LOOP Barcelona 2025: An Expanded Laboratory for the Moving Image
- The 7 Labs
- Feb 4
- 2 min read
In November 2025, we had the chance to participate in LOOP Barcelona, an annual platform that brings together a fair, a festival, and a symposium focused on moving-image practices. For two intense weeks, Barcelona became an expanded laboratory for video art, activating nearly 100 venues ranging from museums and galleries to hotels, restaurants, and independent spaces. What we experienced there shifted the way we think about how moving-image art circulates, gets exhibited, and is understood today.
The Fair
The fair took place across three floors of the Almanac Hotel, with individual hotel rooms functioning as intimate exhibition spaces. This apparently simple gesture (showing video art in a hotel room) turned out to be deeply revealing. The domestic context dissolved the usual distance between viewer and work, creating an almost confidential proximity rarely experienced in galleries or museums.
Moving through the floors, we encountered classic short films alongside painterly video works (some responding in real time to atmospheric and climatic conditions) and generative pieces connected to satellite systems and quantum technologies. The atmosphere was quiet, relaxed, almost suspended. There was no rush. The fair didn't push you from one work to the next: it invited you to stay, to return, to reconsider. It became clear that a single visit wasn't enough to absorb everything happening in those spaces.
The Festival
The festival programme unfolded across the city like a network of active nodes: exhibitions, installations, screenings, and performances of small and medium scale that required you to move, to travel through Barcelona, to incorporate displacement as part of the aesthetic experience.
From music visualisers and analog film projections to experimental audiovisual installations, the festival proposed a fragmented yet internally coherent experience. It doesn't try to give you everything in one place or one moment. LOOP demands time, curiosity, and a willingness to get a bit lost in order to find something unexpected. That effort was rewarded with visual and sonic encounters that felt unique, deliberate, personal.
The Symposium
For us, the symposium was the conceptual heart of LOOP. More than a space for presentations, it functioned as a place of genuine encounter between artists, curators, collectors, and institutional representatives. Conversations revolved around artists' cinema from multiple angles: curation, commissioning, exhibition, digital circulation, preservation, and care of time-based works.
What struck us most was the honesty of the discussions. It wasn't about reaching definitive conclusions, but about putting real tensions on the table: How do we sustain these practices economically and structurally? How do we preserve ephemeral works or those dependent on obsolete technologies? What models of collaboration do we need to build? The symposium didn't offer easy answers, but something more valuable: a sense of community and shared responsibility.
LOOP Barcelona 2025 wasn't just an event. It was an invitation to rethink how we relate to the moving image, not only as viewers, but as part of a cultural ecosystem that needs to be cared for, considered, and sustained collectively.
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