Barrikadenwetter (time of barricades) is a term coined by the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin in the Dresdner Zeitung newspaper of 3 May 1849: it denotes the moment of transition in which a revolutionary subject emerges in collective action and becomes reified as an obstacle in opposition to order constituted. Starting from a historical investigation conducted by the Arsenale Institute - a research group that has been engaged for years in projects linked to the visual arts and the critical analysis of the politics of representation - the exhibition explores the construction, concept and iconography of the barricade by its beginning in the late Renaissance up to the present day, crossing its historical connections with the roots of the 20th century avant-garde.

The walls of the exhibition hall present an iconography of the barricade which, through the collection of 289 images, compares three different visual acts of the Paris uprising of May 1968: that of the demonstrators, the media and the police. The images of this triptych, although they have the same subject, are the result of opposing policies of representation and observation. In the images of the insurgents (photographed by anonymous authors close to the Situationist movement) the actors, whose faces have been expertly made unrecognizable, are visible as a general revolutionary collective. In French newspaper photographs of the time they are media figures moralized as individuals who perpetuate violence or who are exposed to it. From the authorities' point of view (which emerges from photographs in the archives of the Préfecture de police de Paris, which have only recently been made accessible) they are people monitored to be identified, so that delinquency and property crimes become visually verifiable.