Under the title Happy Place, the third edition of the Fribourg Biennale will take place from 5 June to 27 July 2025 across various venues in the city, and will be curated by Lorena Juan, the artistic director of this edition. The project will unfold in both established institutions and independent and public spaces.
With the participation of Irene de Andrés, Agnes Essonti Luque and Claudia Pagès Rabal, Catalan visual arts will be represented by three prominent voices on today’s artistic scene. Irene de Andrés (Ibiza, 1986) will exhibit her audiovisual work Prora. A complex destination, created in 2018 following her receipt of the 5th DKV-Es Baluard Production Grant for Videographic Creation. In this work, the artist addresses tourism as a theme, exploring it through an obsession with travel and the compulsion to collect destinations, revealing how this colossal industry grows ever stronger, consuming everything in its path.
Claudia Pagès Rabal (Barcelona, 1990) will present Aljubs i Grups, an audiovisual piece first shown at Manifesta 15 in Barcelona. Tracing the circulation of water, Pagès focuses on two cisterns (the Montsant cistern and the four cisterns of Xàtiva) to draw an analogy between water tanks and collectives. This results in a form of segregation, of exclusion, whereby the cistern is not a closed space but a container of overlapping time.
Agnes Essonti Luque (Barcelona, 1996) will offer a culinary and ritual performance within the framework of her multimedia installation Since she was little, nostalgia was given to her by the spoonful (A mí de pequeñita me daban nostalgia a cucharadas). This project understands cooking as the capacity for experimentation, as a network of connections and “possibilities of”, as well as a means of storytelling through process. To achieve this, Essonti works with photographs, objects and ingredients, as well as text, generating a confluence of organic and inorganic elements. The result highlights the power each of these elements possesses in defining identities, histories and communities.
The Fribourg Biennale is a platform dedicated to contemporary art in the city of Fribourg. In close collaboration with guest artists and local agents, new works and formats are developed specifically for the biennale, directly referencing the city and transforming it into a field of experimentation. In this way, the biennale offers new perspectives on the city and its realities.
