Mental health, the human condition, and cities make up CCCB’s 2022 program

Barcelona’s Contemporary Culture Center has unveiled its program for 2022, featuring topics such as mental health, the brain, the human condition, and cities. 

These subjects will be explored through exhibitions, talks, and roundtable discussions which will place philosophy and literature at the heart of their debates. 

The program for 2022 includes an exhibition dedicated to the Catalan psychiatrist Francesc Tosquelles and various lectures in which prominent figures in Catalan literature such as Manuel de Pedrolo, Joan Fuster, and Víctor Català will be acclaimed.

For next year, the budget of Barcelona’s Contemporary Culture Center will amount to €11,800,000, an increase of 9.5% compared with 2021 thanks to an increase in the financial reinforcement by the Barcelona Provincial Council. 

The director of CCCB, Judit Carrera, wants the 2022 program to "strengthen ties" and "open up to the world." 

"The CCCB wants to be a space for serene and plural debate,” Carrera added, “a place for meeting and creation that breaks the digital bubble." 

Although directors wanted next season to be the “post-pandemic" program, Carrera recognizes that this is too early to be the case. However, in 2022 the CCCB will resume and intensify international alliances, Carrera explained. 

Permanent alliances with the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin have been announced, and the CCCB will also collaborate with the Royal Society of Literature in London.

Mental health, the human condition, and cities

Mental health and the need to rebuild and create communities is the central theme of three major exhibitions coming to the CCCB over the next year. 

The year will start with 'The mask never lies', a show based on masks and the act of wearing them. 

Following that, April will see the arrival of the exhibition 'Francesc Tosquelles. Like a sewing machine in a wheat field'. This will be dedicated to the life and work of the Catalan psychiatrist who went into exile in France, where he carried out avant-garde therapeutic, political, and cultural experiments in the 1930s.

Another exhibit, 'Brain(s)', will explore how humans have studied this organ, while also offering an analysis of the set of activities that it develops. 

Philosophy and literature will drive the schedule of conferences and discussions, with the intentions at all times of "looking critically at the present", as the head of the program, Elisabeth Goula, emphasized.

The CCCB will also screen plenty of films for families next year. New in 2022 will be 'Urban Symphonies', a collection of commissioned pieces about Barcelona and other metropolitan cities. 

According to Àngela Martínez, head of audiovisuals at the center, the main goal is to "support the creators." Once again there will be the 'Xèntric' program on avant-garde and experimental cinema, which in 2022 will focus on anthropology.