Spain 2026

Title: Los Restos
Commissioner: AECID (Spanish Agency for International Development  Cooperatíon), AC/E (Acción Cultural Española)
Curator: Carles Guerra
Exhibitor: Oriol Vilanova

“Los restos” is built around a practice Oriol Vilanova has sustained for over two decades: the systematic collection of postcards salvaged from flea markets and second-hand shops. These fragments of personal correspondence – discarded remnants of the era of global tourism – form the material basis of a large-scale installation that transforms the Spain Pavilion into what the project terms an “anti-museum.”

The postcards are displayed as a mural composition without hierarchy or linear narrative, foregrounding the obsessive, cumulative logic of gathering itself rather than any single object or story. The installation resists monumentality in favour of the modest, repetitive gesture of preservation – asking what cultural value is assigned to everyday objects, what is chosen to be kept, and what survives when communication regimes shift. In this sense, “Los restos” functions less as an archive of specific histories than as a meditation on fragility, accumulation, and the conditions under which memory persists or dissolves. The reopening of the Spain Pavilion following its comprehensive renovation in 2025 provides a newly refurbished context for a project that is, in many ways, about the tension between institutional frameworks and the informal, marginal spaces where Vilanova’s collection originates.