PLATJA DE PALS

CATALONIA

 

Just inland from Catalonia’s Costa Brava stand the remains of the Radio Liberty transmission complex, a Cold War broadcasting infrastructure designed to project US-funded news, Western culture and anti-communist messaging deep into the Soviet Union. The station once functioned as the most advanced technological apparatus of ideological transmission; today the antennas are gone and the machinery removed. What remains is the architectural residue of communication: trenches where cables once ran, stripped control rooms, crumbling asbestos ceilings and the empty shells of signal-producing spaces. 

 

The Non-Museum Project engages this site beyond the idea of heritage as a temporary research platform. Artists introduce provisional, materially light interventions into the abandoned structures, with textiles, colour, rope, tape, sound and light activating the architecture through gestures that neither restore nor monumentalise it, instead highlighting this architecture of redundancy. Composer and guest collaborator, Montse Miàs, performs in the former Continental Room on a battery-powered piano. Here, the logistical constraints of the site become part of the artistic methodology. For this Catalonia edition, the project operates as a temporary social ecology. Work emerges collectively as often as individually, shaped through conversation and shared investigation. Shannon Cleere observed during the process, “We’re forming art as we talk, discuss politics, the environment and social justice, and all the work is a consequence of that human interaction.”

 

Nothing here is intended to remain. Works are carried in, briefly activated, and documented. Nothing is for sale, nor is there a public audience. The project therefore reverses the institutional logic of the museum and the nature of a broadcasting system itself, embracing the idea of forming and communicating art for art’s sake. Where Radio Liberty once broadcast ideological certainty across geopolitical boundaries, the artists relay messages of another kind: uncertain, temporary, collective and deliberately non-functional forms of presence that surrender to impermanence and reject instrumental use.