The stable exhibition: Barcelona Flashback. A Historical Synthesis

Barcelona Flashback. A Historical Synthesis is the core exhibition of the network of spaces that make up the MUHBA. It is located in Casa Padellàs and is a flexible, open, and interrogative proposal based on Barcelona’s urban narratives.

It is a synthesis exhibition, which shows the bimillennial trajectory of Barcelona based on a method of interrogative historical reading of documents, objects, architectures, and landscapes. It is, at the same time, an international research project on the minimum kit of knowledge and urban representation needed to exercise the right to the city. The exhibition is based on the collections of the MUHBA and is the starting point for the 55 rooms of the Museum in its 19 venues distributed around Barcelona. You enter through the looking glass, as in the dream of Alice imagined by Lewis Carroll, and you can exit via the time tunnel.

With this exhibition, the MUHBA joins the European city museums that are taking up the challenge of offering a synthesis of quality and showing, in an interrogative key, the metropolis in no more than 90 minutes. The proposal points directly towards a radical change in the way Barcelona is seen and visited by its inhabitants and its visitors, in favour of sustainable and alternative tourism.

The exhibition presented a hundred objects in its experimental version from 2019 to 2021 and about 200 in its newer version. This stable exhibition aspires to promote methodological training for the knowledge of the city.

The five sections of Barcelona Flashback

Barcelona Flashback is  conceived as a journey that is both introspective and urban, a dialectic between visitor and Museum, with two sections that open and close the exhibition and place the visitor in a space for more intimate reflection and a central body where the Museum develops a method of urban reading and construction of the historical narrative of Barcelona.

The whole is developed across a sequence of five sections:

1. Urban Beats,  an initial space configured as a series of mirrors that encompass visitors in the midst of images of the city throughout the twentieth century  and invite them to “cross the mirror” like Lewis Caroll’s Alice in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There.

2. Geographies,  which makes inroads into today's city from its urban form, architectures, social and political space and its representations.

3. Testimonies,  which addresses how to question written texts, oral sources, images, and objects, which are the materials that should allow us to move on to a more articulated vision.

4. History,  with a whole series of questions about the options of Barcelona that marked the successive periods of its history, from ancient Barcelona (1st to 17th centuries) to modern Barcelona (18th to 21st centuries).

5. Into the Future, questions for rethinking the city and the world in which we live based solely on questions and documents, without the Museum making any kind of assessment. It is simply the awakening of Alice's story, with its blurred profile somewhere between what is dream and what is reality. It will be up to the visitor to decide...

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Dossier de premsa MUHBA Padellàs. Casa de la Història de Barcelona
Guia breu del MUHBA El Museu d’Història de Barcelona