Anna Moreno

The exhibition The Third Torsion presents recent works by Anna Moreno that reflect on temporality through utopian architecture and the potential of speculative imagination. The central piece is The Terminal Beach, part of a trilogy that contraposes projects by Ricardo Bofill with short stories by James Graham Ballard. The Terminal Beach, a film co-directed with Brazilian filmmaker Bernardo Zanotta, documents -in the form of a road movie- the current state of a nomadic settlement built in 1979 by Ricardo Bofill in the Algerian Sahara, commissioned by President Houari Boumédienne. The construction belongs to the architect’s utopian period, when his studio, Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura (RBTA), operated as an amalgam of architects, poets, painters, and other creators. What was intended to be a complex conceived alongside modernist principles remained unfinished, and today reveals the tension between the dream of that era and the reality of modern colonial legacies. The trilogy has received support from Amarte Fonds, Mondriaan Fonds, Stroom Den Haag, VEGAP, Hangar, and Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura.

Marfantes is set in the Ebro Delta in 2099, in a community that has already adapted to the rising sea levels, salinization, and subsidence that today are still on the horizon. At the centre of the piece, a group of itinerant troubadours sets up an open-air cinema on a mussel platform and screens a documentary from 2024 in which people of our time debate solutions to save the Delta. The audience watches from the future, and handles the footage as an archaeological artefact: a record of good intentions measured against what actually came to pass. Around that cinema, other scenes unfold. A communal paella is cooked with salt-resistant rice and blue crab, once invasive and now folkloric. A horseman rides into the water on fields whose soil, sunk by subsidence, no longer bears agricultural machinery. Teenagers play La Morra. A young singer performs a rondalla from that same future. The marfantes, ghostly figures rooted in Andalusi Arabic and surviving in Delta folklore, return as hauntological witnesses of a future that could have been otherwise. The work was developed over nearly five years of collaboration with farmers, fishers, teenagers, activists, and scientists from the Delta. The shoot unfolded through open situations rather than a written script, and every person on screen is an inhabitant of the territory playing a speculative version of themselves seventy-five years forward. Post-production, carried out with editor Mònica Cambra and supported by Fundación Daniel y Nina Carasso, extended this method into a series of collective editing sessions held in rice warehouses, bird-protection NGOs, and marine research labs across the Delta. Participants viewed, argued, mapped, and renamed a submerged version of their own territory, and their vocabulary has fed the final cut. Authorship, in this project, keeps circulating. The installation is composed of three synchronised channels with site-responsive spatialised sound designed by Oriol Campi, over an original score by Malaysian visual anthropologist Weiyan Low. Sound is treated as a spatial field emerging from all three screens, and the arrangement of the channels is conceived to be reconfigured each time the work is shown,.

In Three Ways to Measure Tides, Moreno presents two overlapping layers of the Ebro Delta: one submerged, the other emergent. Based on scientific projections, these images of the future explore how the landscape and its inhabitants might reorganize in response to rising sea levels and territorial transformation. Using fictional representations of the landscape, the artist questions the perception of geological time and its impact on daily life, drawing a parallel between the fluctuation of tides and the volatility of economic and social systems. The Ebro Delta is an ever-changing landscape, shaped by the forces of sedimentation, erosion, and rising sea levels. Three Ways to Measure Tides presents three speculative attitudes toward the future—adaptation, acceptance, and resistance—through the lens of the region’s species. The invasive blue crab, thriving in altered conditions, symbolizes adaptation. The nearly extinct Nacra, unable to adjust to environmental changes, represents resistance. The newly developed salt-resistant rice, an engineered response to salinization, embodies acceptance. Using illuminated imagery and vernacular symbolism, the work reimagines how both ecosystems and human communities negotiate transformation, drawing a parallel between biological survival strategies and political decision-making in the face of climate change.

The video was filmed in Costa Paradiso, a holiday resort in the northern coast of the island of Sardinia, a tiny village and holiday hub first founded in the 1970s as a VIP exclusive holiday spot once inhabited by filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni. Antonioni and actress Monica Vitti lived in the iconic house nicknamed as La Cupola, a concrete dome designed by architect Dante Bini. Later, Costa Paradiso became one of the most renowned – and less exclusive – beach destinations in north Sardinia during the off-season. The footage includes scenes from the derelict military base on the small island of Caprera, from La Maddalena archipelago, also in northern Sardinia, where Garibaldi had its base. The skewed and fragmented narrative takes us on a fictional detour a sort of ghostly figure inspired by the actress Monica Vitti, lover of Michelangelo Antonioni, with whom she lived in La Cupola during the shooting of Il Deserto Rosso (1964). This film is also referenced in the video through borrowing some of its industrial sounds and the myth of the singing voice.

https://vimeo.com/annamoreno/costaparaiso

Bulldozer is a single take continuous zoom that takes us through a secret meeting between a real estate tycoon and a corrupt politician at a beachfront hotel where they celebrate the success of one of their shady deals. What starts as a game between power and money with clear sexual undertones, soon lays bare the real intentions behind their encounter. The politician has sold the businesswoman to save himself at the brink of an anti-corruption investigation and invites her to disappear. As the tension escalates and the zoom tightens its frame, we understand that their attraction is inseparable from the danger they represent to one another.

"Time is gold" is a phrase shared by all Spanish speakers that has taken on a more funereal relevance in contemporary society, globalized and open 24 hours a day. By inverting the factors of this phrase, it is gold that becomes time, a symbol of the colonial extractivism that contributed to the birth of globalization. Today, extractivist policies linked to environmental agreements are just another face of an economy based on outsourcing. This sentence has been scratched on the walls of several Spanish Cultural Centers in Latin America, part of an ongoing traveling show "Fabular un Mundo Diferente", curated by Blanca de la Torre, which tries to symbolically reach zero CO2 emissions. An employee of the institution has invested their physical and temporal resources to scratch this phrase on the wall, extracting in turn the physical matter that builds it. Moreno received only a photograph of the completed sentence by e-mail. According to our calculations, the detached dust shown here should approximate 50g, equivalent to the carbon footprint of sending an e-mail with attached image. The phrase scratched on the wall Gold is time to love is taken from an unrealized utopian project by the Spanish architect Ricardo Bofill called The City in Space (1970). The phrase appeared on the floor plan of the projected houses, where the furniture disappeared, replaced by disappeared, replacing it with terms and phrases that proposed a new urban growth based on demand and not on predetermined plans.

Anna Moreno’s Plastic, Marble, and Helicopters renders 1970s utopian architecture into a speculative myth, flung at us from an atemporal, near future. It is the culmination of a year-long research into Global Tools, a pioneering pedagogical project initiated in 1972 by various architecture studios from the Italian radical design movement led by Ettore Sottsass. Global Tools proclaimed the “re-founding of manual labor,” and the use of “poor technique” and “simple technology” while invoking the body as the ultimate form of architecture, a site with hidden political and creative potential. Sottsass was then the artistic director of Poltronova, a high-end furniture firm, and research center that still produces some of Global Tools’s members’ iconic designs. The irony of the pro-Marxist group’s coziness with the luxury furniture market does not escape Moreno’s eye. With support from Poltronova, Moreno produced a four-piece modular sofa, which she used as a performative prop at the Space Electronic club during its 50th-anniversary event. The Florentine discotheque was the underground hub where Global Tools enacted some of its seminal experiments. Rather than reenacting these experiments, Moreno’s performances thoughtfully re-propose them. Project made with the support of Fundación Botín (Santander, Spain) Centro Studi Poltronova (Florence, Italy) Stichting Stokroos (Utrecht, The Netherlands)

Anna Moreno’s Plastic, Marble, and Helicopters renders 1970s utopian architecture into a speculative myth, flung at us from an atemporal, near future. It is the culmination of a year-long research into Global Tools, a pioneering pedagogical project initiated in 1972 by various architecture studios from the Italian radical design movement led by Ettore Sottsass. Global Tools proclaimed the “re-founding of manual labor,” and the use of “poor technique” and “simple technology” while invoking the body as the ultimate form of architecture, a site with hidden political and creative potential. Sottsass was then the artistic director of Poltronova, a high-end furniture firm, and research center that still produces some of Global Tools’s members’ iconic designs. The irony of the pro-Marxist group’s coziness with the luxury furniture market does not escape Moreno’s eye. With support from Poltronova, Moreno produced a four-piece modular sofa, which she used as a performative prop at the Space Electronic club during its 50th-anniversary event. The Florentine discotheque was the underground hub where Global Tools enacted some of its seminal experiments. Rather than reenacting these experiments, Moreno’s performances thoughtfully re-propose them. Project made with the support of Fundación Botín (Santander, Spain) Centro Studi Poltronova (Florence, Italy) Stichting Stokroos (Utrecht, The Netherlands)

Series of lamps made for the project Plastic, Marble, and Helicopters

2-channel video-installation BILLENNIUM is the result of a research into the modular architecture proposed by Ricardo Bofill’s Taller de Arquitectura during the seventies, combined with the literature by British sci-fi author J.G. Ballard. In 1962, Ballard wrote Billennium, which describes the claustrophobia and paralysis in an overpopulated world. Departing from this scenario, an expert in community-based economy and a Bitcoin evangelist speculate on a post- apocalyptic future in which honey, rather than gold or oil, act as the main currency. BILLENNIUM focuses on the line between utopian and dystopian projects, not only in architecture but also in the great narratives that we project, as a society, towards the future. This balancing posture is repeated throughout the installation, supported by Mecalux structures based on studies of the building Walden 7, designed by Bofill in 1975, and an incursion into a massive hydroponics plant. The Mecalux structures feature two screens: a video shot in the building Walden7, built by Ricardo Bofill in 1975 near Barcelona, and a video shot inside a massive hydroponics plant in The Hague. The hanging blueprints are based on original drawings of Walden7 from Bofill’s own archive. The installation includes vaporwave music composed by Siem Beets and an audioguide featuring the speculations of the two economy experts. The Architects Association of Catalonia hosts this video-installation which takes place within the framework of Beehave, a project by the Miró Foundation in Barcelona.

In 1970 a happening was organized in Moratalaz (Madrid) to promote the utopian housing project The City in Space, by the Spanish architect Ricardo Bofill (Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura). That unofficial event was never documented and ultimately the housing project was never built. In June 2017 Anna Moreno reenacted the happening in the same place as the original, and documented both the event and the research process through sound. These recordings have been released on a limited edition LP, which is now on show in the Ondertussen space, containing the testimonies of the architects, musicians and direct witnesses involved in the 1970 event. The edition also includes a booklet with fictional stories written by the architects Paula Currás & Havi Navarro, the curator María Montero, the blues expert Ramon del Solo and Anna Moreno herself.

In 1970 a happening was organized in Moratalaz (Madrid) to promote the utopian housing project The City in Space, by the Spanish architect Ricardo Bofill (Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura). That unofficial event was never documented and ultimately the housing project was never built. In June 2017 Anna Moreno reenacted the happening in the same place as the original, and documented both the event and the research process through sound.

First public presentation:1646, The Hague, June 2015 An Awkward Game is a week long event on the intersection between table tennis and politics. Consisting of a series of public events and an installation on the political origins of the game. The origins of table tennis are aligned with geopolitics: British aristocrat Ivor Montagu set the rules of the game in the 30s, as he believed it could help spread Communism over the world. He became a Soviet spy, befriending Trotsky, Chaplin and producing Hitchcock’s early films. When Mao established the game as China’s national sport it became a vital cog in his foreign policy, reaching its peak with the reestablishment of US-China relations through the exchange of table tennis players in 1971. In this project, I parallel diplomacy to dialogics, a term coined by Bakhtin also in the 30s meant to note how readers become engaged in a story by nonlinear processes, and that is currently used in social sciences , stressing how dialogue itself enables the existence of ‘the other’.