The world’s first museum ship to set sail for Ibiza

The Art Explora Festival, featuring the world’s first museum ship, will dock in the Port of Barcelona for the first time from 26 March to 6 April, before continuing its journey to Ibiza from 23 to 29 April.

According to the event organisers and the Port of Barcelona, the festival transforms each port into a cultural hub combining exhibitions, immersive experiences and live performances, both on board the museum ship and on land. Where space allows, the festival expands beyond the vessel itself, setting up tents with additional cultural offerings and even open-air concerts.

Created in 2024, the Art Explora Festival is a travelling cultural project that sails across seas and oceans aboard the world’s first museum ship, with the aim of expanding access to the arts.

After eleven stops and more than 350,000 visitors, Barcelona and Ibiza will become new ports of call on this cultural odyssey.

In 2025, the festival stopped in five Mediterranean countries, Albania (Durrës), France (Nice), Croatia (Rijeka), Greece (Piraeus/Athens) and Cyprus (Limassol), welcoming diverse audiences around artistic projects developed by local curators and artists.

At present, bookings are only available on the website for the Barcelona experience, as confirmed by Noudiari. Access is generally free and requires only registration with an email address.

Designed by architects Axel de Beaufort and Guillaume Verdier, the 47-metre sailing catamaran can host up to 2,000 visitors per day.

On board, visitors can enjoy an immersive sound journey created by IRCAM (the Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music at the Centre Pompidou in Paris), featuring a soundscape composed from natural, urban and cultural environments recorded across the Mediterranean basin.

In addition, a virtual reality experience developed with Ubisoft allows visitors to travel back in time to Alexandria, Athens and Venice at the height of their artistic and architectural splendour.

The exhibition Present will feature a large-scale immersive installation dedicated to female figures of Mediterranean civilisations, created in collaboration with the Louvre Museum.

Introduced by a contextual film, the experience unfolds in a 16-metre tunnel lined with LED screens, bringing together iconic works such as the Winged Victory of Samothrace alongside representations of goddesses, priestesses, rulers and anonymous women.

In the Central Pavilion, dedicated to modern and contemporary art, the exhibition Under L’Atzur explores the Mediterranean as a space of myth, memory and tension through works by major historical and contemporary artists.

Highlights include Marguerite Humeau’s monumental sculpture The Dead (A drifting, dying marine mammal), Joan Miró’s Gens de la mer, and Jean Painlevé’s underwater films.

At each festival stop, a heritage object from a local collection connects the exhibition with the city’s maritime history. In Barcelona, this will be a piece from the Museum of Archaeology of Catalonia. The exhibition is curated by Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel and Blanche de Lestrange.

The Photography Pavilion, dedicated to photography and moving images, will host Against the Current, an exhibition of artists from the Arab world addressing themes of migration, exile and hospitality in the Mediterranean.

Featured works include Anya (Straight Stories – Part 2) by Bouchra Khalili, the site-specific installation Mass Struggle by Akram Zaatari, and Liquid Traces – The Left-to-Die Boat Case by Forensic Oceanography. The exhibition is curated by Amanda Abi Khalil and Danielle Makhoul.

Curated specifically for Barcelona by Rosa Lleó, the live programme will feature performances, talks, screenings and concerts developed in dialogue with the Mediterranean context and the local arts scene.

Free and open to all, the programme will offer daily encounters between artists, audiences and ideas, turning the port into a space for exchange, debate and celebration.

Among the highlights are performances, concerts and DJ sets by national and international artists whose practices span sound, movement and contemporary creation.