The Phantom of Liberty is a title that quotes Luis Buñuel’s well-known 1974 film to question the present moment. We often refer to the “phantom of liberty” to discuss the unattainable that eludes us, a promise that hallucinates reality without fully materialising. In the film’s opening scene, which features Buñuel himself, the characters ironically call out: “Long live the chains!” Liberty, which in the first scene is a political and social freedom, will acquire another meaning: the artist’s or the creator’s liberty, as illusory as the former.

The play between desire and reality, which runs through the construction of liberty, is at a crossroads today, pointing in contradictory directions. Economic inequalities, the purposefulness of capital, the climate emergency and social fractures based on race, religion, gender or sexual orientation expose the fragility of liberty as an expression of the Universal.

Under this title, the biennial proposes a reflection from these different perspectives. Even if we disregard the Universal as a starting point, it is increasingly necessary to think of universalism as a horizon of liberty, understanding that the perpetuation of life can only be that of all lives, human and non-human. In this sense, art is a field of encounter, resistance, participation, rupture, and regenerative imaginative power.

This edition of the Biennial explores the idea of liberty and the strategies of contemporary art to challenge, displace, and inhabit it. The title has an ambiguous and open meaning. If, on the one hand, it suggests the idea that liberty is a phantom, an inescapable and spectral presence, on the other hand, it also points to a postponed process, emphasising the hallucinatory production of a desire. The celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution (1974) is part of this equation, and here we can reflect on its potential for historical imagination, as well as its gridlocks (the eerily fractured echo of one of its slogans, “Peace, bread, housing, health, education”). Similarly, we also seek to evoke another revolution by celebrating the centenary of the Surrealist Manifesto (1924).

Like Fantômas — the fictional hero created by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain — hovering over the rooftops of Paris, the phantoms evoked in this Biennial have a poetic value: they seek to hijack historical events from their conventions and crystallised readings, and to provoke suspension and movement, the very qualities of ghosts.

Ángel Calvo Ulloa e Marta Mestre
Anozero‘24 curators