Unframed Collection partners with NUMIX Lab, an itinerant European event that brings together immersive creation professionals in dialogue with cultural institutions across the continent. The 6th edition in 2025 brought together 459 participants from around the world across 16 venues in Budapest, Veszprém, Vienna, and Linz, fostering exchanges between Europe and North America around immersive cultural practices.
On this occasion, we met with Isabel Salgado, Director of Exhibitions, Collection and Digital at the “La Caixa” Foundation, a non-profit entity that, since the start of the 20th century, offers one of Europe’s most important social and cultural programs. The Foundation is now looking to evolve towards a more immersive and interactive mediation.
In this interview, Isabel Saladago revisits the history of the Foundation, the reasons that move it towards immersion and new technologies, the perceived limits of it and the place of art and artist in these new formats.
Balance is essential, we need to have an open-minded use of technology while having the utmost respect for the content.
— Isabel Salgado
Could you present the “La Caixa” Foundation and your role within it?
Isabel Salgado – The “La Caixa” Foundation is a non-profit entity that started as a purely social program, well before the 20th century. It’s only when Spain became a democracy that it truly launched its cultural project centered on art and science. At that time Spanish culture was very-closed minded, when we created the Science Museum, including a contemporary art collection to connect Spanish and international artists, as well as a vast program of exhibition and music, as to build a network of museums – of both art and science – and cultural center all across the country.
Within the foundation I manage the development of the exhibition program of the entire network CaixaForum and CosmoCaixa, as well as travelling exhibitions that we produce both in our centers and out of it, through Spain and Portugal. I also manage the contemporary art collection, which houses over a thousand pieces, as well as our most recent project: CaixaForum+, a digital platform of audiovisual content and podcasts. This platform is born from the “La Caixa” Foundation’s will to broadcast culture everywhere, at this moment it focuses on Spain and Portugal, which foresee future developments. The fundamental idea is to make culture accessible to all and to insure its universal access.
As a philanthropic institution, we’re looking to boost projects and plant seeds in sectors such as accessibility and mediation. We develop ever-evolving programs, always with the intention to stay topical and up to date. Moreover, we never work alone: we’re always part of a network, echoing the cultural and scientific context of our country.
What is the role of cultural institutions as meeting places between art, science, technology and the public?
I. S. – We firmly believe that CaixaForum and other cultural institutions of the “La Caixa” Foundation must be crossroads allowing the meeting between art and science. Our team is comprised of scientists, art historians, humanities and music professionals, among others. A space appeared where technology and the audience converge, in such a way that all is interconnected and allows for a better apprehension of the modern world complexity.
The choice of subject is crucial as to compel the audience. A good example is the Somos Naturaleza exhibition. We chose the technological format to tackle this subject as our centers are urban based. We feel that the audiovisual medium helps to grasp the magnitude of nature and our place in it. It’s also a great way to discover and explain all the initiatives conducted to reverse climate change and preserve the environment.
The museum ceased to be a space simply dedicated to knowledge transmission to become one of experience, exchange and critical thought, where the public is an active participant collaborating in its construction. In this context, technology is a formidable tool in service of narration, emotion or learning, that is very useful to broach hard to explain phenomenons. For example, the Cartier Foundation in Paris, displays a piece that, through audio of the Amazon, shows how the diversity of its sounds diminished over time. It is strikingly efficient. Huge progresses have been made in this field, but it will certainly continue to evolve and we will see more extraordinary artistic proposals
The “La Caixa” Foundation has, for some time now, included immersive exhibitions. How came the idea to incorporate immersive technologies in your programmation?
I. S. – It was born of our own principles, we cannot lag behind, we must evolve at the pace of the rest of society. Therefore, if society is technological, we must work to nurture such projects while staying within our DNA.
We’re looking for opportunities for the local audience, and as such we welcomed exhibitions such as teamLab. Art, Technology and Nature, that we programmed during the pandemic. Truthfully, to be able to showcase such a technologically innovative exhibition by a big Japanese collective with a multidisciplinary team that fuses creation, technology, and Japanese tradition, has been a true gift for our society. It was a major challenge to adapt the exhibition to the COVID-19’s sanitary restrictions, so that the audience could still interact with the piece without touching the wall. It was a peculiar set-up.
We also wish to highlight our strengths and domains of expertise, such as music. In this field we applied new technologies to classical music, still with the intention to educate and share knowledge. Our main virtual reality project is Symphony, it aims to connect classical music – sometimes perceived as inaccessible – to all kinds of publics. It is an emotional journey at the art of music. Immersion allows us to put the audience member at the center of the orchestra and to make them feel the emotions of one of the musicians under the direction of the maestro Gustavo Dudamel. In keeping with this theme we developed a second project on Ravel’s Boléro, lived in virtual reality inside the orchestra.
These two projects are also part of our technological strategy of pop-up travelling exhibitions across Spain and Portugal. This initiative rests on trailer trucks that bring that type of cultural project to small and medium cities in both those countries, which is appreciated by schools and families alike.
What can technology bring to an idea or art piece presentation ?
I. S. – It is essential to not see technology as an end in itself. You need to make sure that it is in service of the content, the curatorial discourse, the experience and the knowledge we wish to create. Whatever we do, we need to start from a curatorial common thread, that is clear on what we wish to tell, to then choose the needed narration.
In the case of Symphony, it was paramount, for me, to use virtual reality, as music is often an individual practice, an art intrinsically linked to feelings and sensations. What is told in Symphony cannot be relayed through a traditional exhibition. It is essential to ensure that we use technology so that the public can seize the story in the way we want it. Sometimes, technology allows us to dilute the boundaries between space and the audience.
The current period is the most challenging, mainly because we left aside content where the curator is the emitter and the audience a simple receiver. We went on to a scenario where mediation, the way we transmit and we connect to people, is highly significant and technology can be of great help on this matter. It is a fantastic tool that allows us growth, when put in service of the content and the audience.
In your opinion, what effect or impact does the immersive format have on audiences?
I.S. – Virtual immersion tends to be rather individualistic. However, an immersive exhibition resting on interactive projections, such as the one we showcased with teamLab, offers a collective ecosystem that fosters this connection. For us, the absolute priority remains to make culture accessible. CaixaForum and CosmoCaixa’s spaces are designed so that people can come without necessarily knowing the programmation, as they know they will find rigorous, original, and diverse content, for almost nothing. We offer content that allows them to connect with culture, to learn and cultivate a critical mind.
In all we undertake, mediation is a cornerstone, be it through text, audiovisual content, our digital platform CaixaForum+ or through technology and the mediators themselves. We learned a lot during the pandemic, as group visits were no longer possible we started to offer individualized mediation with guides that adapted to age and level of knowledge of the person. With this in mind, the project Deep Space of Ars Electronica, that combines technology and direct mediation is particularly interesting.
We are not specialised in immersive technologies and we think there exist a lot of ways to create this kind of connection. However, in Barcelona, center such as the IDEAL (Digital art center) design really interesting things for the general audience, in collaboration with schools.
What challenges come with technology in terms of curation and scenography for cultural institutions?
I.S. – There’s quite relevant challenges for the curator, as it forces them to have a profound reflection on the narrative and the relationship to the audience. Technology is attractive, but from a conceptual point of view, we must be careful to keep it subordinate to the content, which demands collaborative work. We have to take into account, critical mind, the narrative and the knowledge we want to transmit, without being fearful of the medium. Balance is essential, we need to have an open-minded use of technology while having the utmost respect for the content. It must help us to master new narrative languages, to express ourselves and interact with the audience. Technology break out of traditional exhibition as well as temporal and spatial boundaries as we know it, in that sense it is extremely enriching and powerful in message transmission.
Cultural institutions must be meeting space and, sometimes, the virtual reality format, that make use of headsets restrict this socialisation. This is why multi-users experiences, such as Excurio’s, are so interesting : by making use of the avatars’ design you can see and interact with others partaking in the experience at the same time as you.
How can independent artists use immersive technologies to express themselves and, doing so, enter museums and cultural institutions?
I.S. – I think that it is necessary to build new kinds of alliances. An artist that wants to work with immersive technologies can hardly do so alone. We need to build bridges to connect different profiles be it technical, scientific, etc.
New Technologies offer a wide array of possibilities in artistic expressions allowing artists to work extensively, with space, time, sound, and audience involvement. In fact, immersion is a broad concept, we have designed immersive scenography and mediation, with technology being a tool among others.
Last year, we put on an exhibition on the Weimar Republic that staged a great divide between the pre and post-industrial era. We designed it as an immersive experimentation lab: it started in a room where a waltz was displayed, slowly unraveling as World War I breaks out, inviting the audience to go deeper into a fully dark tunnel that offered a sensation of total immersion.
Institutions have a key role to play. For example, we possess an open call to put at the disposal of artists suitable means and context to the realization of their ideas. Numerous institutions are involved in similar processes, collaborating with artists and supplying them with the technical tools needed to the exploration of the immersive format.
Discover more interviews with curators and programmers on our blog.