The Juan de Salazar Spanish Cultural Center, popularly known as the Salazar, is an institution under the Spanish Embassy in Paraguay and part of the AECID, inaugurated in 1976. Since then, it has established itself as a central space in the cultural life of Asunción, promoting encounters, creation, and debate, as well as the dissemination of new artistic trends and the promotion of cutting-edge projects. As part of the Spanish Cooperation Cultural Centers Network, its work is based on understanding culture as a key axis of human, social, political, and economic development, in close collaboration with Paraguayan institutions and citizens.
Its cultural project is structured around three main axes: Spanish Cultural Promotion, which seeks to raise awareness of Spain's creative diversity and strengthen ties of exchange and friendship between the two countries; Cultural Cooperation, which supports local creative processes in all their stages and disciplines, offering quality and access to diverse audiences; and Culture + Development, a commitment to recognizing culture as an essential factor in the fight against poverty and exclusion, integrating artists and entrepreneurs into dynamics of progress and social democratization. In this sense, Salazar conceives of culture not only as an artistic expression, but also as a tool for well-being, identity, and intellectual freedom, indispensable for comprehensive development.
ABOUT ALL THAT IS SOLID MELTS INTO AIR
The Centro Cultural de España Juan de Salazar presents “All That Is Solid Melts Into Air. Ideas and Poetics for a Contested Future”, a group exhibition proposed by curator Ferran Barenblit with the collaboration of Azucena Arvez, Lía Colombino, and Hugo Mendieta. The exhibition critically and reflectively explores contemporary imaginaries in a world that has left behind the promises of modernity. Based on the famous phrase by Marx and Engels, “All that is solid melts into air”, this project addresses the collapse of the structures that defined recent centuries —progress, reason, liberal democracy— and delves into the uncertainty of the present, marked by climate crises, inequality, disinformation, and geopolitical tensions.
All That Is Solid Melts Into Air proposes a journey through an era of transition in which imagining other worlds becomes urgent and necessary. Through works by national and international artists, it integrates archives, fiction, installation, documentary, and experimental formats. The exhibition invites the public to inhabit a space of resonance for critical imagination, with works that, far from offering closed answers, encourage thinking through contradiction, poetics, and even discomfort.
It will also include a “listening station,” in collaboration with Radio Web MACBA, which will expand the experience with sound pieces. In addition, “mural readings” will be incorporated as textual devices that traverse the space with quotes, glossaries, questions, data, and fragments. This creates an encounter between national and international artists to construct imaginaries of the future.
Featuring artists such as Cristina Lucas, María Ruido, Marcelo Expósito, Belén Rodríguez, Rosell Meseguer, Fredi Casco, Kira Xonorika, among others, the exhibition also includes a significant selection of Paraguayan artists and local content, such as the conflict around the cryptocurrency farm in Villarica (materials from El Surti) and archival materials from the National Library and the Archive of Terror, fostering a dialogue between global contexts and territorial memories.