The Chairs of Tàpies: Blanca Llum Vidal and Los Sara Fontán
2024-07-19 19:00 - 19:30 UTC | Museu Tàpies
The Chairs of Tàpies is a series of multidisciplinary sound actions organised in the context of the Tàpies Centenary Year, with the collaboration of Pompeu Fabra University. The proposal focuses on the voice and words to create a sound accompaniment to oral memory. In this way, each of the thirteen sessions will feature a creator whose starting point will be the chair, taken as a performative object, linking back to the creative universe of Tàpies through the expressive languages and settings of the present day.
The eighth proposal of the series was conceived by Blanca Llum Vidal and Los Sara Fontán, in an action that modulates textures, processes the voice and lends musicality to things which perhaps were not meant to be music. Bringing together a host of authors, the invited artists will attempt to transform words into rhythmic matter, extracting sounds out of things while building a narrative. As occurs in Tàpies, the chair will not just be an idea, but above all an object and a reality to be considered, agitated and meditated upon.

Blanca Llum Vidal studied Social Work and Catalan Philology, and has a Master in Contemporary Thought. She works in the Zona Franca of Barcelona in a shelter for people who are functional diverse. With Arnau Pons she has translated La Douleur, by Marguerite Duras, and individually has translated Duras’s book Écrire. She has edited the poetry of Àngel Guimerà, Mercè Rodoreda’s letters from exile to Anna Murià, short stories by Víctor Català, Dues Catalunyes: jocfloralescos i xarons, by Àngel Carmona and, amongst other projects, the book accompanying the exhibition on Francesc Tosquelles and the catalogue for Agnès Varda, to be released this year at the CCCB. She was editor of an anthology of feminist essays by Maria Aurèlia Capmany, and has recited her work in the Catalan Countries, Spain, Ukraine, Santiago de Chile and Buenos Aires (at the International Book Fair). She has written about Ausiàs March, Blanchot, Kafka, Rodoreda, Arendt, Hersch, Català and Duras, amongst others. In 2023 she released an anthology of her work, published by Textos Sentido Edição & Letras, translated to Portuguese by Àlex Tarradellas, and is currently preparing an anthology of her work to be translated into Italian by Marcelo Belotti, and into Spanish by Unai Velasco. Her publications include La cabra que hi havia, Nosaltres i tu, Homes i ocells, Visca!, Punyetera flor, Maripasoula (crònica d’un viatge a la Guaiana francesa), Aquest amor que no és u / Este amor que no es uno (Spanish translation by Berta García Faet), Amor a la brega, La princesa sou Vós / La princesa sois Vos (Spanish translation by Unai Velasco), Llegir petit i escriure sobre literatura i amor and No cometràs adulteri. She has published in the Quadern supplement of El País and in the political and cultural daily El Temps, and is currently a regular contributor to the digital review Catorze. She has been on stage with Maria Callís to perform La Infanticida, by Víctor Català, performing as well with the classic and post-rock music of Los Sara Fontán, and most recently with the sound designs of Julián D’Avino, in a show taking its aim at contradictions in politics, love, ethics and aesthetics, both old and new. This year she was an invitee to the Guadalajara Book Fair (Mexico).
Los Sara Fontán is an experimental duo featuring Sara Fontán and Edi Pou. They focus on live performance of a physical, passionate and punk character, ever-changing and open to the surroundings. A concert by Los Sara Fontán is a play on melody and rhythm, adding features of programmatic romanticism to directly and indirectly narrate a story, giving audience members freedom to interpret the work in a personal manner.
Stimulated by the question of whether it is possible to advance a career in music without following the productive routines of the music industry, Los Sara Fontán spent five years touring, playing at festivals and self-run venues across Europe, without recording their music. This was possible thanks to a musical and personal underground network they feel fortunate to belong to. In the autumn of 2023, they released Queda pendiente, an album done at their own residence, which they performed, recorded and produced themselves.
Their music is open code, as the prolific duo continually recomposes its own creations to open them up to broader, multidisciplinary collectives, whether other musicians (SO with Amorante, 4132314 with Tarta Relena and Cocanha), different communities (Laboratório dos Riscos Impossíveis, with residents of the Fontainhas neighbourhood in Porto), dancers (Fem una bona pena abans de morir, with Sònia Gómez), poetry (La princesa sou Vós, with Blanca Llum Vidal), theatre (Concrete Matter, by Los Detectives, and Songs for the bitch-witch women, by Mariona Naudin), or TV series and films (the soundtracks for Autodefensa, Magaluf Ghost Town and Remember My Name).

This session of The Chairs of Tàpies will be part of the opening programme of the exhibition Antoni Tàpies. The Practice of Art.

Antoni Tàpies. The Practice of Art | Opening programme
2024-07-19 19:00 - 22:00 (Europe/Madrid)
Antoni Tàpies The Practice of Art will be opened on July 19, 2024, at 7 p.m., with an event curated by Imma Prieto and Judith Barnés, which will feature the participation of Blanca Llum Vidal and Los Sara Fontán; Lolo&Sosaku and the tribute to Mika Vainio.

Programme
· Blanca Llum Vidal and Los Sara Fontán. Poetic action
Public presentation of the eighth “Tapies’ Chairs” programme. An action that will modulate textures, process voices and give sound to what perhaps was not intended to be music. Summoning a lot of authors, the poet and the musicians will try to transform the word into rhythmic matter and extract sounds from things to build a story. The chair, like Tàpies, will not only be an idea. It will be, above all, an object and reality to think about, stir, meditate on.

· Interlude. Tribute to Mika Vainio
As an interlude, the work of Mika Vainio Sondear (Probe) will allow us to hear what sounds in real time on the roof of the museum with the sculpture by Antoni Tàpies Núvol i Cadira (1990). This sound installation by the Finnish artist, created in 2001 as part of the exhibition Discourse architectures, was reactivated for the project Engagement within the framework of the Sónar 2022 festival, which once again collaborates with the museum for this inauguration.

· Lolo & Sosaku. Sound piece Tribute to Antoni Tàpies
Using a set of machines and a vintage piano, belonging to the composer and musical theorist Josep Barberà i Humbert, a sound space will be built that will represent Tàpies’ relationship with the music of Luigi Nonno or Giacinto Scelsi, among others. To do this, the piano in question will be manipulated with the intervention of machines, the human voice and the texts that Tàpies wrote in his paintings. The entire proposal will feature the participation of the soprano Ximena Agurto and the multidisciplinary artist Renata Gelosi.

· Cocktail on the terraces with music from DJ Bla&co

[Image: Piano & Machines, Lolo & Sosaku, 2020.]

Following the Sun: Berta Prieto + Aina Serena
2024-07-20 19:00 - 21:00 (Europe/Madrid) | Museu Tàpies
The roof of the Fundació Antoni Tàpies is to become an experimental playground for Opimelissa, a collective who cook, sing, dance and lots more. We’ll be following the sun with the gentle irony and humour of Júlia Barbany, the architecture of the catchy electrosong of Petit Ibèric, the philosophical canticles of Max Grosse about the life and lovesickness of an odd sock with a hole in it, the egodilirium of the sharp-penned dramatist and writer Berta Prieto (if you don’t know who she is yet, you’re living in a cave!), the rhythm of DJ, performer and militant for self-governance Meritxell de Soto, the overflowing energy of tender, multi-faceted punkmother Belén Barenys, the experimental Latin music of Deprerreo, the contorted body of Candela Capitán, who denounces the sexualisation of women through convulsive metrics.
Fifth session of the programme Following the Sun, an experimental series of sound and stage performances, presenting nine new sessions by young creative talents. The programme, curated and produced by Carolina Olivares Esturillo, aims to promote the youthful, inexhaustible energy of artists to light up and give new life to Tàpies’ solitary sock that presides over the Fundació’s roof terrace.

Fifth session: Berta Prieto + Aina Serena
“Final de curs, tú la letra y yo la música” is an experiment that wants to conclude this year where the impossibility of finding concrete has marked our days. She blah blah blah blah and in the end nothing. I don’t even know what I’m saying, but I can’t stop talking. Let everyone be quiet, I want to hear my thoughts! Let my thoughts be silent, I want to listen to everyone! Consent, desire, limits… My goodness, what a year. How would all these reflections sound? Everything is so important! I don’t understand anything you’re saying. On the other side is the utopia of gesture, abstraction, suggestion… I also want to exist in doubt, but doubt is only a fantasy: we don’t have time. You are too literal, too literal, you are too literal: “too much baby.” He has to learn to shut up in class. He doesn’t participate enough. With the inability to speak, Berta Prieto, the girl who cannot stop talking: something never seen before in this circus! And, with the condemnation of abstraction, Aina Serena: unable to materialize a single thought! Accompany these poor “geeks” to resolve the definitive dispute between word and gesture, reason and emotion, literality and poetics.
Berta Prieto was born in 1998 and spent all her childhood and adolescence in Celrà, until he decided to go to Barcelona and study interpretation. It started to write to give herself and her friends roles, and so she has completed three works: El Chinabum (La Gleva), Fuck You Modern Family (Sala Beckett and Bitó Productions) and Derecho a Pataleta: the most exciting mission of the spies of true (Sala Beckett). She is one of the creators of the Autodefensa series, nominated for many awards important etc. He has also started speaking and writing in different spaces of prestige such as the CCCB or El País. Now she is also very busy writing another play, another series and having many ideas to continue living of the story.

Programme curated and produced by Carolina Olivares Esturillo
Design: Ana Habash and Ignasi Ayats. Illustrated by: Eduard Sales
Ticket sales through the Fundació website and at the box office. Limited capacity

Link to the full programme.

Picnic at the Museu Tàpies! 2024
2024-07-25 18:00 - 20:00 (Europe/Madrid) | Museu Tàpies
Tickets

Would you like to spend a summer afternoon at the museum to discover the exhibition Antoni Tàpies. The Practice of Art with your family, and then have a picnic on the terrace? Come with your own evening meal and we will invite you to a drink to celebrate the Tàpies Centenary Year!
We have prepared various proposals so that together you can enjoy the exhibition, along with a creative workshop that will be held in three different time slots: 6 pm, 6.30 pm and 7 pm.
Incollaboration with El Culturista

Today is Tàpies: Remei Sipi - Erick Beltrán
2024-07-30 18:00 - 19:00 UTC | Museu Tàpies
Tickets

Today is Tàpies is a series of conversations across generations and disciplines, led and moderated by arts journalist Rita Roig (Terrassa, 1997) and organised by the Museu Tàpies as part of the Tàpies Centenary Year. It sets out to interpret the artist’s texts as a starting point to discuss current issues such as environmentalism, self-determination for peoples, interculturality and the political commitment of art.
The series will encourage people to think about the artist’s words and thoughts though thirteen events at the Museu Tàpies involving people from a range of professional backgrounds (arts, education, science, politics, the environment, health and life sciences) and different generations. Altogether it will construct a polyphonic dialogue that will be recorded in podcast form thanks to cooperation with Catalunya Ràdio, in order to recover and experience the knowledge generated in a different format and a different context.

Chapter 8: Activism from the sidelines
Tàpies celebrates the moment when Europe finally comes up against “other cultures up to then considered savage that shifted the hitherto untouchable centre of gravity away from the shattered humanism of Europe for good.” The artist was clear that looking beyond Europe did not mean fleeing, and that in the art of some communities described as backward there was useful wisdom for modernity. In this conversation, Remei Sipi and Erick Beltrán will be discussing why some western values still seem untouchable to us and some forms of cultural expression are regarded as exotic, taking as a starting point Antoni Tàpies’ thoughts on the Eurocentric bias in the art world and about the colonial inheritance in our culture.

PARTICIPANTS
Remei Sipi is a writer, essayist, children’s educator and activist, an expert in gender and development. She works to defend women, ethnic minorities and migrants, and has helped organise African women’s associations in attempt to avoid the folklorisation of the intercultural events to which they are invited. Since the 1980s she has led different associations and been a member of groups like E’Waiso Ipola and the immigrant women’s network in Catalonia. In 1995 she set up the publisher Mey, a landmark in Equatorial Guinean literature. She is currently the secretary of the association E’Waiso Ipola and promoter of the federation of African women’s associations in Spain.

Erick Beltrán is an artist who explores and reflects on the concept of publishing and discourse construction. He takes an interest in the information that circulates and how it influences our view of the world. His work makes use of drawings, photographs, maps and other objects with the aim of linking public art and graphic languages. His aim is to reveal the mechanisms that define, assess, classify, select, reproduce and distribute images to create political, economic and cultural discourses in contemporary society.

Today is Tàpies programme
Podcasts Today is Tàpies, by Catalunya Ràdio.

The Chairs of Tàpies. Hugo Gómez-Chao Porta
2024-09-13 19:00 - 19:30 UTC | Museu Tàpies
The Chairs of Tàpies is a series of multidisciplinary sound actions organised in the context of the Tàpies Centenary Year, with the collaboration of Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF). The proposal focuses on the voice and words to create a sound accompaniment to oral memory. In this way, each of the thirteen sessions will feature a creator whose starting point will be the chair, taken as a performative object, linking back to the creative universe of Tàpies through the expressive languages and settings of the present day.
The guest in the ninth Chair of Tàpies is Hugo Gómez-Chao, who is to present the proposition entitled Three Voices. Three voices try to speak in the darkness. Three voices try to remember a text, the words, the inflections of their own voice. They try to learn to speak again through fragments of phrases, words, whispers, but any trace of communication has been lost in this superimposition of air over nothing. Suddenly, some signs appear that connect it all: en echo, a flash of meaning, a gesture that makes the three voices sing at the same time, a pure word. And suddenly what can be heard becomes visible.
Based on texts by Antoni Tàpies, Leonardo da Vinci and Ángel Valente, Three voices explores the physicality of the human voice to create a choreography that can only exist in the ear. This event also features the sopranos Margarita Rodríguez and Adriana Aranda and the mezzosoprano Cristina Segura, as well as percussionists Noè Rodrigo and Sabela Castro.

Hugo Gómez-Chao Porta
Born in A Coruña, he studied composition with Beat Furrer at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Graz, and with Ramón Lazkano at Musikene in Donostia/Sant Sebastián. In addition to his academic training, he has attended classes with composers like Toshio Hosokawa, Alberto Posadas, Clemens Gadenstätter, Bernhard Lang, Mark Andre and Pierluigi Billone.
He has been resident composer at the Real Academia de España in Rome (2022–2023) and resident composer at Juventudes Musicales de España (2019), scholarship holder in Artistic Training from A Coruña provincial authority and REGA resident artist at the City of Culture of Santiago de Compostela. He has won accolades including the first prize for young composers from the SGAE-CNDM Xavier Montsalvatge foundation and special commendation from the Colegio de España in Paris.
He has received commissions and premiered work with the support of bodies including JONDE (Joven Orquesta Nacional de España), the AEOS foundation, the SGAE foundation, Orquesta Sinfónica de Galicia, Real Filharmonía de Galicia, Juventudes Musicales de España, Impuls Festival, Accademia Filarmonica Romana, the Contrasti de Florència series, Festival Ensems in Valencia, the sacred music festival in Madrid, La Phármaco dance company, the City of Culture of Santiago de Compostela and Museu Tàpies, among others.
His music has been performed in Italy, Austria, Germany and France, among other countries, by leading ensembles and artists such as Quartet Arditti, Klangforum Wien, IEMA Ensemble Modern, Orquesta Sinfónica de Galicia, Real Filharmonía de Galicia, mdi ensemble, Arxis Ensemble, Vertixe Sonora Ensemble, Grup Instrumental Segle XX, Jove Orquestra de la Generalitat Valenciana and Ensemble So Extrem, among others.
In 2018 he founded the RESIS international contemporary music festival in A Coruña (with the support of INAEM, A Coruña city council, A Coruña provincial authority and the government of Galicia), of which he is artistic director. He is also artistic director of the Associación Cultural Aïs, with projects like the A_NEXOS series at the Luis Seoane foundation. In 2022 he founded Arxis Ensemble, of which he is also artistic director. Since 2023 he has curated the Andrés Gaos award and been musical adviser to the culture department of A Coruña provincial authority.

Margarita Rodríguez
Born in Mallorca, she has worked with eminent international conductors like William Christie, Masaaki Suzuki and Kent Nagano. In the contemporary music repertoire, she made her début as L’Angelo in Il giardino della vita, by José María Sánchez-Verdú, conducted by Arturo Tamayo. Since then she has premiered and performed compositions by leading contemporary composers, including Aleph, by Iluminada Pérez-Frutos; KELAIA (Libro de los vientos), by José María Sánchez-Verdú; Lo grotesco, by Sergio Blardony; Marii, by Ward De Vleeschhouwer; Resonancias sobre la Folía de España, by Alicia Díaz de la Fuente, and Intérieur, by Hugo Gómez-Chao, and is now a regular figure at the top contemporary series and festivals.

Adriana Aranda
Born in Barcelona, she studied classical and contemporary singing at the Conservatori Superior de Música del Liceu and then the master’s course in Lied at the Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya, specialising in contemporary music. She has won scholarships from the Fundació Victòria dels Àngels and also from Wolfram Rieger on the International Course for the Interpretation of Lied with Joventuts Musicals de Catalunya. In the field of contemporary music, she was a member of the Académie Voix Nouvelles in Royaumont (France) in 2019. She has worked with different contemporary music ensembles including the CrossingLines Ensemble at the OUT·SIDE’20 FESTIVAL, Grup Instrumental Segle XX at the Festival RESIS 2021, Vertixe Sonora since 2021 and Arxis Ensemble at the Royal Spanish Academy in Rome in 2023. In September 2023 she played Pierrot Lunaire by Arnold Schoenberg at the Música als Masos festival.

Born in Barcelona, ​​she studied singing with Dolors Aldea (a disciple of Gérard Souzay) and Francisco Poyato, as well as with Wolfram Rieger, Dalton Baldwin, Ulrich Eisenlohr, Burkhard Kehring, and Donatienne Michel-Dansac (currently the main European vocal reference in contemporary music). She received a scholarship from the Fundació Victoria de los Ángeles and twice from Wolfram Rieger in the Curs Internacional de Lied de Joventuts Musicals de Catalunya. In the field of Lied, she has performed in different venues in Spain, highlighting the LIFE Victoria Festival with Ian Burnside and Roderick Williams. She has taken part in different national and international multidisciplinary new creation projects with dance, theatre and circus in festivals both in Spain and France. He has worked with the main national contemporary music ensembles, such as Vertixe Sonora, Arxis Ensemble or CrossingLines, among others, appearing in festivals such as RESIS Festival, OUT•SIDE or the Festival de los Castillos and has premiered as a soloist three consecutive operas at the Gran Teatre del Liceu by Fabià Santcovsky, Itziar Viloria with Álex Tentor and Jordi Oriol and the most recent one by Guillem Palomar.

Cristina Segura
After graduating from the Conservatori Superior de Música del Liceu under Maria Dolors Aldea, she did two master’s degrees at the Haute école de musique in Geneva with Nathalie Stutzmann, followed by further training in lied at the Conservatoire Royal de Bruxelles. She stands out for her extensive training and work both in opera and lied, early and contemporary music and oratorios. She has sung as a soloist in Switzerland, Slovenia, France, Belgium, Brazil and Spain. She has sung the parts of Carmen (Carmen) and Suzuki (Madama Butterfly) at the Palau de la Música Catalana. At the Opéra de Lausanne she has played the parts of Smeton (Anna Bolena), Teresa (La sonnambula), Alisa (Lucia di Lammermoor), L’autruche (Les Zoocrates) and Pepa (La Belle de Cadix), as well as La maman, La tasse and La libellule (L’enfant et les sortilèges).

Gaudir UB course. Antoni Tàpies and the Practice of Art.
2024-09-16 - 2024-11-25
Antoni Tàpies was born in Barcelona on 13 December 1923. Today he is recognised as one of the most important artists of the 20th century. However, his work remains relatively little-known and is often considered cryptic and inaccessible. On this course we’ll give you some keys to get into Tàpies’ work. Through theoretical and practical sessions held in different parts of the museum, we will look at a range of aspects: the artistic conception that like behind his work, his creative techniques and processes, the links with the art of his time and his contributions to the history of art.

Today is Tàpies: Gloria Moure - Mabel Palacín
2024-09-17 18:00 - 19:00 UTC | Museu Tàpies
Tickets

Organised by the Museu Tàpies as part of the Tàpies Centenary Year, Today is Tàpies is a series of transgenerational and interdisciplinary conversations conducted and moderated by the cultural journalist Rita Roig (Terrassa, 1997). The aim is to interpret Tàpies’ texts as a starting point for reflecting on current issues such as ecology, the right to self-determination, interculturality and political commitment in art.
The words and ideas of the artist will be revisited during a series of thirteen sessions, with invited participants from different generations and diverse professional fields (culture, education, science, politics, environment, health and human sciences) helping to construct a polyphonic story that will be collected in the form of a podcast. Thanks to the collaboration of Catalunya Ràdio, the podcast will allow us to experience the generated knowledge in another format and in another context.

Chapter 9: Being an Artist: Philosophers of Combat and Action
“Can we talk today about the status of artist in a general way, with features common to all of them?” wondered Antoni Tàpies. The artist was fascinated by creators of all kinds who represented radically different archetypes. From the spiritual Zen master to the versatile Renaissance man, the definition of an artist can take so many forms, that we can get lost in a sea of relativism and conventions. But what does being an artist mean in today’s world? Is mastery of a technique enough? Must one know one is an artist in order to be one? In this conversation Gloria Moure and Mabel Palacín discuss the conception of the artist and the role they are to play in society.

PARTICIPANTS
Gloria Moure is an art historian and freelance curator. In the course of her career she has been director of the Fundació Espai Poblenou (Barcelona) and the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea (CGAC, Santiago de Compostela). In the last fifteen years, alongside her role as a curator, she has worked extensively in publishing. She currently heads Colección 20_21, a series of monographs published by Ediciones Polígrafa that has a prominent place among the collections of work and writing by leading contemporary artists.

Mabel Palacín is a multidisciplinary artist who works in film, video and photography. Her work reflects on the centrality of images in the contemporary world and on how we relate to them. She is also interested in the multiplicity of formats of images and in how they influence our relationship with the world. She sees images as theoretical agents able to construct models on the basis of which to understand and expand today’s visual landscape.

Today is Tàpies programme
Podcasts Today is Tàpies, by Catalunya Ràdio.

Tàpies, Montsalvatge and Victoria
2024-09-20 19:00 - 20:30 (Europe/Madrid) | Museu Tàpies
Throughout 2024, the Fundación Victoria de los Ángeles and the Museu Tàpies are celebrating the centenary of the birth of the soprano and the artist, respectively. To this end, and within the framework of the commemoration, the Museu Tàpies will host a concert to celebrate their friendship and highlight their artistic careers. Curiously, despite both living in Barcelona, Victoria de los Ángeles and Antoni Tàpies usually met in New York, especially during the 1960s and 1970s, coinciding with the internationalisation of Tàpies’ work and its inclusion in private and public collections.
Their mutual admiration is demonstrated by various documents from that time. Together with his wife Teresa Barba, Tàpies collected numerous records, among which Carmen, sung by Victoria de los Ángeles, stood out as one of his most precious jewels. Equally, Victoria de los Ángeles acquired several works by Tàpies over the years, which she kept in her own home. Proof of this reciprocal recognition is the 2007 commission for the logo of the newly-created Fundación Victoria de los Ángeles, designed by Tàpies for the occasion using some of his personal symbols.
The soprano Montserrat Seró returns to LIFE Victoria, accompanied on the piano by Marc Serra, who will also debut with saxophonist Gisela Dekort, winner of the Xavier Montsalvatge Award in the Les Corts International Music Competition. Their recital will establish a dialogue with Tàpies’ paintings and his musical preferences, exploring the relationship with Victoria and Montsalvatge. The repertoire will include works by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Johannes Brahms, Federico García Lorca, George Gershwin, Xavier Montsalvatge and Leonard Bernstein, among others.

Montaner y Simón: A Publishing House with History. Guided Tour
2024-09-21 11:00 - 13:30, 2024-10-19 11:00 - 13:30, 2024-11-16 11:00 - 13:30 UTC | Museu Tàpies
Tickets

A guided tour that aims to explore the history of the former Montaner y Simón publishing house, the work of the modernista architect Lluís Domènech i Montaner, through a visit to the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, the former main offices of the publishing house, and two closely related buildings by the same architect: the Palau Montaner, now headquarters of the Spanish government’s delegation in Catalonia, and the Casa Thomas, currently the Cubiñá designer furniture store.

Following the Sun: Meritxell de Soto
2024-09-21 19:00 - 21:00 (Europe/Madrid) | Museu Tàpies
The roof of the Fundació Antoni Tàpies is to become an experimental playground for Opimelissa, a collective who cook, sing, dance and lots more. We’ll be following the sun with the gentle irony and humour of Júlia Barbany, the architecture of the catchy electrosong of Petit Ibèric, the philosophical canticles of Max Grosse about the life and lovesickness of an odd sock with a hole in it, the egodilirium of the sharp-penned dramatist and writer Berta Prieto (if you don’t know who she is yet, you’re living in a cave!), the rhythm of DJ, performer and militant for self-governance Meritxell de Soto, the overflowing energy of tender, multi-faceted punkmother Belén Barenys, the experimental Latin music of Deprerreo, the contorted body of Candela Capitán, who denounces the sexualisation of women through convulsive metrics.
Fifth session of the programme Following the Sun, an experimental series of sound and stage performances, presenting nine new sessions by young creative talents. The programme, curated and produced by Carolina Olivares Esturillo, aims to promote the youthful, inexhaustible energy of artists to light up and give new life to Tàpies’ solitary sock that presides over the Fundació’s roof terrace.

Sixth session: Meritxell de Soto
Meritxell de Soto presents Ultra Femme Frequencies, a vinyl DJ set of drones and atmosphere, where the music is not only heard, but lived. In this piece, De Soto challenges the technical conventions of DJing, often associated with traditional masculinity, through the choreographic practice of tapping with the whole body, an investigation he has developed together with the dancer and choreographer Guillem Jiménez. The sound layers immerse the listener in a space of stillness and expansion, evoking a tactile sensuality: the vibration travels from the frequencies to the skin, establishing a dialogue between the sound and the body. Here, the technique is transformed into choreography, turning the body into an extension of the sound. Part of the choreographic movements are inspired by gestures taken from DJ archives, re-contextualized in a performative space and impregnated with elements of Bimbo culture. The work proposes a re-reading of the act of piercing from the perspective of provocation, play and irony, exploring new territories on the periphery of outdated paradigms and hot takes.

Meritxell de Soto is an artist who challenges the boundaries between sound and performance, investigating how sound devices interact with physicality and power dynamics. His work deals with topics such as the construction of gender, identity and eroticism, using sound to question and reimagine these concepts. De Soto creates spaces where the boundaries between the performer and technology are blurred, generating sensory experiences that invite reflection on the body as a place of agency.
In projects like Espai Segur, he subverts the traditional norms of DJing, integrating his body into the action of punching and encouraging a critical dialogue about care and safety in high-intensity environments, often dominated by traditional masculinity.
On a conceptual level, Meritxell de Soto’s work is a constant exploration of how sound and popular spaces can become platforms for critical reflection. He has performed at festivals and parties such as Sónar (BCN), Tremor (PGL), Keep Hush (UK) and Ankali (PRG), and has participated as a performer with the LASADCUM company at Teatros del Canal and Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB), among others. His piece Espai Segur has been presented at the Gayte Lyrique in Paris and Casa Monjuïc, in Barcelona. In addition, he has been part of the round table Dance Dance Revolution, at Sónar+D, and is currently curating the electronic music festivals Tresor, at the CCCB.
His practice as a DJ is characterized by the hybridization of musical genres, focused on the deconstructed club sound, with a critical look at how these sound choices impact the collective experience of the public, promoting the creation of communities.

Technical details:
· Creative direction and interpretation: Meritxell de Soto
· Choreography and Movement collaborator: Guillem Jiménez
· Styling: Romina Puga
· Programme curated and produced by Carolina Olivares Esturillo

· Design: Ana Habash and Ignasi Ayats.
· Illustrated by: Eduard Sales
· Ticket sales through the website and at the box office of Museu Tàpies. Limited capacity.

Link to the full programme.

Open day and guided tour on the occasion of La Mercè 2024
2024-09-24 10:00 - 19:00 (Europe/Madrid)
As every year, on the occasion of the La Mercè 2024 festivities, the Tàpies Museum offers an open day, from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., and a free guided tour, at 5:30 p.m., to approach the exhibitions in course:
– Antoni Tàpies. The practice of art
– Serge Attukwei Clottey. Beyond the Skin

Sarah Maldoror. An Alternative Identity
2024-09-25 - 2024-10-02
The season of films Sarah Maldoror. An Alternative Identity responds to the need to network with the city’s institutions to develop a de-localised programme and the desire to highlight a pioneer of African film like Sarah Maldoror, who left us a wonderful legacy on the subject of negritude. The season sets out to revisit Maldoror’s work, as a figure as yet little-known but essential in dealing with the decolonial movement and struggles for social diversity. The four sessions, designed by the Museu Tàpies with the special support of Annouchka de Andrade, the film-maker’s daughter, will set out from Maldoror’s visual poetics to portray a future society rooted in anticolonialism and pan-Africanism.
Sarah Maldoror (Condom, France, 1929 – Fontenay-lès-Bris, France, 2020) is considered the first black woman to make a feature-length film in Africa and represents a key figure in world and revolutionary cinema, firmly and unabashedly anti-racist. Over several decades, her prolific body of work includes more than forty films that combine fiction and documentary in the broadest sense of the term. Altogether it is a kind of poetry dedicated to translating the black cultural, social and political movement into images and sound.
The seminar will invite film critics, activists and sociologists to help to construct a fruitful dialogue around concepts like colonialism, social justice and migration, but will also deal with broader terms in connection with possession, baggage, heritage or identity.

Session 1: Date: 25 September 2024 | Venue: Filmoteca de Catalunya | 6 pm
Presentation of the series Sarah Maldoror: An Alternative Identity with the directors of the Museu Tàpies and the Filmoteca de Catalunya
Opening lecture: Filming Means Taking Sides, by Annouchka de Andrade
Screening of Monangambé (1968, 17 min) and Ana Mercedes Hoyos (2008, 13 min)
Public debate and questions to Annouchka de Andrade

Session 2: Date: 27 September 2024 | Venue: Filmoteca de Catalunya | 6 pm
Presentation of the session by the Filmoteca de Catalunya
Presentation of the Carnaval trilogy by Annouchka de Andrade
Performative reading by Yazel Parra Nahmens
Screening of the Carnaval trilogy: Un carnaval dans le Sahel, Fogo, île de feu and Carnaval en Guinée-Bissau (1979-1980, 80 min). First screening in Spain of the restored copies.

Session 3: Date: 1 October 2024 | Venue: Institut Français | 6 pm
Presentation of the series by the Tàpies museum
Preamble: In Search of an Identity, by Annouchka de Andrade
Screening of Aimé Césaire: le masque des mots (1987, 47 min)
Public debate and questions to Annouchka de Andrade

Session 4: Date: 2 October 2024 | Venue: Museu Tàpies | 5.30 pm
Presentation of the series by the Tàpies museum
Screening of Sambizanga (1972-1973, 102 min)
Round table with Annouchka de Andrade and Daniellis Hernández, moderated by Yazel Parra Nahmens

With the participation and collaboration of the Filmoteca de Catalunya and the Institut Français de Barcelone, With the support of the programme Museu Habitat, an initiative by the Generalitat de Catalunya.

Tàpies landscape
2024-09-29 11:00 - 12:00 (Europe/Madrid) | Museu Tàpies
Tour/workshop for families at the exhibition Antoni Tàpies: The Practice of Art.
Antoni Tàpies and his family spent their summers in the Montseny area, where they enjoyed the nature park. We often find landscapes or elements that make reference to nature in his work. During the tour we’ll speculate about the different stories some of his pictures have to tell, by asking each other questions. What is Somac the lion doing in the middle of a landscape by Tàpies? Can bulls fly? Can a man be bigger than a landscape? During the workshop we’ll make our own Tàpies landscape-collage. We’ll create a landscape with techniques used by the artist, adding elements taken from his works.

Architectures of the Skin, from the Body to the Street seminar
2024-10-01 18:00 - 2024-10-04 20:30 (Europe/Madrid) | Museu Tàpies
Architectures of the Skin, from the Body to the Street is a seminar coordinated by Imma Prieto and Josep Ramoneda, and sets out from three main themes: the environment, migration and colonialism.
The programme will feature historians, architects, artists and thinkers who have stood out for their careers and their knowledge within the proposed theoretical framework, but also for their critical ability. This view will contribute to reflection about the work of Serge Attukwei Clottey and, at the same time, bring into play possible shared imaginations to which his purpose appeals: the reconstruction and re-use of works in the struggle for the ecosystem and as vestiges and memories of societies.

PROGRAMME

Session 1 | October 1, 2024

· 6.00 pm: Welcome and introduction by Imma Prieto, director of the Tàpies Museum
· 6.10 pm: Preamble by Mohamad Bitari
· 6.20 pm: Conference by Mustafa Barghouti. Against the war of genocide
· 6.50 pm: Lecture by M’Barek Bouhchichi. Nous sommes des mots Des écriture
· 7.20 pm: Colloquium between Mustafa Barghaouti, Mohamad Bitari and M’Barek Bouhchichi. Moderator: Josep Ramoneda
· 8.00 pm: Debate and questions
· 8.30 pm: Closing

Session 2 | October 2, 2024 | This session is free of charge. No prior registration is required.

· 5.30 pm: Presentation of the cycle and session by Imma Prieto
· 5.40 pm: Screening of Sambizanga (1972-1973, 102 min)
· 7.30 pm: Round table with Annouchka de Andrade and Daniellis Hernández. Moderator: Yazel Parra Nahmens
· 8.30 pm: Closing

Session 3 | October 3, 2024

· 6.00 pm: Welcome and introduction by Imma Prieto
· 6.10 pm: Lecture by Josep Maria Fradera. Història, memòria i image d’un èxode forçat: Àfrica, Europa i Amèrica
· 6.40 pm: Lecture by Paula Nascimento. Diluting borders, (re)imagining the commons
· 7.20 pm: Colloquium between Josep Maria Fradera and Paula Nascimento. Moderator: Imma Prieto
· 7.45 pm: Debate and questions
· 8.15 pm: Closing

Session 4 | October 4, 2024

· 6.00 pm: Welcome and introduction by Imma Prieto
· 6.10 pm: Lecture by Gustau Nerín. Guinea Equatorial i Espanya: la geografia dels buits y dels silencis
· 6.40 pm: Conference by Laida Memba. Arquitectura Vernacular, Memòria Corporal i Resistència
· 7.20 pm: Performative reading titled oración caribe, by Yazel Parra Nahmens and Miguel Ángel Galián
· 7.45 pm: Conversation between Gustau Nerín, Yazel Parra Nahmens and Laida Memba. Moderator: Imma Prieto
· 8.15 pm: Debate and questions
· 8.30 pm: Closing

A seminar with the support of the Museu Habitat program, an initiative of the Government of Catalonia.

Oliver Marchart. Conflictual Aesthetics: Artistic Activism and the Public Sphere
2024-10-05 11:00 - 12:30 (Europe/Madrid) | Museu Tàpies
The NED publishing house has recently released the book Estética conflictual. Activismo artístico y esfera pública [Conflictual Aesthetics: Artistic Activism and the Public Sphere] by Oliver Marchart, with a prologue by Laura Llevadot. This publication explores the relationship between artistic practices featuring political activism and art’s political power as expressed through the activism of the past decade, upholding present-day liberal revolutions.
In this regard, in the last twenty years two events have particularly stood out: the crisis of 2008 and the COVID-19 pandemic. This convulsive political moment has given rise to various activist initiatives that have challenged neoliberalism’s demands for austerity and imposed precariousness. Rather than finding haven amidst comfortable institutions, art has claimed a political vocation for itself by intervening in the articulation of activist positions, broadening spaces of conflict and dissent so as to conceive of other possible ways of living in the public sphere.
The Museu Tàpies will host a presentation of this book, accompanied by a debate on the activist turn in contemporary art in recent decades and art’s capacity to intervene in the public sphere. Participants will be Imma Prieto, director of the Museu Tàpies; Carles Guerra, independent curator; Laura Llevadot, philosopher and teacher; and Oliver Marchart, author of the book and of other publications, including Post-Foundational Political Thought (2007) and Thinking Antagonism: Political Ontology after Laclau (2018).

Programme:
11h-11.30 am Presentation of the book by Oliver Marchart, Estètica conflictual (NED, 2024).
11h. Laura Llevadot: Pensament posfundacional i estètica posfundacional.
11.10 h. Juan Evaristo Valls Boix: Oliver Marchart i la qüestió de l’art polític
11.20 h. Oliver Marchart: Estètica Conflictual (Conflictual Aesthetics)
11.30-12.30 h. Conversation: Activism in Contemporary Art
11.30 h. Imma Prieto (Director, Museu Tàpies): Art activista i art polític
11. 45 h. Carles Guerra (Independent research): Art activista i art polític
12h. Oliver Marchart
12.25 h. Laura Llevadot: questions and conclusions

The Chairs of Tàpies: Difraccions Series
2024-10-11 19:00 UTC
The Chairs of Tàpies is a series of multidisciplinary sound actions organised in the context of the Tàpies Centenary Year, with the collaboration of Pompeu Fabra University. The proposal focuses on the voice and words to create a sound accompaniment to oral memory. In this way, each of the thirteen sessions will feature a creator whose starting point will be the chair, taken as a performative object, linking back to the creative universe of Tàpies through the expressive languages and settings of the present day.

The Tàpies chairs: cicle Difraccions
The tenth sound action of the cycle is “L’escolta fugaç”, a proposal from the cicle Difraccions. Listening, as the central act of the musical event, emerges in its highest intensity in the context of multidisciplinary improvisation, both on the part of the public and those performing. The creation of material through improvisation shifts us into a state of ongoing attention, where we are required to react to the appearance of new ideas that might arise from chance, fortuitous mishaps, deviations or even new imaginary worlds of sound.
The guitarist Amidea Clotet proposes a dialogue between sound and movement with the dancer Sònia Sánchez. This interchange invites us to reflect on the role of listening in generative improvisation. How do performers listen to themselves while improvising, and how do they respond to their deviations, errors or new solutions as they arise when performing live? How does movement react to sound, and how is sound modified in function of what movement proposes? Listening, at the core of the musical event, is made manifest in this context with full intensity.

Amidea Clotet is one of the emerging figures in the Barcelona generative improvisation scene. She studied electric guitar at the Liceu Conservatory in Barcelona, as well as contemporary composition in Denmark, which is where she began her path towards improvised music. Clotet creates spontaneous soundscapes using extended techniques and objects, resulting in music that is raw and, as she observes, arises as a response to the times we live in. Her creations are situated part-way between playfully risky sound experimentation and the beauty of subtlety.

Sònia Sánchez is a dancer whose work has its foundations in flamenco, free improvisation and the Japanese Body Weather dance technique. She has a preference for improvised sound laboratories exploring through the body, while her work is grounded in flamenco roots of sound in space, the body that resonates in movement and danced space. She began her research into the relationship between the attitude of flamenco rhythm and the organic speed of Body Weather in 2001. In 2004, she added to her career path an interest in free music, and since then has dedicated herself to daily exploration of this broad array of terrains and horizons

Today is Tàpies. Perejaume - Marta Tafalla
2024-10-15 18:00 - 19:00 UTC | Museu Tàpies
Today is Tàpies is a series of conversations across generations and disciplines, led and moderated by arts journalist Rita Roig (Terrassa, 1997) and organised by the Museu Tàpies, as part of the Tàpies Centenary Year. It sets out to interpret the artist’s texts as a starting point to discuss current issues such as environmentalism, self-determination for peoples, interculturality and the political commitment of art.
The series will encourage people to think about the artist’s words and thoughts though thirteen events at the Museu Tàpies involving people from a range of professional backgrounds (arts, education, science, politics, the environment, health and life sciences) and different generations. Altogether it will construct a polyphonic dialogue that will be recorded in podcast form thanks to cooperation with Catalunya Ràdio, in order to recover and experience the knowledge generated in a different format and a different context.

Chapter 11: Environmentalism and other directions
Tàpies wrote time and again about nature. He did so in talking about the Montseny massif in particular, to combat the degradation of this landscape he loved deeply, but every word he devoted to the Montseny actually referred to the natural environment, the life around us. For him, “The environment is a material from which all of us are committed to constructing what should be the most beautiful and delicate of our works of art: life itself.” The concern to represent the landscape, care for it and value it is a constant in Tàpies’ work, and in that of many other artists influenced by him. In this conversation, Perejaume talks to philosopher and environmentalist Marta Tafalla about the relationship between the environment and art, creation and nature and the commitment artists must have to this.

PARTICIPANTS
Perejaume is an artist and writer who combines visual and literary creativity. Since the early 1980s he has produced an extensive body of work including books of poetry, essays, criticism and catalogues in which he constantly questions the relations between nature and culture with the aim of reformulating the relationship between art and territory. Joan Brossa, Joan Miró, J.V. Foix and Jacint Verdaguer are some of the figures whose creative work has influenced his artistic vision, which also draws on the popular culture of the Maresme area and the world of farming. In 2005 he won the national visual arts prize awarded by the Catalan government, and in 2006 the national arts prize awarded by the Spanish ministry of culture.

Marta Tafalla is a philosopher who explores the relationship between animals, humans and nature from an ethical and aesthetic point of view. She considers environmentalism and animalism essential concepts in coping with today’s challenges. She currently lectures in ethics and aesthetics at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and is also a member of the scientific council of the Centre for Animal Ethics at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Her most recent publications are Ecoanimal. Una estética plurisensorial, ecologista y animalista (Plaza y Valdés, 2019), an essay in which she rethinks our relationship with nature and sets out a multisensory, ecologist and animalist proposition that is essential to facing up to today’s challenges; and Filosofía ante la crisis ecológica (Plaza y Valdés, 2022)

Today is Tàpies programme
Podcasts Today is Tàpies, by Catalunya Ràdio.

Following the Sun: Deprerreo
2024-10-19 12:00 - 14:00 (Europe/Madrid)
The roof of Museu Tàpies is to become an experimental playground for Opimelissa, a collective who cook, sing, dance and lots more. We’ll be following the sun with the gentle irony and humour of Júlia Barbany, the architecture of the catchy electrosong of Petit Ibèric, the philosophical canticles of Max Grosse about the life and lovesickness of an odd sock with a hole in it, the egodilirium of the sharp-penned dramatist and writer Berta Prieto (if you don’t know who she is yet, you’re living in a cave!), the rhythm of DJ, performer and militant for self-governance Meritxell de Soto, the overflowing energy of tender, multi-faceted punkmother Belén Barenys, the experimental Latin music of Deprerreo, the contorted body of Candela Capitán, who denounces the sexualisation of women through convulsive metrics.
Following the Sun is an an experimental series of sound and stage performances, presenting nine new sessions by young creative talents. The programme, curated and produced by Carolina Olivares Esturillo, aims to promote the youthful, inexhaustible energy of artists to light up and give new life to Tàpies’ solitary sock that presides over the Museu’s roof terrace.

Seventh session: “Sonidos de Resistencia: Ecos de Venezuela”, Deprerreo collective
The “Mitjò” terrace of the Museu Tàpies presents the seventh session of the cycle of sound manifestations and stage experiments “Following the Sun”, and has the pleasure of hosting, on October 19, 2024 at 12 noon, the performance of the colectivo Deprerreo collective. This group, founded by the Venezuelan music producer based in Barcelona, ​​Luis Miranda (@lilfemiranda), will premiere a new sound intervention in collaboration with Venezuelan artists based in Barcelona. Aquiles Ignacio Hinestrosa (@celestial.trash._), Marta Cruz (@candadismo) and Natalia Ortega Orozco (@_nana_ortegaorozco). The visuals that will be projected during the sound action belong to the archive of Luken Ignacio Quintana, founder of the colectivo activista x Venezuela @hacha.machete.
Deprerreo will create a live song that evokes resistance, freedom and the cultural richness of the Caribbean. The sound piece will not only celebrate the cultural diversity of Venezuela, but will also serve as an encouragement for the more than 7.71 million Venezuelan migrants who have left their home in search of a better future.
In “Sonidos de Resistencia: Ecos de Venezuela” the great cultural richness of the Caribbean will be shown, inspired by spiritual syncretism, countercultural rebellion, connection with ancestors and the reflection of community power in times of adversity. In addition, it will be set to a spiritualist theme, thus conveying a message of hope and solidarity.
This meeting seeks to make visible the social and cultural crisis that Venezuela faces, highlighting the strength and resilience of its people, as well as its artistic legacy in an act of resistance. We invoke energies that promote immediate changes and a deep connection with all those who have not been able to migrate. Join us in this celebration of cultural resistance and hope!

· Curatorship and artistic production: Carolina Olivares Esturillo
· Design: Ana Habash and Ignasi Ayats.
· Illustration: Eduard Sales
· Ticket sales via the website and at the museum reception. Limited capacity.

Link to the full programme.

Anigetals
2024-10-20 10:00 - 15:00 (Europe/Madrid) | Museu Tàpies
Workshop run by Anita García and Gonzalo Elvira as part of the Barcelona Dibuixa festival
Anigetals are beings that are turning from animals into plants, invented at Espai C at the Dolors Monserdà-Santapau School by Anita García, Gonzalo Elvira and the students taking part. Could the anigetals live in a work by Antoni Tàpies?
We invite you to take part in a drawing and collage workshop designed for people of all ages to take us into the forest of Misiones (in northern Argentina), as described by Horacio Quiroga in Cuentos de la selva, at the same time allowing us to discover Tàpies’ work and local flora.
Activity part of the Barcelona Dibuixa Festival

Rereflux
2024-10-23 18:00 - 21:00 (Europe/Madrid) | Museu Tàpies
Thirty years ago now, the Museu Tàpies, then headed by Manuel Borja-Villel, opened In the Spirit of Fluxus, a comprehensive retrospective, curated by Elizabeth Armstrong and Joan Rothfuss, of the movement that revolutionised the foundations of art in the 1960s. The exhibition featured the work of artists including Joseph Beuys, George Brecht, Robert Filliou, Dick Higgins, Shigeko Kubota, George Maciunas, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Benjamin Patterson, Carolee Schneemann, Mieko (Chieko) Shiomi, Ben Vautier, Wolf Vostell, Emmett Williams and La Monte Young, among many others, and of Zaj artists like Juan Hidalgo and Esther Ferrer.
The exhibition was also accompanied by a series of activities which included the Reflux project, a programme of re-enactments of Fluxus events curated by Oscar Abril Ascaso and executed by a group of young local performance artists: Borja Zabala, Jaume Alcalde, Denys Blacker, Lluís Alabern, Júlia Montilla, Joan Casellas, Quim Tarrida, Miquel Baixas, Alexis Tauler and Noel Tatú.
In the Spirit of Fluxus played a central role in catalysing a moment of effervescence in performance techniques in Catalonia in general, and in action art in particular in Barcelona. Intense and collaborative, but not free from criticism and disagreement, it set the pace for a generation of young artists and, among other ramifications, led to the creation of the first platform for performing artists in Spain, Club7, right here in the museum.
Rereflux is a programme of debate and action that sets out to commemorate that crucial moment in the history of action art in Barcelona and in the artistic practices of the 1990s in this country. With this aim, Rereflux is organising a round table with some of the protagonists of the Reflux project of 1994 and a programme of Fluxus actions executed by contemporary performance artists, in what would now be a new Re-Reflux Orchestra for the 21st century.
The initiative forms part of the ARTefACTe4 days, an event to foster contemporary performance practices that works as a laboratory for new cultural institutionality. A project by CLUB9, the platform that is the heir to Club7 and that was publicly launched in the auditorium of the Museu Tàpies on 29 May 2021.

PROGRAMME
6 pm. Talk by Oscar Abril Ascaso, curator of the project Reflux 1994.
7 pm. Round table with Manuel Borja-Villel, former director of the Museu Tàpies, and Lluís Alabern and Joan Casellas, artists on the project Reflux 1994.
8 pm. Fluxus performances by Estel Boada, Paloma Orts, Pia Sommer, Neus Masdeu and Llapispanc.

Picture credits: Teresa Ramírez – Arxiu Aire
Performance by the Reflux Orchestra in the auditorium of the Museu Tàpies on 29 January 1995. From left to right: Borja Zabala, Joan Casellas, Júlia Montilla, Alexis Tauler, Noel Tatú, Quim Tarrida, Miquel Baixas, Lluís Alabern and Oscar Abril Ascaso.

The Chairs of Tàpies: Eduard Escoffet
2024-10-25 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | Museu Tàpies
The Chairs of Tàpies is a series of multidisciplinary sound actions organised in the context of the Tàpies Centenary Year, with the collaboration of Pompeu Fabra University. The proposal focuses on the voice and words to create a sound accompaniment to oral memory. In this way, each of the thirteen sessions will feature a creator whose starting point will be the chair, taken as a performative object, linking back to the creative universe of Tàpies through the expressive languages and settings of the present day.

Eduard Escoffet is a poet and sound artist. He has published books of poetry a lot (2012), The earth and the sky (2013, published in Spanish in 2018 with the title ground and sky) and Less and everything (2017), apart from the artist’s book Estramps with Evru (2012) and the poster-poem Plantation (2021), Carles Hac Mor award. In 2018 he was a finalist for the Prix Bernard Heidsieck, awarded by the Center Pompidou and the Fondazione Bonotto. With the electronic band Bradien, with whom he collaborated between 2009 and 2016, he published the albums Pols (2012) and Scale (2015). He is currently a member of the group Barba Corsini, with which he published the album in 2021 A new fire He is the author with Gianluca Abbate of the virtual reality film body inside (Italy, 2019), winner of the Goethe Prize at the Zebra Poetry Film Festival in Berlin.
In 2022 he composed the piece Ode to the Walking Class for the German vocal group Sprechbohrer within the framework of the project The Poet’s Sound. In 2022, the sound performance for tapes premiered in Barcelona. Utopia and slavery (piece for 25 mechanical voices), which could later be seen in Tarragona and Madrid. In 2023 he presented the double exhibition Growth and Degrowth by Howard Roark at Chiquita Room and The Green Parrot (Barcelona) and published the album of sound poetry and vocal improvisation Bastide, published by Erratum (Paris) and Sonhoras (Barcelona).

T/H-partitura
A sound dialogue between Bernard Heidsieck and Antoni Tàpies
Eduard Escoffet |Length: about 25 min
Between 1959 and 1960, Bernard Heidsieck composed Poème-partition T, a sound poem dedicated to a painting by Tàpies, who in those years was forging his career in the European gallery circuit, and especially in Paris. As he had done earlier with paintings by Jean Degottex and other artists, Heidsieck wrote and recorded with his tape recorder a poem that played with layering and the timbre of the voice, and which was, in the end, an open dialogue with Tàpies. Heidsieck sent the poem to Tàpies, but the painter never responded and their dialogue was cut short.
T/H-partitura [T/H-score] thus seeks to activate this dialogue between the two creators. The resulting piece remakes the sound materials from the Heidsieck poem while adding features that create connections between the two poetics, such as the chair, the main theme of this series. It is a quadrophonic piece done with four cassette tapes and live voice, conceived as well to dialogue with the museum building and the railway sounds that run through it. As in previous pieces by Escoffet, such as Utopia i esclavatge [Utopia and Slavery] (La Capella, 2022) and Echo and the Oracle (CCCB, 2023), T/H-partitura experiments with vocal overlaying and physicality of the voice. In this case, furthermore, it explores common features between the work of Bernard Heidsieck and that of Tàpies.
While they were never to have a creative dialogue between them, there are many features that bring them close together. Both creators impregnate their works with reality—with objects, in one case, and with recordings from the street in the other. They manipulate materials—earth and paint in one case, the recording tape itself in the other—and also go beyond the supports themselves—the canvas and the page, respectively—in creating works that must be seen or listened to live, putting the body front and centre, whether in gesture or voice. Many poets have written about Tàpies, but few have accomplished what Bernard Heidsieck did in shifting the essence of the artistic code of Tàpies to another support: he makes the painting anew by working with text and voice in a way that is true to Tàpies. T/H-partitura, therefore, is the reconstruction of these echoes.

Can books be sorted by their smell?
2024-10-27 11:00 - 13:00 UTC | Museu Tàpies
Books come in all shapes and sizes. How do you organise your books at home? Because of their smell? By their weight?
We are offering a morning of family activities in which to observe the physical characteristics of books, such as smell, weight, size or colour. The book is an object full of letters, syllables, words, sentences, texts and photographs, not always in the same language, using different fonts and spellings, of varied sizes and colours. We will play with all these elements to produce some creative writing in a quick and agile way.
This workshop is based on The Portable Library, a travelling selection of books inspired by the Fundació Antoni Tàpies Library, which specialises in modern and contemporary art.
Activity conducted by Tantàgora

Today is Tàpies: Maria Josep Balsach - Ariadna Guiteras
2024-10-29 18:00 - 19:00 UTC | Museu Tàpies
Tickets

Organised by the Museu Tàpies as part of the Tàpies Centenary Year, Today is Tàpies is a series of transgenerational and interdisciplinary conversations conducted and moderated by the cultural journalist Rita Roig. The aim is to interpret Tàpies’ texts as a starting point for reflecting on current issues such as ecology, the right to self-determination, interculturality and political commitment in art.The words and ideas of the artist will be revisited during a series of thirteen sessions, with invited participants from different generations and diverse professional fields (culture, education, science, politics, environment, health and human sciences) helping to construct a polyphonic story that will be collected in the form of a podcast. Thanks to the collaboration of Catalunya Ràdio, the podcast will allow us to experience the generated knowledge in another format and in another context.

Chapter 11: Body and Memory: Readings of Skin and Layers
“I have sometimes joked that art applied to bodies can be a remedy for pain,” wrote Antoni Tàpies. In his texts, like many other artists, he referred to the healing nature of art. Art is often claimed to heal the body (and even the mind): is this ability still useful in our context? Art, which may seem like a contemplative, mental activity, always ends up passing through the body, whether in the form of shivers due to Stendhal syndrome or in interaction with a work of art we have before us. So, how is art related to corporeality? We will reflect on this with Maria Josep Balsach and Ariadna Guiteras.

PARTICIPANTS
Maria Josep Balsach is an art historian and poet specialising in contemporary art, specifically in Joan Miró. She has written numerous theoretical pieces on aesthetics and art in the 19th and 20th centuries from a multidisciplinary standpoint. She is currently director of the European Live Art Archive project and of the chair in contemporary art and culture at the University of Girona. She has worked as an art critic for the newspapers Avui, El País and La Vanguardia.

Ariadna Guiteras is a multidisciplinary artist who explores the limits of human and superhuman bodies and the relations of which they are constituted. She considers bodies as vulnerable, open matter that is always related to other things, whether the environment, energies or data. Her work revolves around the ideas of control and performance we associate with bodies, in relation to the social, political and emotional context that surrounds them. Throughout her artistic process she relates materiality and immateriality, gesture and memory, touch and affect, and her pieces therefore take the form of performances, sculptures and installations.

Today is Tàpies programme
Podcasts Today is Tàpies, by Catalunya Ràdio.

The Chairs of Tàpies: Mal Pelo
2024-11-08 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | Museu Tàpies
The Chairs of Tàpies is a series of multidisciplinary sound actions organised in the context of the Tàpies Centenary Year, with the collaboration of Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF). The proposal focuses on the voice and words to create a sound accompaniment to oral memory. In this way, each of the thirteen sessions will feature a creator whose starting point will be the chair, taken as a performative object, linking back to the creative universe of Tàpies through the expressive languages and settings of the present day. The proposal for the month of November is Mal Pelo.

Mal Pelo, a creative theatre group under the artistic direction of Pep Ramis and María Muñoz, is known for its practice of shared authorship, arising from dialogue between creators from various disciplines (dance, philosophy, music, audiovisual). Over the course of its long career, it has developed its own artistic language through movement and the creation of theatrical performances, featuring text, original soundtracks, live music and the construction of stage settings, as well as light and video, amongst other theatrical techniques. The overall symbiosis makes it possible to understand space by means of the careful and peculiar capacity to listen to bodies and to objects. This in turn generates a personalised world, characterised by an amalgam of gestures and stimulations that approximate the work of Mal Pelo to a type of dance-essay, understood as a dialogue between body, text and sound.

María Muñoz and Pep Ramis have found on the stage an ideal place to express their urge to experiment, query and share subjects that are essential to their trajectory. Mal Pelo has presented the shows Quarere (1989), Sur, Perros del Sur (1992), Dol (1994), La calle del Imaginero (1996), Orache (1998), El alma del bicho (1999), L’animal a l’esquena (2001), Atrás los ojos (2002), An (el silenci) (2003), BACH (2004), ATLAS (2005), Testimoni de llops (2006), He visto caballos (2008), Tots els noms (2010), Caín & Caín (2011), L’esperança de vida d’una llebre (2013), El cinquè hivern (2015), 7 lunas (2015), The Mountain, the Truth and the Paradise (2017), On Goldberg Variations / Variations (2019), Inventions (2020), Highlands (2021), De haber nacido (2023) and Double Infinite – The Bluebird Call (2023), amongst others.

Over the course of their career, Mal Pelo has collaborated with various creators and projects, including John Berger, Erri de Luca, Lisa Nelson, Àngels Margarit, Steve Noble, Núria Font, Steve Paxton, Eduard Fernández, Andrés Corchero, Toni Serra, Lilo Baur, Cesc Gelabert, Faustin Linyekula, Raffaella Giordano, Baró d’Evel, Leonor Leal, Niño de Elche and Marta Izquierdo, amongst others.

The company has received numerous distinctions, including the National Culture Award of Catalonia, the City of Barcelona Award and the Spanish National Culture Award, acknowledging its career in the field of choreography, as well its achievements opening up new paths in contemporary dance.

In 2001, María Muñoz and Pep Ramis initiated the project L’Animal a l’Esquena, a creation and research centre located at Mas Espolla, in Celrà, Girona. The centre is conceived to enliven the intersection of various disciplines and interests, leading to artistic interchange through a working model based on creative residencies. Its location enhances the relationship between creators and the centre’s natural surroundings, intensifying the possibility of new dialogues between art and nature.
[Photo credit: Mal Pelo]

Let’s Turn Objects into Skin. Family activity
2024-11-10 11:00 - 12:30 (Europe/Madrid) | Museu Tàpies
Tickets

Where do the piles of boxes that protect our internet purchases end up? And what about disposable paper or plastic cups? How could we give them a new life? One of the concerns of artist Serge Attukwei Clottey is the excess of disposable objects that clutter up our everyday life. Both the work of Toni Tàpies and that of this Ghanaian artist involve giving a new life to everyday objects. All together we’ll discover what the use was of the yellow containers that Clottey has turned into the new skin of the front of the museum. We propose a tour/workshop to think about the memory, uses and future of some of these elements. We’ll take inspiration from Clottey’s process to design the costumes for a critical tour of the museum.
For children aged 6 and upwards, accompanied by adults.

International Symposium: Representation and Enigma. From the Threshold of Images
2024-11-13 - 2024-11-15 | Museu Tàpies
The Museu Tàpies wants the celebration of the Tàpies Year to culminate in an international symposium to encourage new interpretations and new ways of approaching the artist’s legacy today, given that we are currently rewriting certain historiographical genealogies. As has been pointed out repeatedly, the centenary of Antoni Tàpies’ birth involves not only a homage to the past but also a celebration of all that is to come. In this respect, it is absolutely necessary for us to be able to rethink a legacy that still speaks to us and in which there still remain many layers of interpretation to reveal and discover.
The international symposium Representation and Enigma: From the Threshold of Images, coordinated by Imma Prieto, director of the Museu Tàpies, Manuel Borja-Villel and Judith Barnés, public programmes coordinator of the Museu Tàpies will revolve around three conceptual areas:

Representation and non-representation, focusing on the inherent dychotomy of the reflection of reality, and on the pair of figuration and abstraction, generating new, more permeable nominal situations.
Time and non-time, concentrating on the continuity and otherwise of techniques, of symbolic languages, breaking with linearity and with the chronological sense of the creative process.
Enigma and specificness, relating creation to magic, incorporating the concept of the demiurge and highlighting the multiple layers of interpretation of a work of art and the active role of the viewer in activating narratives.

Through these three areas, and with the works by Antoni Tàpies that make up the retrospective as a backdrop, participants in the symposium will be encourage adopting a free, personal approach, to allow them to look again at a visual and though code in order to rethink it and rethink ourselves today. As indicated in the symposium programme, the invitation goes out to researchers, academics and curators from Spain and abroad without any apparent connection with the artist, precisely to encourage this disruption.
The three sessions of the international symposium will begin with an initial talk, followed by two replies to encourage criticism and dialogue between the guests. The programme features Hans D. Christ, Nausikaä El-Mecky, Isabel de Naverán, Leda Martins, Carmen Pardo, José A. Sánchez, Rita Segato, María Sierra and Amador Vega.

SESSION 1. Enigma and Concretion | Date: 13 November 2024
5 pm Presentation and welcome by Imma Prieto
5.10 pm Talk “Tàpies’ Crossroad” by Amador Vega
6 pm Break
6.15 pm Approach “Under the Eyelids” by Isabel de Naverán
6.45 pm Approach “Appearance, Disappearance and Violence” by Nausikaä El-Mecky
7.15 pm Discussion between Amador Vega, Isabel de Naverán and Nausikaä El-Mecky, moderated by Manuel Borja-Villel
7.45 pm Open discussion
8.15 pm Closing

SESSION 2. Time and Non-Time | Date: 14 November 2024
5 pm Talk “Six Moments for Another Time” by Manuel Borja-Villel
5.50 pm Break
6.05 pm Approach “Times of an Ear: Fragment by Tàpies” by Carmen Pardo
6.35 pm Approach “On Negativity” by José A. Sánchez
7.05 pm Discussion between Manuel Borja-Villel, Carmen Pardo and José A. Sánchez, moderated by Judith Barnés
7.35 pm Open discussion
20.00 pm Closing

SESSION 3. Representation and Non-Representation | Date: 15 November 2024
5 pm Talk “The Path of Art: from Representation to Deconstruction” by Rita Segato
5.50 pm Break
6.05 pm Approach “The Image of the Romany People: Overexposure as a Form of (non) Representation” by María Sierra
6.35 pm Approach “The Fortune of the Abstraction” by Hans D. Christ
7.05 pm Discussion between Rita Segato, María Sierra and Hans D. Christ, moderated by Imma Prieto
7.35 pm Open discussion
08.05 pm Conclusions and close by Imma Prieto
08.30 pm Closing

Book-Wall. Reading club
2024-11-19 18:30 - 20:00 (Europe/Madrid)
As part of the project Beyond the Skin a reading club will be offered with the collaboration of the bookshops Finestres, La Central and La Impossible. This time, the selection of books will be related to themes touched on by Clottey’s work, such as ecology, climate change and the migrations imposed by the global economic system. The reading club is a place to pool thoughts about necessary readings in the context of social and climate emergency in which we live.
Llibre-mur [Book-Wall] (1990) is a work by Antoni Tàpies that lends its name to the series of reading clubs we have organised in recent years in collaboration with bookshops in the neighbourhood concerning our current exhibitions. Tàpies’ interest in books, both as objects and as sources of knowledge, and the fact that the museum premises formerly housed a publishing company, Montaner y Simón, make dialogues like this about writing, reading and art appropriate.
