Centre d’Arts Santa Mònica. “Després del vendaval. Rehabitar les esquerdes des de l’acció col-lectiva”.
“Rehabilitar les esquerdes” refers to the gaps between walls and power and the ability to fill and heal them through art.
It is an exhibition committed to the environment, where we will reflect on concepts and slogans such as “no person is illegal” or “people without houses and houses without people”.
📍Location: La Rambla, 7
📆Dates : October 2, 2024 to January 12, 2025
The world’s smallest museum hidden in the streets of Gracia.
When we walk we look to the sky, to the ground, forward or to whoever accompanies us. We look at the store windows or the facades of buildings, but we rarely stop to look at the walls, which usually hide few secrets and are nothing more than the transition between one door and another, the piece of stone born to hide things, not to show them.
But that changes in Gracia, the neighborhood that hosts a museum, the smallest in the world, which hides in the walls of its streets. To find it, one can freely walk around the neighborhood, or, if in a hurry, consult the map of the work, which indicates where to look.
The exhibition rooms of the “Smallest Museum in the World” are not rooms or galleries, but holes in the wall barely 10 cm wide and long. They are the old water faucets of the city, holes hidden behind small black metal doors that have been left empty, and that the artist Noemí Batllori began to fill, a few years ago, with her daughter Gala, with small works of art.
📍 Gràcia neighborhood