Veins (Neighbours)

Barcelona, 1995

In 1995, the Museu d’Art Contemporani (MACBA), designed by the American architect Richard Meier, opened in the middle of the medieval Gotico district of Barcelona. 

Part of the original architecture had to make way for the white, cubist museum, giving the impression that a spaceship has landed between the narrow streets and ancient buildings. The MACBA intervenes in the original environment without entering into a relationship with the neighborhood, but merely with other international modern art museums.

The museum offers a view of the different interiors of the buildings that surround the connecting square. These interiors are so fundamentally different that the windows seem to offer a glimpse of a different reality. 

Irene Fortuyn photographed the interiors of the local residents and borrowed the photographed furniture to display in the panorama room of the museum together with the accompanying photo as a puzzle. 

Veins, which is Catalan for Neighbours, reveals the boundaries between the museum as an intervention and the environment surrounding it. The experience of the museum is reversed. The work and the situation completely merge. The interior that served as the model for the photograph has now become the reality of the viewer, as the viewer finds himself in the place portrayed in the photos.