Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca – Future of Yesterday

Video work

The video work Future of Yesterday (2026) takes centre stage in the exhibition. In this new work, Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca focus on the German hardcore scene, paying particular attention to Straight Edge (sXe for short): a movement that emerged on the east coast of the United States in the 1980s as a ‘clean’ counter-culture within post-hardcore punk.

Music scenes

Wagner & de Burca situate this work within a broader dialogue with other underground music scenes. For instance, Future of Yesterday is juxtaposed with the early key work Estás vendo coisas / You are seeing things (2016) from the collection of De Pont Museum, in which the duo explores the brega scene in Recife, a locally rooted music culture that emerged in the 1970s in north-eastern Brazil.

Methodology

A defining feature of Wagner & de Burca’s artistic practice is their distinctly collaborative approach. The communities portrayed are not subjects, but co-creators. They are actively involved in developing the script, the set design, the music, the choreography and the staging, thereby collectively shaping the work.