The Museum has inaugurated a new exhibition that brings together the most important images of the 173 pieces that the Barcelona-based group AtelieRetaguardia donated to the Museum in 2012 after its dissolution. The retrospective "AtelieRetaguardia. Contemporary Heliography" will show the bulk of the donation, with a selection of more than 60 ambrotypes and ferrotypes made through historical procedures of the 19th and 20th century by the cultural association AtelieRetaguardia. This group of artists was the first collective in Europe to take up the experimental character of early photography to explore new creative avenues and produce an innovative artistic proposal fully committed to the present day. With their donation, the Museum has established itself as the art center with the largest collection of contemporary ambrotypes in the world.

AtelieRetaguardia was formed in Barcelona in 2007 by Israel Ariño, Martí Llorens, Xavier Mulet, Rebecca Mutell and Arcangela Regis, a group of artists who dedicated themselves for five years to the study, the teaching and the artistic internship of photography. The cultural association undertook to look at the origins of the medium in order to produce proposals from a critical and plural perspective, in keeping with the new and changing photographic landscape of the 21st century. "It has been a challenge and a very interesting exercise to take up the project and look at it with a certain distance and from another perspective," explained at press conference Rebecca Mutell.

"This project is the perfect link to understand how photography is transferred from the 19th century to the present day," said Rafael Levenfeld, member of the Museum's Artistic Direction committee . The photographic exhibition will show the project "Barcelona Heliographic Expedition", which addresses the contemporary urban landscape from a nineteenth-century look, photographing the Catalan city through the technique of ambrotype -direct wet collodion on glass plate-, in disuse since the late nineteenth century. The formal rhetoric of this technique, whose long times of exhibition make the figures in movement invisible, makes the current known space appear strange and phantasmagoric.

Another series of the sample is "Apollo Epikouros", produced in partnership with the British Museum and the School of Fine Arts of Barcelona, which offers a long look at the frieze of the temple of Apollo Epikouros of Bassae (Greece), currently preserved in that museum. The photographs were also taken by means of the ambrotype and refer to the expeditions of the 19th century, in which archaeologists and photographers traveled to document the remains of classical antiquity. These remains have lost the link with their original space, so their reading and photographic representation pose different challenges. "We want to reclaim the photographic process. Our photographs are not ancient but contemporary," said Martí Llorens.

AtelieRetaguardia became a space for artistic production, the training and the research. The photographic internship was understood from a point of view that had an impact on the reflection on the process: it was about working and combining different procedures to expand the resources of expression in the field of photographic creation. In order to share and disseminate its work, the group organized different activities, courses and workshops, adapting the formats and contents to each case. The research was essential to be able to carry out all this creative work and professor, and for this reason they gathered a specialized Library Services , as well as a small collection of photographic and optical artifacts from the 19th century.