In a year when Spanish curators directed the Venice Biennale for the first time, Muntadas, representing Spain in the Spanish Pavilion, told a reporter that the Biennale “takes its ideas from international fairs. It connotes the theme park. There was exoticism, invention, the new . . . but by now it is an obsolete structure.” Muntadas’s On Translation: I Giardini, the latest in a series of often site-specific “On Translation” projects completed over the last ten years, is here documented from its inception.

ENG: Muntadas began exploring television, film and video as far back as the 1970s and is considered one of the world’s first media artists. He has worked with nearly all genres of artists’ publications, creating an extremely diverse oeuvre that ranges from the artist’s postcard to net art. He concerns himself with various phenomena of society; a central aspect to his work is the critical analysis of shifts in public and private realms.

ENG: Bremen is a city of 500.000 inhabitants, with historical buildings and spaces whose imprint on the urban tissue traces the recent past of the city... Like Bremen many other cities in Germany (Ruhr area) and elsewhere in the worl are seeking attention to solve social, economic, cultural... problems. Strategies are diverse: city planning, novel architecture, international conferences, Olympic Games, World Cups, Congresses, Capital of Europe, Leisure events, Theme Parks, Exhibitions, Museums, Stadiums... Spectacle.

La exposición Proyectos de Antoni Muntadas es una selección de sus trabajos a lo largo del periodo de 1974 a 2004. Es también la producción de una obra realizada ex profeso para el Laboratorio Arte Alameda, On Translation : Alameda, que se compone de tres partes y que es el resultado de las experiecias y materiales recogidos durante visitas anteriores del artista a la Ciudad de México. 21 mesas de luz muestran la nutrida obra realizada durante todos estos años por el artista. Fotografías, cartelerías, collages, arquitectura. etc. Obra nueva, sin recorrido comercial.

EN: The act of compiling some of Muntada's different editions allows us to verify something that, paradoxically, we find at the root of all his works: each project falls within a specific context and time, a set of particular circumstances (geographical, historical, cultural, political, linguistic and so on) that in their day set definite processes of intervention in motion and inevitably influences their successive interpretations.This might seem obvious, granted, but I believe it might contribute to an understanding of this selection of Works, not so much as an archaeological or fetishist

ENG: The texts included in this publication are an incomplete-partial attempt, as any build-recoverable reflective and interpretive context in which they arose and extended some of the most important achievements of Muntadas. The last chapter contains notes of projects, artist interviews and reflections.Throughout his entire career, the Catalan artist Antoni Muntadas has explored the multiple and complex relationships between politics, economics, society and culture, from one perspective, at once reflective and critical.

ENG: This catalogue for the exhibition “On Translation: Museum” reinterprets projects by Muntadas pertaining to the series known generically as “On Translation” begun in 1995. The book documents the works and installations that make up the series, in which Muntadas addresses the concept of translation in contemporary society.