Construint un Horitzó. Barcelona i Gaza, un pont al Mediterrani

A horizon is a place that exists only for the one who looks at it. Barcelona and Gaza share a sea from the two ends of the Mediterranean. And for almost thirty years they have together imagined cities open to the sea. This exhibition explains this bond of solidarity, the harshness of the present and the life that persists in the street. With voices that speak about it, that live it and that have lived it, it is an invitation to draw a future from both shores.A horizon is a place that exists only for the one who looks at it. Barcelona and Gaza look at the same sea. The whole Mediterranean separates them, and a single line unites them: the horizon.Barcelona has ten districts. Since 2025 it has an eleventh, symbolic, on the other shore: District 11. Cities of Palestine, heir to when, in the 1990s, the city made Sarajevo, besieged by war, its District 11. With Gaza, however, the link is older.Almost thirty years of relations, in which technicians from both cities draw squares, parks and seafronts together, with one same idea of the city: open to the street and to the sea. Few of those plans have left the paper. The Barcelona Peace Park, in the Tal al-Hawa neighbourhood, inaugurated in 2005 and destroyed during the 2008-2009 war. The two cities rebuilt it. Today it is ruins again. Drawing, building, losing and starting again: in this park the whole relationship fits.This bond has not been woven only in offices. It has been forged in the streets, with campaigns demanding commitment from institutions, with demonstrations, cultural events and flotillas sailing from the port. City council and citizens have not always moved at the same pace, but Barcelona has never stopped looking towards the other shore.And looking is not an innocent gesture.In 1982, the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the Palestinian historian Elias Sanbar spoke in the newspaper Libération about how a people is expelled: how to create a void, how to evacuate a territory. Back then it sounded like a warning. Since 2023, the Israeli offensive has reduced entire neighbourhoods of Gaza to rubble. In September 2025, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel had committed acts of genocide, a conclusion the Israeli government rejects.To evacuate a people is also to evacuate their gaze. In Gaza, the Israeli army prohibits or severely restricts access to the sea. Their coastline is taken from them and, with it, the horizon. And yet the square and the street continue to sustain life.The year Barcelona is World Capital of Architecture, this exhibition looks at Gaza from the other shore, in three movements. First, crossing the gap: standing between two cities and two histories, and understanding where we come from, what has been erased and what has resisted. Then, a span of land: the one the two cities share in the form of solidarity, exchange and craft, which has held firm despite the distance. And finally, drawing a forbidden horizon: giving the word to people who live in Gaza, who have lived it and who think it, and building with their voices a gaze and a future. They speak not only of destruction, but of the city as a space of life, memory and future.The exhibition offers no consolation. It proposes to look, think and imagine what a city can do for another.Building a horizon begins by not ceasing to look at it.