Cities that were never built, interdisciplinary artistic events, or artificial intelligence, among the selected proposals for Mugak/ 2025
2025 March 12
- The Basque Country International Architecture Biennale, an initiative of the Department of Housing and Urban Agenda of the Basque Government, will deploy its program of exhibitions, workshops, and visits across the three territories of Euskadi.
- The jury has chosen from proposals submitted from six different countries: Germany, the United States, Spain, the Netherlands, Mexico, and Pakistan.
- The fifth edition of the Biennale Mugak/ will take place during October and November, and will soon open the third and final call for parallel events, Off Mugak/.
The International Architecture Biennale of Euskadi Mugak/, an initiative of the Department of Housing and Urban Agenda of the Basque Government, has already selected the activities that will shape the program of its fifth edition. This was done through the Open Mugak/ call, which aimed to financially support thematic programs, conferences, visits, exhibitions, and cultural expressions that are open and free, all within the theme of this edition, ‘Castles in the Air, or How to Build Utopia Today’. For the first time, this call was open to any entity and/or individual at the national and international level, not just those from the Basque Country.
As a result, proposals were received from six different countries: Germany, the United States, Spain, the Netherlands, Mexico, and Pakistan. At the national level, in addition to Álava, Bizkaia, and Gipuzkoa, proposals also came from seven other provinces: A Coruña, Barcelona, Madrid, Navarra, Seville, Valencia, and Valladolid.
The selected projects forming part of the fifth edition of Mugak/ will take place between October and November in Bilbao, San Sebastián, Hernani, and Vitoria-Gasteiz. The proposals will be implemented in various locations in each city, including three ephemeral architectural installations: ‘Levedad y denuncia: el bordado como utopía en femenino’ (Alderdi Eder, Donostia), ‘Etxenoi’ (Plaza de las Mujeres, Bilbao), and ‘Utopía: prohibido el paso’ (Plaza de la Virgen Blanca, Vitoria-Gasteiz).
High-Quality and Diverse Proposals
The first selected project, by artist and professor Santos Bregaña, presents a series of unrealized utopian projects in San Sebastián, such as transforming La Concha Bay into an industrial port or Mount Urgull into a senior residence. These ideas emerged after the devastation of the city in 1813, leading to radical projects for their time. ‘Ucronías de San Sebastián’ revives these utopias by displaying them in bus shelters, accompanied by an epistolary literature exercise by writer Harkaitz Cano, who will create postcards written as alternate histories from these unbuilt places. “These projects were real because they were conceived, but since they were never built, the San Sebastián we know today would have been entirely different. This proposal rescues an architectural heritage from two centuries ago and presents it to the public in a multidisciplinary way,” explains the jury. The project will also include visits, roundtable discussions, and workshops.
The next project, ‘Architecture without Building’, comes from the Maushaus ideas laboratory in collaboration with the No Man’s Land association. It is a construction workshop that will travel across the three capitals of Euskadi, centered around the work and philosophy of Yona Friedman. “This project utilizes the legacy of this radical and visionary architect, translating his ideas into public installations built through three workshops that will complement the three ephemeral architectural installations,” explains the jury. Local artists will be invited to intervene, with complementary formats such as interviews, lectures, and participatory debates, fostering collective exchange alongside members of No Man’s Land.
In addition to the three capitals of Euskadi, Mugak/ returns to Chillida Leku (Hernani) with ‘Interespecies’. Organized and coordinated by architects Victoria Collar, Jon Garbizu, and Gonzalo Peña, the project explores human interaction with other species and how the Anthropocene affects life on Earth. It proposes a new philosophy of coexistence through sensory stimuli, workshops, and discussions that break traditional event structures, embracing multilateralism and integrating architecture, landscape design, and art. The program includes three activities: a workshop, a performance, and a debate featuring international speakers.
‘Utopías en lo cotidiano: exploración urbana de la hospitalidad de Vitoria-Gasteiz’ is a proposal by four professors from the School of Architecture of the University of Navarra: Esperanza Marrodán, Javier Antón, Conrado Capilla, and Asier Santas. Through a workshop divided into three sections, the project addresses utopia as a space of hope and solidarity. “This initiative seeks to uncover everyday utopian elements hidden within the complexity of urban life. Through a walking-based strategy, the project aims not only to document the city but also to generate a positive shift in how people perceive and interact with their surroundings,” explains the organizing team. The workshop features guest speaker Francesco Careri, a professor at Università Roma Tre and an acclaimed author known for exploring cities worldwide.
The proposal ‘We make cities’ comes from the Seville-based studio Lugadero. This "think tank", which will travel through the three capitals of the Basque Country, proposes workshops with citizens where, through artificial intelligence, the cities of the future will be explored in a participatory manner. In each city, there will be a theoretical component featuring a series of international and local urban planners who will discuss the future of cities from a speculative perspective. Following this, the practical component will involve the creation of images using artificial intelligence, resulting in a speculative utopian imaginary. "It proposes playing with utopia to build the city of the future—using utopia can help us envision better cities," explains the jury. The pictorial results will be publicly exhibited.
‘Hausturak/Fracturas/Fractures’ offers an immersive artistic experience in the Iesu Church by Rafael Moneo, in San Sebastián. For three nights, the audience will experience a piece that combines projections (video mapping) by Edorta Subijana; music, featuring the analog synthesizers of the ‘Ciudad Pegaso’ project by J. Sasso; and dance, with choreography by Garazi Egiguren Urkola. This exclusive event, inspired by the work of radical architect Lebbeus Woods, aims to amplify the experience of architecture and bring it to new audiences, exploring new expressive possibilities based on the interplay of art and technology. This collective artistic experience “seeks to create a space for reflection and a critical questioning of utopias as a mechanism of escape, while reflecting on the current dystopia of violence and rupture driven by realities such as Trump’s threats to take total control, Elon Musk’s colonization of Mars, or the ‘The Line’ building-city,” the authors state.
‘Protopía’ will be a collective exhibition in Bilbao conceived by architects Pablo Alberich and Ana Retuerto. For its creation, they propose inviting 16 individuals from the fields of architecture, design, philosophy, and art to reflect on utopia. The process involves sending them a box containing a text about utopia in architecture, asking them to create a piece, place it back in the box, and return it to the senders to be added to the exhibition. “The proposal highlights the process of creation and transformation, and the accumulation of exercises by different participants reveals the interpretative plurality of various disciplines, as well as the atypical and non-competitive nature of the creative process itself,” explain its authors.
Finally, ‘The Utopian Island of Jorge Oteiza’ will feature a public program of lectures, activities, workshops, and visits focused on the project that the sculptor, along with a group of young architects, proposed in the mid-1990s for the island of Zorrozaurre. The core venue will be Azkuna Zentroa (Bilbao), which once again joins as a collaborator of the Biennial, with some visits to Zorrozaurre and additional lectures at San Telmo (Donostia). “The proposal strongly connects the sculptor’s island with the imaginary island of Utopia, described in 1516 by Thomas More as a great crescent moon. Through Oteiza’s project, his utopian thinking is unraveled in other projects he was involved in. Like Thomas More, we believe that there is no better way to conceive utopias than in the territory of an island, and that this Biennial, dedicated to utopias, should not only have pavilions, exhibitions, and workshops but also its own island,” state the authors of the proposal, the Jorge Oteiza Museum Foundation along with the AHIKU association.
Last call to be part of Mugak/
The third and final call for activities for the fifth edition of the Mugak/ Biennial will open on March 31. This call, Off Mugak/, is aimed at projects that already have prior funding and wish to be part of the parallel events program, with the goal of enriching the Biennial through independent approaches.
