OFF-SITE, Swab Barcelona’s New Programme

Swab Barcelona’s new curatorial challenge is dedicated to independent art spaces that emerge through reuse, adaptation, and the need to reactivate unconventional environments, often overlooked, residual, or disused, transforming them into places for artistic production, exhibition, and encounter.

The programme responds to the growing spatial pressures affecting urban environments by prioritising the reuse of existing and underutilised structures. This approach reduces environmental impact while reflecting the real social and economic conditions in which culture operates today, including the growing scarcity of available urban space in contemporary cities. From this starting point, OFF-Site challenges traditional models of cultural infrastructure and proposes more flexible, context-sensitive, and intimate approaches, moving beyond the white cube and the logic of expansion.

The programme focuses on narratives that not only emerge from the margins of the art circuit, but also actively challenge the narratives produced and legitimised by its centres. It proposes rethinking how spaces located away from hegemonic centres articulate alternative ways of inhabiting the periphery: ways of connecting with experiences, practices, and discourses that do not conform to the market-driven concentration of the art world or its systems of validation. The proposals brought together in this edition share an interest in encounters between opposites—the intimate and the public, the material and the ethereal, the corporeal and the architectural—and from these frictions construct narratives that invite us to question the more rigid structures of contemporary society.

The exploration of new spaces for art is an invitation to create fresher, more conscious forms of connection. Each project acts as a membrane that absorbs its context and engages in dialogue with the environment in which it is situated. Through reuse and adaptation, independent spaces become laboratories for new cultural models: lighter, more ethical, and more closely connected to their communities. OFF-Site is grounded in the belief that the future of cultural spaces lies less in expansion than in the ability to adapt, strengthen relationships, and find within what is already available a starting point for what is possible.

For this edition, the proposals presented by the participating galleries converge around a series of shared concerns that run across their different languages and contexts of origin: diverse readings of the city and its transformations; a sustained attention to corporeality and intimacy as territories of meaning and resistance; and a reflection on identities that exist beyond the norm, as well as ways of inhabiting space that challenge established models. Taken together, these practices reaffirm the programme’s central conviction: that the future of cultural spaces lies less in accumulation than in the ability to adapt, to find a starting point in what is residual, and in the collective, a way of sustaining one another.

The galleries confirmed for this edition of OFF-Site are: Alkovi (Finland), Éthereal Maison (United Kingdom), Open (Iceland), Outhouse (United Kingdom), and Suvatne & Eraković (Norway/Switzerland).

Alkovi

It is an exhibition space located in Helsinki, founded by artist Otto Karvonen in 2005. Based on sustainable working models, it presents artists whose practices question contemporary modes of production and extractive capitalist culture, exploring the tensions between the material and the poetic within everyday spaces.

Its programme addresses the politics of attention, corporeality, and affect as territories of resistance and meaning, bringing the intimate, the everyday, the poem, and video as a confessional device into dialogue with the public sphere. Through sculpture and installation, the artists explore the expressive possibilities of materials, generating new forms of relationship between the object, the body, and the environment, while proposing a reconfiguration of the concept of home as a space in constant transformation.

Etheral Maison

It is an interdisciplinary and intersectional curatorial project and nomadic gallery, founded in March 2024 by Yaiza Hernández Escobar. Its central aim is to build community—a queer chosen family—and to find in the materiality and affects of inhabited spaces a starting point for shared narratives.

Its approach invites us to inhabit the interstitial through attention and slowness: to pause within what exists between the public and the private, between desire, the body, and its representation. Éthereal Maison reimagines home and intimacy not as stable refuges, but as territories of tension, shaped by cultural, affective, and technological forces that constantly reconfigure them. These explorations emerge from transfeminist perspectives that question inherited categories of gender, desire, and subjectivity, proposing new ways of imagining and inhabiting embodied experience in the contemporary context.

Open

Founded by Arnar Ágeirsson, Hildigunnur Birgisdóttir, Una Margrét Árnadóttir, and Örn Alexander Ámundason, who collectively manage the space on a day-to-day basis. Located in the former fishing district and harbour area of Grandi, Reykjavík, this artist-run space contributes to cultural exchange in the area and has created a much-needed space for local and international artists within the Icelandic art scene.

Open presents itself as a living architecture that accommodates diverse projects: a place in constant dialogue with its public, where emotional interaction and the collective reconstruction of space are central to its practice. Its approach draws on a transformed past to foster an artistic revival understood not as a rupture, but as a reactivation—a way of inhabiting the present through the memory and energy of what the place once was.

Outhouse

An independent, artist-run creative space located in Brunswick Park, Camberwell, housed in what was formerly a public toilet. From this unconventional setting—a place in transformation that questions the relationship between decay and institutional legitimisation—the gallery presents the work of Mina Fouladi for this edition of Swab.

Fouladi’s practice seeks to rehumanise landscapes reduced to media narratives, bringing into tension processes of accelerated urban transformation and the conflicts that fragment both cities and the identities of those who inhabit them. Her work begins with sustained attention to the everyday: to discarded materials that have become quietly integrated into the ecosystem of daily life, and to the bodies navigating this constantly changing environment. From this perspective, Fouladi examines the politics of attention—what we look at, what we overlook, and what we normalise—and explores how corporeality and affect reshape the relationship between human beings and their surroundings.

Suvatne & Eraković

It is an artist-run gallery founded in 2020 by Aljoša Eraković and Kristian Suvatne. Based between Oslo and Basel, it operates as a flexible platform for exhibitions, collaborations, and international exchange.

At Swab, the gallery presents works that explore the relationship between built environments and the ideological spaces that underpin them, examining how memory operates within the city—how it accumulates, transforms, and sometimes erases the collective expectations that communities invest in their spaces over time. Its proposal invites reflection on the city not only as a physical environment, but also as an ideological and affective construct in a state of constant negotiation: a territory where collective memory, unfulfilled promises, and urban transformations leave both visible and invisible traces on those who inhabit it.