PolsXtrems

It all starts by joining the gym

Every gym starts with a registration form. Here, instead of measuring body mass or cardiovascular fitness, the intake questionnaire asks visitors about their information habits. To what extent do you trust the content that algorithms select for you? Do you know the values of the influencers you follow? How do you resist dubious information?

Before any installation is seen, the form already does its work: it turns the lens inward, asking visitors to look at patterns they usually don't examine.

Pick a side to get in

Two turnstiles stand side by side at the entrance, each labelled with one side of a dichotomous question: What do you trust more, your head or your heart? To enter, visitors must choose one. There is no third option, no "it depends."

The format mirrors the very structure the exhibition sets out to question: the reduction of complexity into binary opposites. With no right or wrong answer, we look to generate debate.

Welcome to the training room

Past the turnstiles, the training room opens up. The space is designed to be recognised as a gym: industrial materials, bold signage, a direct tone. But something is off. The machines that the visitors find in the space are designed for an effort that comes from the mind.

The room is organised as a circuit with four stations, each addressing a different dimension of polarisation. The exercises do not aim to tell visitors whether their position is right or wrong. They invite them to reflect on how their thinking is built: the mechanisms that shape it, often difficult to perceive, like cognitive biases and the role of emotions. Because polarisation, before being social or political, is cognitive.

Emotional fitness

The first station addresses the role of emotions in polarisation. A screen equipped with facial recognition invites visitors to perform one of four feelings (rage, rejection, surprise, or fear) and responds with historical examples of how that same emotion has led to radically different outcomes.

Channelled constructively, rage mobilised three thousand people for Barcelona's first Antiracist Race, organised by Top Manta. Channelled destructively, that same rage led to hate attacks on migrants in the Spanish town of Torre Pacheco. Surprise, in its constructive form, propelled Zohran Mamdani's unprecedented electoral turnout in New York. In its destructive form, it triggered campaigns branding him a terrorist threat. Same emotion, opposite results. The station maps the distance between an emotion and its consequences, showing that the difference lies in what happens between feeling something and acting on it.

Stretching out the biases

The second station slows things down. A screen offers a guided class led by performer Marina Olivares, inviting visitors to pay full attention to our cognitive biases: the filters tied to our identity through which we interpret reality, and which often lead us to false conclusions. For instance, The Dunning-Kruger effect, where knowing very little about something makes us feel like experts. Confirmation bias, the reflex to seek only information that validates what we already believe. The availability cascade, where ideas seem true simply because we have encountered them often enough.

The session frames biases as postures we fall into when we think or discuss, making them tangible and allowing visitors to recognise them. Because the question is not whether we have biases, but whether we can see them working.

Critical scroll simulator

The third station is the most physical. A stationary bicycle faces a large screen beneath a wall-sized mural with the slogan "Just Doubt It". To unlock content, visitors must pedal, covering the equivalent of their average daily mobile scroll: 180 metres, the European average.

As they pedal, the screen presents two real headlines about the same news story from two different outlets. Housing, immigration, feminism: the same facts, framed to produce opposite reactions. Pop-up notifications interrupt the ride with critical insights about how we actually consume information. For example: “59% of people share news without reading it”.

The piece asks visitors to make the effort of staying informed, and to train doubt as a democratic skill. It takes inspiration from Bernat Cuní's Polar Bubbles project and from the research of neuroscientist Mariano Sigman, who found that in groups deliberating controversial topics, the individuals who help the group reach agreement are not those with the strongest convictions, but those who hold their positions with a degree of uncertainty.

Wrapping up

Like most gym routines, the exhibition ends in the locker room, one of the few spaces where we come across people who are radically different from us. No dress codes, no filters, just shared square meters between bodies that would otherwise never meet.

Each locker contains two voices presenting opposing sides of a current social conflict: tourism, transphobia, immigration, housing occupation. No position is legitimised or dismissed. Visitors are asked to listen, and then to consider whether, beyond the disagreement, the two sides share something. Often, what sits beneath both positions is a similar concern: losing status, a right, or a sense of belonging.

Signs on the walls mark a line: there are opinions that disguise discrimination as debate, and those need to be identified and stopped. Listening does not mean accepting everything.

Right in front of the lockers, a question on the wall invites visitors to respond and leave their mark on the conversation: "When was the last time a conversation with someone who thought very differently made you change your mind?" Each visitor picks a coloured sticker that corresponds to their age and places it as their answer.

The exhibition ends with a downloadable domestic routine against toxic polarisation, a set of exercises to take home. Because the real training room is outside.

Letting Barcelona know the gym was open

The exhibition's promotional campaign starts from a familiar place: the gym as a space for improvement, effort, and routine. Direct posters, short messages, bright colours. A language that promises change and activation. But here, the body is not what gets trained. What gets trained is the way we think, feel, and listen.

The design plays with that tension. What looks familiar, the gym, points somewhere else, the mind. What looks familiar, magazine models, points somewhere else, ordinary people. Alongside a visual language instantly recognisable as that of a gym, small details push against it: the people in the posters are not models but everyday faces, and the object that accompanies their training is not a dumbbell but a phone, a symbol of how much our relationship with information, and with each other, has changed.

Polarisation is not the problem. It has driven social progress, fuelled movements, pushed necessary debates forward. The problem is when it turns toxic, when we lose respect for those who think differently, and disagreement becomes dismissal. That kind of polarisation is not something that happens to other people. It is a set of habits we all carry, shaped by comfort and reinforced by repetition, and the idea that it is always someone else's problem is itself one of those habits. PolsXtrems is an hour in a gym designed to make that visible. But the exhibition is only the warm-up. The real training is what happens when we leave: the next headline we choose whether to share, the next conversation we choose to stay in, the next time we notice ourselves dismissing someone before really listening. None of it gets easier. It just gets more familiar, the way any exercise does.