Panoràmic Festival Exhibitions at Roca Umbert
Granollers once again becomes one of the epicentres of the 9th edition of the Panoràmic Festival, which from October 16 unfolds a programme shared with Barcelona and Terrassa. The event includes more than twenty exhibitions combining photography, cinema, installation, video and new artistic formats to reflect on the image and its uses in today’s society. Roca Umbert will host 5 of the exhibitions:
«Hito Steyerl: Quicksand» by Hito Steyerl, Dents de Serra
Curated by Federica Matelli
From October 16 to November 23
Friday: 5–8 pm / Saturday: 11 am–2 pm and 5–8 pm / Sunday: 11 am–2 pm
«Hito Steyerl: Quicksand» invites us to sink into the quicksands of “infocracy” in the 21st century: an endless sea of spam, digital noise and over-information. Through three of Hito Steyerl’s most emblematic works —Is the Museum a Battlefield? (2013), Liquidity Inc. (2014) and Duty Free Art (2015)— this exhibition offers a journey through some of the major issues defining our present: the circulation of capital, digital technology, war and the increasingly ambiguous role of cultural institutions.
Considered one of the most influential artists and thinkers of contemporary digital video art, Steyerl combines in her installations archival materials, visual essay and institutional critique with a sharp and provocative gaze. An opportunity to pause and rethink the place of art and images in a world dominated by algorithms, financial flows and mediated narratives.
«Error-horror» by Franc Aleu, La Tèrmica
Friday: 5–8 pm / Saturday: 11 am–2 pm and 5–8 pm / Sunday: 11 am–2 pm
«Error-horror» is an exhibition project that explores the play of meanings emerging from a single distorted word: error and horror. A visual and conceptual fusion that speaks of a territory where machine and imagination collapse, where the misunderstanding between the human and the algorithm opens spaces for radical creation.
Artist Franc Aleu presents the results of more than three years of research and experimentation with faulty models and AI tools still in development. From this trajectory, Aleu proposes an immersive experience that explores the poetic potential of AI-generated errors, transforming their imperfections —glitches, censorships and misunderstandings— into artistic material.
In addition to images and videos, the exhibition includes a real-time video generation piece in which visitors will see themselves reflected as one of these imperfect, perhaps even monstrous, digital creatures, opening the door to an aesthetic and symbolic confrontation with their own reflection.
Open Panoràmic, selected artists from the open call, Espai d’Arts
Friday: 5–8 pm / Saturday: 11 am–2 pm and 5–8 pm / Sunday: 11 am–2 pm
Exhibition of the artists selected in the Open Panoràmic 2025 open call, curated by Pilar Cruz
Dates: October 16 to November 30
Category A – Still Image
Benedetta Ristori “The Wall Remembers Twice”
Polina Schneider “I, Superhero”
Beatrice Moumdjian “Forensic Excavations Inventory or The Total Deconstruction of an Armenian Family”
Category B – Audiovisual Essay
Laura Baigorri Ballarín “Farewells to artists: An ethical trilogy (2025) 11’”
Kenneth Russo “Àlbum Il·lustrat (1900-2024)”
Ignasi Prat Altimira “El tapís del rei”
Category C – Other Formats
Mònica Porta Domínguez “És com tenir un hort”
Marta Bisbal Torres “Maquinacions”
Marina Baldina “Non-player character”
«La subversió de les imatges», photobook exhibition, Dents de Serra
From October 16 to November 23
Friday: 5–8 pm / Saturday: 11 am–2 pm and 5–8 pm / Sunday: 11 am–2 pm
Curated by Andrés Hispano
Through a bibliographic selection, Panoràmic presents a journey and a reflection on the key aspects that have shaped our use, exchange and understanding of photography throughout this first quarter of the century.
In addition to the definitive transition from analogue to digital, other practices such as the use of archives, appropriation, manipulations of all kinds and AI-assisted creations have generated a new landscape in which the photographic image seems freed from its technical and historical origins. We no longer need lenses, mirrors or even environment to produce images we consider photographic, which are no longer, strictly speaking, either captures or reproductions.
In this atomised circulation of images it seemed difficult to cultivate an artistic voice without the possibility of articulating fully respected projects, as galleries or books enabled throughout the last century. This is where the rise of the photobook preserves an essential space in photographic art.
In this break from which we want to rethink the photographic image, we find especially stimulating the explorations of fiction, the invisible, the estranged or the void —images that open the way to a quotidian yet enigmatic world, far from the saturation, overstimulation and horror vacui in which we are cultivated every day.
«Tot el que pot passar: la inactivitat com a motor de l’inaudit» by Laura Aranda Lavado, Espai La Xemeneia
Panoràmic File
Curated by Mercè Alsina. In collaboration with the Photographic Archive of the Municipal Archive of Granollers
Against the speed, productivity and spectacle of the capitalist world, the work of Laura Aranda Lavado proposes embracing another, slower, more conscious and contemplative rhythm. Inspired by Contemplative Life by Byung-Chul Han, Aranda’s research does not understand inactivity as the absence of action, but as a form of resistance and re-appropriation of time.
The project brings together a series of everyday, professional and user images from the Regional Photographic Archive of Vallès Oriental. Scenes of play, community and freedom that escape the productivist logic and make us question how we prioritise the value of some historical documents over others. Furthermore, one of these images has been translated into textile language through crochet, in a gesture that transforms photography into a manual and fragmentary process, evidencing how the image is also a way of constructing a narrative open to reinterpretation.
