Artist Nora Ancarola and Loop Festival curator Eva Paià engage in a conversation around the multimedia installation The Power of the Display. Gae Archive.

With a multimedia installation presented in two parts, Nora Ancarola concludes a research process on the structure of the Museum and the architectural renovation carried out by Gae Aulenti between 1985 and 2004. Her proposal allows us to access the secret inner workings behind the construction and consolidation of the building. The artist has filmed characters who move and interact within the mysterious foundations of the building as agents of balance, containment, and play. Through this exercise in transparency, she reveals that the museum is a large display device that structures our experience of art.

Ancarola understands the Museum’s architecture as an archive that accumulates layers and strata referring to its functioning, hierarchies, and history. In doing so, she questions the division between the visible and the invisible, between the museographic space dedicated to art, the exhibited spaces, and the supposedly merely functional ones, often hidden. A phenakistoscope, an early optical device and precursor to cinema, evokes the idea of a dynamic, illusionistic vision, where movement—like that of the tightrope walkers—enables us to see and uncover the enigma.

In collaboration with the Loop Barcelona Festival.