Mónica Bello, originally from Santiago de Compostela and arrived in Barcelona in 2003, mentioned the so-called Public Imagination Commissariat that Dalí proposed for La Pedrera. She now leads the Platform Dalí project, promoted by the Fundació Gala-Dalí and backed by Bello's solid track record at the helm of Arts at CERN, perhaps the most substantial initiative that over the last decade has attempted to articulate the intersection between artistic and scientific disciplines. The program is designed to create a stable framework in which art and science come together to understand the complexity of the world, fostering "dialogues, exchanges, and experiences" that seek significant meeting points between both universes.
As everyone knows, Dalí was passionate about science. About reality. Surrealism has that factor, which in the word includes the term "reality," even if it goes through the centrifuge: therefore, reality, the tangible, science, visual effects, DNA, the microscope, the atoms of Atomic Leda, metals, prisms, make up the painter's tireless toys. He created his cosmogony from what already exists in the cosmos, and then made his dreamlike, deeply expressive version. The Platform Dalí project therefore focuses on this creator's approach to the world of knowledge and wants to build a bridge. To break artistic languages based on scientific questions. "Scientific events are the only constant guide of my imagination," said the artist from Empordà, who wants to be the true ideological compass of the project.
We are not facing an ephemeral festival, but rather a long-term cultural infrastructure that will start in 2026 with grants, residencies, public programs and meetings in laboratories, and will culminate with an exhibition in 2029. The logic is not to represent art, but to subject it to the laboratory, to analyze it, to contrast it with the tangible world, to expose it to the tensions of contemporary research and to put it in dialogue with physics and alchemy, life sciences, supercomputing, artificial intelligence or marine research. All of these are areas that articulate the identity of centers such as the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, the Institut de Ciències del Mar, the Institut de Física d'Altes Energies, the Parc de Recerca Biomèdica de Barcelona or the Institut de Ciències Fotòniques.
Barcelona contains a high-level scientific ecosystem, often unknown to the country itself. The Foundation understands that artistic institutions cannot limit themselves to preserving legacies, but must mobilize them. The project assumes that Dalí cannot be understood without science, and that perhaps we cannot understand the world, today, without art. The commitment to resident artists, in this sense, confirms the experimental vocation: Tania Candiani, with her work on visual and sound languages; Israel Galván, who has pushed the body and rhythm to unexpected limits; the Taller Estampa collective, with its "critical practice with digital technologies"; or George Mahashe, who explores "relationships between art, science and knowledge systems," especially in Southern Africa. These artists do not need provincial grants of 80,000 euros, but rather to integrate into an already existing Barcelona and Catalan fabric.
Also surprising is the care taken with the visual identity, created by Javier Jaén, which starts from the letter "D" and fragments it into moving spheres (as in so many Dalinian paintings), evoking the transformation of matter and "looking at the known from a multiple perspective." The video presenting the image also winked at ants and eggs, so iconic in the artist's work.
Platform Dalí is, in a way, a form of renewed humanism, a defense of multidisciplinary thinking in the midst of an era of extreme specialization (what Dalí so detested, as he showed before American cameras on the show What's my Line?). And it is also a space to ask uncomfortable questions: what can art do when the world is governed by algorithms, data, and complex systems? What can it contribute when science defines reality, agreed and congratulations, but not its meaning? We know what technology can contribute to art, but what about art to science? According to Mónica Bello, it is not about art providing a solution, or even a research framework: it is about providing the increasingly urgent value of asking "why are we doing all this."
In a city that seems to lack imagination and audacity, and where what is simply selling a city brand for free, or directly giving away the city, is passed off as great ideas, it is hopeful that a new ecosystem appears, determined to build, not just to program or entertain. Or to make pretty. What we need is more Dalí, more dream, more audacity, more modernity, more Modernism, more Pedrera, more individual and collective freedom, more sense of things. Reality is not made to be assumed, nor to fall into sterile realism (which is the cradle of cynicism and, often, of fascism, that which made the Commissariat of Public Imagination impossible). Reality is made to be known, to be measured, and then, to be changed. To be improved. To be imagined.