Museu Tàpies

Following the Sun. Agnes Essonti Luque
2025-04-12 13:00 - 14:30 (Europe/Madrid) | Museu Tàpies
Unguent
Water, juniper, palm oil, honey, coconut milk, catfish, popcorn… An offering to heal every wound. Actions that heal. That strip off layers of dead skin. Of atrophied limbs. Of poisoned ghosts.
Agnes Essonti Luque will be entering into a ritualistic dialogue based on Ibori, a Yoruba ritual that aims to satisfy your Ori (a consciousness of the hereafter) through offerings, especially food. In front of Tàpies’ Mitjó [Sock], the Cameroonian–Spanish artist will use a series of unguents, making her own body into the medium. With these actions, the artist seeks to share with the audience ways of neutralising the frustrations of the past, offering a possible solution through simple gestures that, with repetition, become sacred. She invites us to recognise that rituals are for everybody and to realise that they can help to connect to ancestral wisdom, fonts of hidden powers, reserves of vitality and arsenals of protection.

Agnes Essonti Luque is a Cameroonian–Spanish artist and curator, whose work is inspired by black and post-colonial feminist thinkers and revolves around topics like ancestral connections, memories of childhood and nostalgia. Her work spans a range of media, including photography, textiles, installations and performances. In recent years she has explored the construction of Afro-diasporic identities and the tireless search for home, focusing on processes of hybridisation and pidginisation. She sees her own work as a way of offering new readings of historical events and reimagining better futures.

Her work has featured in various national and international exhibitions and events, among them Manifesta 15 (2024), Foodscapes, the Spanish Pavilion at the 18th Venice Biennale of Architecture (2023) and 1384 Days Wide at Rencontres de Bamako (2015). Her performances have been presented at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza and at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS). Her work A Journey is part of the MNCARS collection.

Photo credit: Viatge, sol, eternitat. © Quique Curbelo, 2025.

Raw
2025-04-24 19:00 - 19:30 | Museu Tàpies
Raw is a voice improvisation based on cuts and sprains, exposing the space between the body of flesh and bones and the aerial, spiritual body of the voice. It is an investigation in sound and movement based on the gesture of our breath in space, starting from the idea that the voice does not belong to us, that it is a body that travels and lives outside of our bodies for a determined period of time, and is hard to remember.

Laia Estruch (Barcelona, 1981) is the second creator invited to participate in the series The Chairs of Tàpies: Tattooed Memories. She has a degree in Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona (2010), and studied the final degree year at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York). Her artistic practice is developed in the context of performance art and sculpture, through which she researches the language of the body and the voice. She has presented projects at CCEMx. Centro Cultural de España en México (2020), MACBA. Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2022), PUBLICS (Helsinki, 2022), Hauser & Wirth Menorca (2023), the Bienal de Arte Paiz (Guatemala, 2023), MNAC. Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (2023), El Patio by Zona Maco (Baja California, Mexico, 2024), the Triennial Kortrijk (Belgium, 2024) and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid, 2025).

A session of the second edition of the series The Chairs of Tàpies

Wild Tarot: Barcelona Poesia 2025
2025-05-08 17:30 - 20:00
Sold Out Tickets

The Wild Tarot adventure is a card and piano presentation performed live by Oriol Sauleda and Lulu Martorell. It is a musical consultancy and sound bite, inspired by the unique character of tarot hands, in the time and place of the cards being pulled and those having them read.
The session, performed out loud, sounds out and does not preach, presenting symbols as the keys to open up the queen’s gardens. Driven by tarot’s Major Arcana, Oriol guides us through a realm that hosts Lulu’s song and melody. It is the result of tarot’s irrational power, its seductive attraction, the immediate poetics it reveals, for in tarot, as in lyrical poetry and the chaotic order of the universe, everything is connected and resonates. This leads to the initial invocation, the “Spiritual Canticle” of Saint John of the Cross, unleashing the sincere, ritual mechanics of Wild Tarot. This exclusive premiere has been prepared for Festival Barcelona Poesia, in the context of the exhibition Antoni Tàpies: The Imagination of the World.

Oriol Sauleda presents his poetry like a minstrel, with the charm of a griot who needs sonnets to make himself heard. He insists on poetic play, in momentary chance and improvising in order to be on time. Every so often he publishes a book. Sauleda adds fuel to the fire with words from theatre, rock music, tarot and the Immaculate Conception, ready for the cold. He does not do this alone, but rather needs powerful allies like Lulu herself, along with Núria Martínez Vernis, Memi March, Amor Estadella, Montse Colomé and other great women. The improvisation sessions done with Lulu Martorell are called Concepcionals. More recently, in collaboration with Marcel·lí Bayer, they have activated memory and recollection in the show Adamar Johnson, reviving a totally unknown poet who died during the AIDS epidemic.
Lulu Martorell is just as she was in 1984, when she presented the TV music programme ‘Pleitaguensam’, or the mythic, unclassifiable ‘Glasnost’: leather jacket, wavy hair and a punky voice that speaks whatever comes to mind. Younger generations do not know enough about what she contributed through her programmes. Singing, playing music, writing or making movies, surrounded by her friends—that is the air she breathes. Oriol Martorell, Carlos Santos, Agustí Fernández, Pepe Sales, Albert Pla and Africa have all been her guides. Now, holding tight to Oriol Sauleda and the musical project Concepcionals, they swim against the current of the Llobregat River until finally getting to the Konvent art centre, near the headwaters, where everything comes together.

fe sense obres morta és. A film tribute by Albert Serra to Antoni Tàpies
2025-05-08 20:00 - 22:00
Premiere of Albert Serra’s film tribute to Antoni Tàpies.

The Museu Tàpies presents the tribute that the film director, producer and screenwriter Albert Serra (Banyoles, 1975) has dedicated to the artist Antoni Tàpies.
The film “fe sense obres morta és” delves into one of the most emotional and surprising aspects of the artist’s universe, exploring it from Serra’s singular and provocative perspective. The film is the result of the museum’s invitation to the director to make a free, contemporary and deeply personal approach to Tàpies’ work and thought. The film does not aim to illustrate, but to evoke; generate a sensory experience that dialogues with the poetic and material force that defines his artistic career.
On May 8, at 8 p.m., the film will be publicly screened at the Filmoteca de Catalunya, in a session that will feature the participation of Albert Serra and Imma Prieto, director of the Museu Tàpies.
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[Work: Antoni Tàpies. Jo parlo amb la mà (1999). Private Collection © Comissió Tàpies / VEGAP, 2025.]

Following the sun. feyfeyfey
2025-05-17 13:00 - 15:00
This emerging collective, united in a network of queerness, has woven together a sound performance piece, brb do not perceive me unless ur ready 2 speak in r1ddles and chill with beautiful r0cks xxx, that explores communication phenomena, and specifically the transmission and reception of queer frequencies.
Understanding queer communication systems as subversive tools that enable members of our community to be eco-localised and protect each other, the collective uses sound and visual elements to express rhythmic, cryptic and natural cyclic pulsations between the three members. These reverberations bounce off porous bodies, in transmissions devoured by open ears, as vibrational absorptions and other forms of abstract, poetic and non-verbal communication come together to create a dissonant aria in dialogue with the natural world, situating queer existences through communication.

feyfeyfey is an emerging Barcelona-based art collective whose members are Alida Maria Lanzi, Anusha Jean Ramesh and Bram Dul. It uses performance and sound to explore aspects of queerness, and is interested in the elasticity of access, as well as the politics of movement and the act of sounding out together as friends, from varied stances.
Feyfeyfey creates spaces that question how we relate with ourselves, others and the worlds we inhabit. In the past, the term fey in English meant ‘destined to die, condemned’, and was used as a vulgar term for homosexuals. It is likewise a term used to refer to fairies. Here it is repeated three times, asserting itself as a sound ritual.
The practice of Alida Maria Lanzi (Germany, 2004) is focused on the construction of worlds: imaging alternative spaces where queer bodies might exist beyond binary constructs and norms. Using sculpture, installation and performance, they combine organic and inorganic rhythms to create hybrid shapes. Their site-specific works perturb and unsettle, merging liminal space with speculative narratives to imagine new atmospheres and ways of being, opening up new connections and identities. They are currently finishing their thesis at Metàfora Studio Arts.
The work of Anusha Jean Ramesh (Malaysia, 2001) strives to grasp the elemental conditions of connectivity. Their practice tends to be relational, seeking to follow traces of queer displacement, identity and temporalities while basing itself on personal relationships, intuitively channelled through sound, sculpture, installation and video. They are currently completing their thesis at Metàfora Studio Arts, and are preparing a solo exhibition at 200CENT for November 2025.
Bram Dul (Netherlands, 2005) is writing their love letter to sound, where every project creates a new phrase. They translate thoughts on queerness and neuro-divergency into sound, sculpture, installation and performance, shaping their projects through the perspective of childlike admiration and research-based practice. Dul is currently completing a year-long residency at Metàfora Studio Arts, and in September will begin studies at Design Academy Eindhoven.
A session of the second edition of the programme Following The Sun, curated by Gabriel Virgilio Luciani

Aesthetics of Transit: Ancestral Memory and Collective Subconscious
2025-05-21 18:00 - 21:00
The Museu Tàpies presents a seminar with the aim of exploring the language and cosmology of Marta Palau. On the foundation of indigenous cosmovisions and ancestral rituals, topics such as shamanism, healing and sacred symbolism will be addressed.
This event enables us to reflect on how Palau uses practices that channel concepts of magic and history in relation to artistic practice, developing a visual poetics that connects with the collective subconscious and ancestral memory. Her use of natural materials and traditional textile techniques, as well as the creation of symbology rooted in personal experience, help us speak of art as a creative tool for cultural resistance, accentuating the spiritual abundance of native cultures.
As the closing event of the film series ‘The (In)visible Exiles’, this seminar contributes to a rupture with anthropocentric and Eurocentric consciousness, so as to inhabit the world on the basis of other narratives, focusing on collective imaginations. In this regard, the work of Palau should be understood as an act of memory and resistance in the face of dehumanising processes, and as a gesture favouring understanding of the world as a concentric, relational whole.

PROGRAMME
· 6 pm. Presentation of the session by the Museu Tàpies
· 6.10 pm. Lecture ‘Marta Palau Amongst Paths of Exile’, by Mari Paz Balibrea
· 6.50 pm. Lecture ‘Between Two Worlds: Women, Art and Exile’, by Gemma Domènech
· 7.30 pm. Lecture ‘Those Female Visionaries, We Female Visionaries: The Cosmology of Marta Palau’, by Pilar Bonet
· 8.10 pm. Poetic interlude ‘The Word: Exile of Exile’, by Maria Sevilla
· 8.30 pm. Debate with Mari Paz Balibrea, Gemma Domènech, Pilar Bonet and Maria Sevilla, moderated by the Museu Tàpies
· 9 pm. Closing

Mari Paz Balibrea
Balibrea is Professor of Contemporary Spanish Cultural Studies at Birbeck, University of London. Her work explores the political dimension of culture, focusing particularly on 20th-century Spain. In this line of research, she has published widely on the role of left-wing intellectuals, as well as on the legacy of Spanish Republican exiles and the construction of the idea of the citizen in the creative city. She has been an advisor on the art and culture of Republican exiles for the recent remodelling of the permanent collection of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.

Pilar Bonet Julve
A researcher, historian and art critic, Bonet is a professor at the University of Barcelona. She is an expert on the art and spirituality of visionary European women, and is president of the Fundació Josefa Tolrà – Art Visionari, as well as creator and co-director of the research group Visionary Women Art (ACCA Research Prize, 2023).
An exhibition curator in contemporary art, in recent years her shows have been centred on graphic and textile creativity by heterodox artists: Josefa Tolrà i Madge Gill, dones visionàries, Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (MNAC), 2023; La mèdium i el poeta. Una conversa astral entre Josefa Tolrà i Joan Brossa, Fundació Joan Brossa, Barcelona, 2020; ALMA. Mèdiums i visionàries, Museu d’Art Es Baluard de Palma, 2019; Josefa Tolrà i Julia Aguilar. Art des de l’altre costat, Les Bernardes de Salt, Girona, 2017; and Josefa Tolrà. Dibujo fuerza fluídica, Can Palauet, Mataró, 2013.

Gemma Domènech
Domènech is Serra Hunter Plan Adjunct Professor in the Department of History and Art History of the University of Girona (UdG), and since 2022 has been the director of the Institut Català de Recerca en Patrimoni Cultural (ICRPC), where she had been a researcher since 2009. Alongside these activities, from 2019 to 2021 she was general director of Democratic Memory of the Government of Catalonia.
She has a PhD in Art History from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (2000), and has had an extensive career in research, with over one hundred publications and presentations at national and international conferences. Highlights include her line of research on the repression and exile of Spanish Republican architects and the Mexican exile of female Catalan artists. These studies have led to collaborative projects with the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and the Colegio de Jalisco (Guadalajara, Mexico). Domènech is co-author of Segundo diccionario de los catalanes de México (Porrúa, Mexico City, 2022), winner of the 56th Serra d’Or Critic’s Prize in Catalan Research.

Maria Sevilla
Sevilla is a researcher and precarious professor in Catalan language and literature at the University of Barcelona, while also working as a poet and rhapsodist. She has published four books of poems and a plaquette: Dents de polpa (2015), Kalàixnikov (2017), if true: false; else: true (2020), Plastilina (2021) and La nit ovípara (2024). In 2024 she published her first essay, No desitjaràs els béns del proïsme. She has experimented with liminal genres such as sound poetry and video recitals, and since January 2019 has been one of the three programmers at Horiginal. In the performing arts, she has recited her work in many national festivals, as well as in cities such as Quetzaltenango, Istanbul, Vilnius, London, Paris and Calcutta.

Fragments of Earth
2025-05-29 19:00 - 19:30
Matria Libre – Arte sin Fronteras presents a piece of political dance where bodies become matter in movement, leaving ephemeral imprints in space, as if they were scars of a time that has been erased and rewritten. In this piece, dance is not merely gesture, but also an inscription, a draft, a kind of writing made of presence and absence, where each step resonates as a mark of identity and collective memory. The dancers pass through invisible glazes, revealing and concealing fragments of reality, as if they were digging into the material of the forgotten. Between earth and air, between weight and ascent, the dance traces a path towards a type of spirituality that is not found in form but in the empty space it leaves behind.

Matria Libre – Arte sin Fronteras is a pioneering company of political dance. Their piece Sabia Tierra [Wise Earth] was presented at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. The company recently won an award at the Lens Dans Video Dance Festival, for the piece Abolición de la Guerra [Abolition of War]. The company’s artistic proposal is based on the revival of ancestral knowledge and the creation of corporeal language in the pursuit of justice, which is universal and broadens frontiers. The company is comprised of dancers Ada Saliou and Mayaymara Behoteguy Chávez.
Ada Saliou is a distinguished dancer, choreographer and master of African dance. Through his unique corporeal language, he expresses deep emotions and delves into socially relevant topics like immigration and the environment.
Mayaymara Behoteguy Chávez is a dancer and international activist. Steeped in the context of magic realism, and deeply influenced by the struggle for social justice, she has converted her dance into a cry against capitalism, able to awaken consciences and activate change.

A session of the second edition of the series The Chairs of Tàpies

Weaving Generations: Intergenerational Project on Textile Art and the Work of Marta Palau
2025-06-11 17:00 - 19:00 | Museu Tàpies
I propose a dialogue where I will speak in a language of knots, braided cord, entwined forms. My language will be . . . the harsh clamour of the broken cord, knotted, woven, twisted, braided, tied. . .
Cuesta, Rosendo, ‘Marta Palau, notas de una entrevista imaginaria’.
Marta Palau in El arte feminista de Marta Palau, Vindictas Artes Visuales, TV UNAM. Video

Weaving Generations aims to create a space for encounter and knowledge exchange in relation to textile art. The project is conceived for a group comprised of twelve individuals from Espais de Gent Gran de l’Eixample [Eixample Senior Spaces] of Barcelona, as well as six more from Eix Jove de l’Eixample [Eixample Youth Alliance] and six students with connections to the textile workshop at Escola Massana.
The proposal will be for the group to enter into dialogue with the work of Marta Palau through three practical sessions, dedicated to experimentation with weaving and knot-making techniques. Particular attention will be paid to the materials used, prioritizing those connected to the immediate context or the personal environment of each participant.
The project will conclude with a public activity to assess the processes and results of the sessions, culminating with a performance piece by members of the G.A.C. (Grup d’Acció Creativa) from Eix Jove de l’Eixample.

Programme

· Session 1 (30 April): visit to the exhibition Marta Palau: My Paths are Earthly. A small tapestry done with a vertical frame will be made in pairs. Previously, the looms will be prepared with the warp, while the kinds of fibres and materials that can be used for the grid will be explained.

· Session 2 (14 May): collaborative creation of a large tapestry made from materials taken from the immediate territory, along with others brought by the participating individuals. The session is conceived as a way to encourage shared narratives related to materials, their qualities and their origins. This session will feature the special participation of the project Tornen les esquelles [The Sheep Bells Return] and the design firm Cortana.

· Session 3 (28 May): collaborative creation of a circular macramé tapestry, derived from the sculptural volumes and knot-making techniques employed by Marta Palau.

· Public Presentation (11 June): presentation of the results and the technical and learning processes involved in the project. The session will conclude with a performance that dialogues with the work of Marta Palau, conceived and performed by members of the G.A.C. (Grup d’Acció Creativa) from Eix Jove de l’Eixample.

Following the Sun. Adrasha
2025-06-14 19:00 - 20:00
The project mebrat / Հայանական is born from an ongoing investigation into lighthouses understood as an unusual architecture that, paradoxically, resonates with both the idea of guidance and that of border. The experimental artist and sound DJ has dedicated time to studying the different periodicities with which lighthouses emit light, and has translated them into various rhythms and sounds.
Moving away from the nautical connotations of the lighthouse, the sound performance seeks to connect with emotional and geopolitical complexities such as homeland, the need to travel, composite identities, changes in communication and mutating destinies, through a series of field recordings and autobiographical samples: audio recordings of friends and family in Ethiopia and Spain, interwoven with textures of his own voice and maritime motifs.
This sound collage —with a collaboration by Bamba, from the Jokkoo collective— becomes a meditation on the fragility of memory and identity, origin and destination, acceptance and resistance.

Adrasha is an Ethiopian multidisciplinary artist based in Barcelona. She began her career as a dancer in Addis Ababa, influenced by traditional and urban sounds from the Horn of Africa. Focused on exploring underground sounds —in particular, contemporary club music from the African continent and its diaspora—, Adrasha’s work attempts to create a dialogue between hybrid sound expressions, such as Afropunk, Gqom, Future Dancehall and current experimental electronic music.
A session within the framework of the second edition of Following the sun series, curated by Gabriel Virgilio Luciani

Florilegium of Lands and Bodies. Performance by Equipo Jeleton
2025-06-19 18:30 - 21:00
Equipo Jeleton offers us a public oracle reading of the Florilegium tarot, questioning the exhibition Marta Palau: My Paths Are Earthly. Throwing threads into the past and the future to engage with the works and their enigmas.
Equipo Jeleton’s Florilegium tarot brings together elements from their Political History of Flowers in twenty-five arcana that depict parts of the body, plants and flowers, and allegorical figures.
The performance will take place in two sessions.

Equipo Jeleton was established in 1999 by Gelen Alcántara Sánchez (Murcia, 1975) and Jesús Arpal Moya (Barakaldo, 1972). They reinterpret literary, musical and visual repertoires in a critical and twisted way with the aim of transmuting poison into medicine. They have recently presented their work at Hangar, Bulegoa Z/B, Bilbao Museoa, MACBA, Fundació Miró, Centro Párraga, La Taller, Universitat Miguel Hernández and Tabakalera.

Untitled Performances with Esther Ferrer
2025-06-26 19:00 - 19:30
The second edition of the series The Chairs of Tàpies is fortunate to feature Esther Ferrer, a pioneering figure in action art who has made her body an essential tool for resistance, expression and thought. Ferrer sees the body not just as matter, but as a symbolic medium for experiences, memories and conflicts. Her practice works with the persistence of gesture, the construction of time by repetition and the ability of the body to store and transmit, almost like a written skin, the tensions between the I and the world.
On the basis of silence, humour and radicalism, from a coherent, free positioning, she confronts convention, offering a distinctive view of how bodies resist and explain, becoming sensitive archives of identity, absence and presence. Within this framework, Ferrer will therefore be inviting us to celebrate gesture as living memory, as a place from which the body appeals, questions and transforms itself.

Esther Ferrer has been staging actions since the mid-sixties, both individually and as a member of the ZAJ group (which broke up in 1996). In the early 1960s she set up, together with the painter José Antonio Sistiaga, the first Taller de Libre Expresión [Free Expression Workshop], the seed for a whole range of other, parallel activities, among them an experimental school in Elorrio, in Bizkaia province in the Basque Country. From the mid-seventies onwards, she resumed her visual work, with retouched photographs, installations, paintings based on a series of first names and on the number pi, objects and so on.
In the course of her long career as a performance artist, she has taken part in festivals in Spain, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, France, Denmark, Norway, Britain, the Netherlands, Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria, the United States, Canada, Mexico, Cuba, Brazil, Thailand, Japan, Korea and Palestine, among others.
She has exhibited her visual work at: Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid), Galerie J. & J. Donguy (Paris), Galerie Lara Vincy (Paris), Galerie Satellite (Paris), Galería Trayecto (Vitoria), Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Koldo Mitxelena (San Sebastián), Galeria Àngels (Barcelona), Galeria Trinta (Santiago de Compostela), Galería 1 Mira Madrid, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo (Seville), Roskilde Museum of Contemporary Art (Denmark), Círculo de Bellas Artes (Madrid), MOCARoma (Mexico City), Museo de Bellas Artes (Rio de Janeiro), ARTIUM (Vitoria), Es Baluard (Palma), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea (A Coruña), MAC/VAL (Vitry-sur-Seine, France), CEART (Fuenlabrada), Museo Guggenheim Bilbao and Centre nacional de la danse (Lyon), among others.
She has taught numerous courses at universities, museums and schools of fine art in Canada, France, Italy, Mexico and Switzerland, as well as Spain.
In 1999 she was one of the two artists who represented Spain at the Venice Biennale.
She has won accolades including: Trace: John Boehme Performance Art – Lifetime Achievement Award (2006); the Spanish National Visual Arts Prize (2008); the Basque government’s Gure Artea prize (2012); the MAV prize, the Women in Visual Arts prize (2014); the Marie Claire contemporary art prize (2014); the Velázquez prize (2014); the Golden Drum of the City of Donostia/San Sebastián (2022); the Bernard Heidsieck prize from the Centre Georges Pompidou (2022); and the Francisco Prieto prize from the FNMT, the Spanish national mint (2024).

[Inauguration of the rue Marcel Duchamp in Paris, 1995. Photo: A. Szfran.]

Antoni Llena: Smokey Memories
2025-06-27 12:00 - 13:30 | Museu Tàpies
The publishers L’Avenç and Blume are pleased to jointly present the publication Antoni Llena. Memòries de fum [Antoni Llena: Smokey Memories], on the terrace of the Museu Tàpies.
In this book, Antoni Llena seeks to explain artistic consciousness on the basis of defects and fears, in a fresco that unfolds like a mural charged with contradictions. He begins by sketching out his family context, how he met the person who would be his first partner, a person he still lives with, and enduring friendship. It continues by explaining the unique way Llena discovered art, and his choice to live in the world at a distance, searching for modernity through anachronisms. His decision to live in the world from outside the world. His discovery of art, his interests and his ambitions. His own particular way of doing things, and the roots that have made it grow. His struggles to find a place of his own that was radical, without it being detached from tradition. The artistic personalities who have shaped it, along with the works he has created and others that have influenced him. The path he has taken, without having to lay out a set of markers along the way to get there. Eroticism, loves and phobia, and so much more. Understanding art as a political reality set apart from trendy political choices. Then, all told, his efforts to ensure it is all well written.
This presentation features the presence of the author, Antoni Llena, the philosopher Xavier Antich and the publishers Leopoldo Blume and Josep M. Muñoz.

Foto: Antoni Bernad

A Hatch in the Void
2025-07-01
If a work of art fails to harness the magic in things themselves, if it uses objects only to make them mean something, it has wasted one of its greatest possibilities. When we take an object and make it mean something, what we are doing is confirming ourselves. We are confirming our own concepts of who we are and what the world is. But allowing things to be seen as what they are offers a more open and fertile ground. After all, the unknown is pure adventure.
As part of the exhibition Antoni Tàpies: The Imagination of the World, the Museu Tàpies has invited Marc Caellas to perform four activations of the exhibition room to give a new life and a new dimension to the materials presented in it, with the aim of rethinking them.

Activations

25.03.2025 – The Background of Things.
Marc Caellas, born in Barcelona, is an artist who works with writing, theatre, performance and curation in hybrid projects that develop into books, plays, installations or public programmes and festivals.
His two most recently published books are Notas de suicidio (La Uña Rota, 2022) and Dos hombres que caminan (Ediciones Menguantes, 2022), the latter written in collaboration with Esteban Feune de Colombi. His previous works include Carcelona (Melusina, 2011), Caracaos (Melusina, 2015), Drogotá (Planeta, 2017), Neuros Aires (Libros del Zorzal, 2020) and Teatro del bueno (Teatron.Tinta, 2015).
He has participated in numerous national and international literature and performing arts festivals, including: Festival Iberoamericano de Teatro de Bogotá, Festival de Palco e Rúa de Belo Horizonte (Brazil), Bienal do Livro de São Paulo, FILBA (Buenos Aires), Festival Estival (San Martín de los Andes, Argentina), FIT de Cádiz, TNT Festival (Terrassa), IDEM Casa Encendida Festival (Madrid), Escenas do Cambio Festival (Santiago de Compostela), Kosmopolis Festival at CCCB (Barcelona), Festival de las Ideas (Madrid), Cuéntalo Festival (Logroño), Nus Festival (Barcelona), Open Heart Festival (Lanzarote), Meet You (Valladolid) and WIM (Frías, Burgos), among others.
He was resident artist at the Centro de Cultura Contemporánea Condeduque (Madrid), Tokyo Arts and Space, Nau Côclea (Saus, Girona) and Can Timoner (Mallorca).
He has twice been awarded the Ministry of Culture’s grants for literary creation, received Iberescena grants for theatrical co-production and was a finalist for the BBVA Award for the best play with Suicide Notes.
He has taught courses on creative writing, theatre creation and new dramaturgy at the Museo Universitario del Chopo, Centro de Cultura Contemporánea Condeduque, University of Barcelona, Universidad Central de Venezuela, Universidad de los Andes and Universidad del Atlántico.

01.07.2025 – Offering to the Earth
In July the Earth is thirsty. It needs feeding. Offering to the Earth is a ritual of Andean origin based on reciprocity. The gods are thanked for the produce received and presented with an offering to satisfy their hunger and thirst.
Invited by Marc Caellas, conservationist and activist for Amazonia, Magdalena Ruiz, will conduct a ritual of gratitude. This event—the second in the series A Hatch in the Void, conceived by Caellas as part of the exhibition Antoni Tàpies: The Imagination of the World—aims to question and broaden the traditional reading of the exhibition by creating spaces where the works are counterposed with contemporary thought and opened up to a range of interpretations.

Offering to the Earth
2025-07-01 18:00 - 19:00
In July the Earth is thirsty. It needs feeding. Offering to the Earth is a ritual of Andean origin based on reciprocity. The gods are thanked for the produce received and presented with an offering to satisfy their hunger and thirst.
Invited by Marc Caellas, conservationist and activist for Amazonia, Magdalena Ruiz, will conduct a ritual of gratitude. This event—the second in the series A Hatch in the Void, conceived by Caellas as part of the exhibition Antoni Tàpies: The Imagination of the World—aims to question and broaden the traditional reading of the exhibition by creating spaces where the works are counterposed with contemporary thought and opened up to a range of interpretations.

Muérdago
2025-07-03 19:00 - 20:00 | Museu Tàpies
The Museu Tàpies has invited Adelaida to dialogue with the creative universe of Marta Palau, in a concert conceived to show how the singer and artist share ritualistic aspects that connect the body with nature and ancestral memory. Through organic sonorities and all-encompassing atmospheres, Muérdago [Mistletoe] evokes transitional, transformational space, similar to the symbolic territories that Palau creates with primal materials like wood, earth or botanical fibres. The creations of both artists appeal to sensorial and mystical experience, where matter and gesture become channels for a deep-set connection with both the sacred and the earthly.
Adelaida lives and works on the full moon. A mermaid of heaven and hell, she lifts her voice in an incantation. Born and raised in Barcelona, she has a degree in Fine Arts from Central Saint Martins, which enlivens the performative nature of her endeavour. Her classical voice training at the Orfeó Català is patent in her innovative, personal compositional language, with which she explores the limits of the voice and its expressive and ritualistic potential. On stage, she transforms into the phoenix, then from phoenix into songster, from songster to sea nymph, and so on.
This Catalan singer-songwriter and producer has recently released her second album, Muérdago. The recording poses many questions and provides few answers. Infinite, delicate mantras of sound distinguish this ASMR labyrinth, bursting with lamentations and wounded desires. It features everything from choral ambiences to darker, baroque electronics, with her voice always front and centre. The album features the collaboration of Catalan producers MANS O and Pura Cadera, and was mixed by Rashad Becker. The live presentation took place at Sonar 2024, with a hypnotic, moody performance, and since then Adelaida has been touring in Europe and, more recently, in Mexico.
Adelaida made her debut with Cántaro [Jug], an album of endless vocal layers done with LANAV, and released in September 2022. It was featured in Primavera Sound in 2022 and 2023, Eufònic 2022 at the Fundació Joan Miró, the Festival BAM 2023 and She Makes Noise 2023, amongst many other performances.

© Bo Bannink

Llorenç Barber. L’espai alliberat [Liberated Space]
2025-07-08 19:30 - 21:00 | Jardins de Rubió i Lluch, c. Hospital, 56, Barcelona
Extramurs is an artistic project by the Museu Tàpies that conceives the city as a space of intervention and mediation. With a pluralistic, multidisciplinary approach, the project encourages inter-institutional dialogue, along with dialogue with public space and the environment. Featuring the ongoing collaboration of EINA Centre Universitari de Disseny i Art de Barcelona and the Festival Grec, Extramurs contributes to a rethinking of the role of the institution from a more holistic perspective, through interventions and activities that respond to contemporary demands, encouraging new community narratives in urban space. Inspired by concepts of situated knowledge, this spirit advances reflection on how we mediate our surroundings, and how we might inhabit the world in a more conscious, integrating way. At the same time, the gesture of considering the walls of public space as the carriers of residents’ voices, spaces where collective discourses are materialised and where shared experiences find new meanings, connects us directly with the thought of Tàpies.
Held annually, each edition of Extramurs is presented in the public space, coinciding with the Festival Grec. For the 2025 edition, the artist Elena del Rivero has been invited to develop the project Transiting La Quema, curated by Mateo Feijóo. The proposal is grounded in an intense process of collaborative research and production on the topic of the burning of the artist’s first works, performed as a cleansing gesture.
The installations conceived by Del Rivero as part of the Extramurs project, in collaboration with students from EINA Centre Universitari de Disseny i Art de Barcelona, will be shown on the façade and interior of the Museu Tàpies, as well as at Basílica Santa Maria del Pi, Centre d’Art La Capella, the Teatre Grec gardens, Galeria Senda and Loop Barcelona. The exhibition includes photographs, collages, objects and an illuminated sign. The cartography of these intervened spaces invites us to reflect on the resilience of human and social structures, as well as on the dialogue between past and present, accentuating the tensions and continuities that define history in the construction of the contemporary city.
The inaugural event of La Quema takes place at the Rubió i Lluch Gardens with the concert L’espai alliberat, by Llorenç Barber, a musician, composer, musicologist, bell-ringer and pioneer of sound art in Europe. This visual and sound artist, recognised for introducing minimalist music to Spain, has created a portable set of bells used for the development of his own performance technique. Barber’s bell concerts have been held in over two hundred cities in twenty different countries. He has done concerts for the closing ceremonies of three cultural capital years (Lisbon, Copenhagen and Stockholm), and his performances have featured at biennial exhibitions and art fairs in Japan, France, Thailand and Brazil, while inaugurating two separate Heads of State and Government Meetings (in Salamanca and Rome).
The sound of bells brings us to the world of Elena del Rivero, an international artist committed to the exploration of reparation and memory. We invite you to reflect with us on the resilience of human and social structures and on the dialogue between past and present, accentuating the tensions and continuities that define history in the construction of the contemporary city.

With the collaboration of students from Conservatori Municipal de Música de Barcelona, Fundació Conservatori del Liceu, Escola de Música l’Antàrtida de Barcelona, Escola Municipal de les Arts de Santa Perpètua de la Mogoda and the musical band La Valenciana, and the support of ESMUC.

A coproduction of the Festival Grec de Barcelona 2025 and the Museu Tàpies

Extramurs is an initiative of the Museu Tàpies with the collaboration of EINA Centre Universitari de Disseny i Art de Barcelona and festival Grec, with the complicity of Centre d’Art La Capella, Basílica Santa Maria del Pi, Galeria Senda and Loop Barcelona.
Artist: Elena del Rivero
Curator: Mateo Feijóo
The realization of Elena del Rivero – La Quema, at Galicia, promoted by A Casa do Pozo, had the support of: AECID and Fundación Cañada Blanch

Thirteen Over Zero. Ritual-action-performance
2025-07-17 19:00 - 19:30 | Museu Tàpies
Tattoo the sacred numbers of the Maya civilisation (13 and 0) on the upper right side of the chest. Thirteen is the number with the highest energy; zero (0) was used by the Maya long before the Western world used Arabic numerals. Zero is absence, emptiness, nothingness; zero is silence, expanding and stretching the eternity of the Maya civilisation.
In the Maya Cholqi’ij calendar, cycles are made up of 13 weeks and 20 days. It is a sacred calendar with 260 days (13 x 20 = 260). In Maya numerical symbolism, the number 13 is represented by drawing two sticks and three dots. Then a space is left underneath and a conch shell, symbolising zero, is drawn. This creates the number 260, like the 260 days of the Maya calendar, an ancestrally sacred number. Western modernity ignores, secularises, even demonises the number 13; for the Maya, it is sacred. Zero is totality, the beginning and the end; it symbolises the agricultural cycle and is represented by a conch shell.
The ritual-action-performance Thirteen Over Zero involves tattooing the sacred numbers 13 and 0 on Benvenuto Chavajay’s body. It is about dusting off history and activating memory, countless stories, wounds and accumulated legacies. Through this gesture, the Guatemalan artist activates ancestral memory to take a step forward, to heal and embrace all the wounds and legacies. It is about giving history a second chance.
Chavajay offers his skin as a sacrifice and an offering to his ancestors. He wounds his body, opens cracks in it, dropping in tiny black drops and creating lumps and grooves of memory. Scarring, coagulation, blood and charcoal, pain and tattooing.

Benvenuto Chavajay (San Pedro La Laguna, Atitlán Lake, Guatemala) defines himself as a chunchero artist, that is, an observer and intervener of chunches, a term that in Tz’utujil—the artist’s mother tongue—designates discarded objects that have lost their use value. His aim is to identify, ratify and dignify symbolic elements that are part of the history and ancestral knowledge of Maya culture, which he has inherited. In this interview, Chavajay uses his works in the Museo Reina Sofía Collection as a reference to explain how art can be a healing rite in response to the colonial wound. Based on this premise and far removed from the logics of modern Western thinking, in his project El retorno de las almas [The Return of the Souls] the artist embodies the dignification of the indigenous cultures that have been erased from history.
A session of the second edition of the series The Chairs of Tàpies

Opening of the exhibition 'André du Colombier. A Lyrical Point of View'
2025-09-17 19:00 - 20:30 | Museu Tàpies
The Museu Tàpies invites you to the opening of the exhibition ‘André du Colombier. A Lyrical Point of View’, curated by Adam Szymczyk
André Paliard Iscu was born in 1952 in Barcelona. In the early 1970s, he studied literature and philosophy in Paris. He chose to change his name to du Colombier (“of the dovecote”), decided to become an artist and held his first individual exhibition, entitled Modestie, Compétence, et Efficacité (Modesty, Competence and Efficiency) at the Galerie Eric Fabre in Paris in 1977. He died in Paris in 2003.
His earliest surviving work is a vertical silver line: a trace of pencil lead on a sheet of black sandpaper. As if left when sharpening a writer’s tool, it is an anti-drawing against the grain. Other early works are sequences of black-and-white photographs documenting dynamic actions with household utensils, or, by contrast, static and exposed objects, defamiliarised under clinical white light.
Standard-sized sheets of reflective Chromolux paper in various colours became over time the artist’s medium of choice, used as a backdrop for handwritten or Letraset texts: odd words, equivocal phrases and cryptic, coded sentences. Another genre in du Colombier’s practice was his mise-en-scènes. Composed of toys, tourist souvenirs and accessories arranged and performed on café tables or in other casual situations, these were often staged for an invited audience of one and never documented.
The exhibition’s titular phrase ‘lyrical point of view’ is a title of the text accompanying du Colombier’s show at Patricia Dorfmann’s gallery in Paris in 1999. It captures the position of an artist whose elusive oeuvre keeps confronting us, free and equal, with the ever-evolving work of interpretation.

André du Colombier, Untitled [Flour and Hot Water Bottle], n.d. 1977

Visit of the curator to the exhibition "Anna Malagrida. Opacities. Veiling transparency"
2025-09-20 10:00 - 11:00
As part of the programming of Barcelona Gallery Weekend, the Museu Tàpies invites us to a guided visit through the exhibition by Anna Malagrida. Opacitas: Veiling Transparency, accompanied by Patricia Sorroche, head of exhibitions at the museum and the show’s curator. Malagrida is represented by Galeria Senda. During the visit we will learn about the artist’s creative process and discover the conceptual reflections and concerns that have shaped her work.
This exhibition is centred on the notion of transparency as contemporary fiction, proposing a critical perspective on the limits between what is visible and what is hidden, between what is shown and what is veiled. Working alternatively in photography, video and installation art, Malagrida calls on us to reflect on urban space, nature and everyday gestures as scenarios of opacity and resistance.

Visit of the artist to the exhibition "Anna Malagrida. Opacities. Veiling transparency"
2025-09-20 11:00 - 12:00 | Museu Tàpies
As part of the programming of Barcelona Gallery Weekend, the Museu Tàpies invites us to a guided visit through the exhibition by Anna Malagrida. Opacitas: Veiling Transparency, accompanied by the artist. Malagrida is represented by Galeria Senda. During the visit we will learn about the artist’s creative process and discover the conceptual reflections and concerns that have shaped her work.
This exhibition is centred on the notion of transparency as contemporary fiction, proposing a critical perspective on the limits between what is visible and what is hidden, between what is shown and what is veiled. Working alternatively in photography, video and installation art, Malagrida calls on us to reflect on urban space, nature and everyday gestures as scenarios of opacity and resistance.

Anna Malagrida at the exhibition. Photo: Pep Herrero

Following the Sun: Guillem Jiménez / laSADCUM
2025-09-20 18:00 - 20:00 | Museu Tàpies
Oliver 04
This body essay is the staging of an investigation into digi-modernist poetics. It functions as a compilation of various gestural investigations that stem from the world Guillem Jiménez, choreographer and dancer from Barcelona, seeks to build through his company, laSADCUM. A portal to a fantasy world that takes certain bodily behaviours cultivated by capitalism and cyberspace to the extreme.
Through the use of satire, Jiménez proposes a character governed by the logics of pop magic, interns, techno-feudalism and a series of online and offline cultural conventions. Oliver is a kind of alter ego, not only of Jiménez, but of a whole system of bodies subject to the authorities that operate in the interstices of digital algorithms.

Guillem Jiménez / laSADCUM
laSADCUM is a Barcelona-based dance company led by choreographer Guillem Jiménez that, through the lens of dance and choreography, addresses certain poetics of the post-internet era.
laSADCUM have produced four performance pieces so far: two small-scale pieces (The Uncanny Valley, 2019, and The Lesson, 2020) and two large-scale pieces (Aclucalls, 2022, and Navaja, 2024). They have also carried out two exhibitions (Classmates, 2020, and Twink Twink Twink, 2022), workshops and curatorial programmes, as well as various collaborations with artists and institutions. They have received various awards, including the ActAward 2021 for best dance piece (The Lesson), 10 Sentidos 2021 for best dance piece (The Lesson), DansaCat 2024 for best music (Aclucalls), DansaCat 2024 for best choreography (Aclucalls), DansaCat 2024 for best show (Navaja) and Pedra Viva 2024 (Navaja).
laSADCUM’s work has been presented at venues such as the CCCB, Teatros del Canal, Festival Dansa València, La Casa Encendida, the Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, Dansa Metropolitana, Tanečno Festival, Teatro Réplika, Sala Apolo, Pluto and La Mutant, among others.
Guillem Jiménez, on the other hand, works as a performer (with Pedro Torres, Amaranta Velarde, Mar Aguiló and Benjamin Abel, among others) and as assistant choreographer and movement director (with Meritxell de Soto, Marina Fueyo and Gabriela Richardson, among others). This year he will premiere Duplex Studio (2025), a piece co-created alongside choreographer Luqui Lagomarsino, at Antic Teatre as part of the Grec Festival.

A session within the framework of the 2nd edition of the “Following the Sun 2025” cycle, curated by Gabriel Virgilio Luciani.

[Photo: Guillem Jiménez en Duplex Studio, @gergelyofner ]

Following the Sun. Sejal Parekh
2025-09-20 19:00 - 20:00
What Did You Say
What Did you Say is a sociological and sonic inquiry into the distortion of meaning and fact caused by deliberate or non-deliberate miscommunication or misunderstanding. Activated by the Indian-British artist Sejal Parekh, the performance—which functions more as a reckoning—confronts imperial mistranslations, the deliberate deafness of power and the symbolic violence of asking someone to repeat themselves in a language not their own.
The dynamic dialogues with several non-verbal communication phenomena, such as: the Sufi zikr, where breath carries meaning beyond the rational; Vedic chant, whose potency lies in vibrational memory; or Ashanti drum language, where rhythm speaks what cannot be said. Furthermore, the piece proposes a participative action, a take on a children’s game previously referred to in the United Kingdom as Chinese Whispers. The Sinophobic origins of the game’s title dialogues with other cultural bullyings and otherings, such as the Greek barbarian, with an onomatopoeic etymology mocking the sounds of those who did not speak Greek.
Tàpies’ Mitjó [Sock] will be activated as a listening device or witness through sounds of whispers and semiotics, which the audience should attempt to decipher by navigating the space around the sculpture. In the words of the artist: “What happens when whispers are given form, volume and permanence?” The corporeal gesture of collectively leaning in, attempting to understand, actively listening and accepting the sacred discomfort of not understanding, are the core elements of this spatial choreography.

Sejal Parekh is a cross-disciplinary artist. Through site-specific installations, video and sound work, she excavates the intricate topologies of hiraeth, a Welsh diasporic condition that transcends mere nostalgia, articulating instead a radical reimagining of spatial and cultural inhabitation.
Emerging from an intricate understanding of parallel world systems, where cultural dynamics are not merely observed but performatively dismantled, Parekh’s aesthetic strategy constitutes a fundamental archaeology of gesture. She recuperates and transforms objects, motifs and performative actions that were historically deployed to marginalise and stratify, transmuting them into nuanced instruments of critical refusal.
Sejal has an MA in Sculpture from Royal College Art, London. Her work has been shown at MACBA, Somerset House, Hope93, Ovada Gallery, SWAB Art Fair, Art Meets Apolo with Galería Senda and Stone Space Gallery. She has upcoming exhibitions at Barbati Gallery Venice, VHC Gallery India and the Souvenir for Loop Video Art Festival 2025.

A session within the framework of the 2nd edition of the “Following the Sun 2025” cycle, curated by Gabriel Virgilio Luciani.

Open day and guided tour on the occasion of La Mercè 2025
2025-09-24 10:00 - 19:00 | Museu Tàpies
As every year, on the occasion of the La Mercè 2025 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 Imagination of the World
Anna Malagrida. Opacitas. Veiling Transparency
André du Colombier. A Lyrical Point of Vue
and the project Extramurs 2025. Elena del Rivero. Transiting “la Quema”

La Mercè 2025 Image. Artistic Director: Lluís Danés

Joan Morey. Double Event
2025-09-25 18:00 - 18:30
In 2004, as part of an artistic project, Joan Morey tattooed “DECEPTION” on his left forearm. The choice of this word was not arbitrary, since it carries a semantic ambiguity, multiple layers of interpretation and a high potential for misunderstanding. Far from considering it a closed statement, he used it to highlight one of the structural conditions of art: its artificial, fictional and even tricky character, but, at the same time, its capacity to convey complex forms of truth.
Twenty years later, that inscription on the skin can be read as the symbolic beginning of an artistic journey based on ambiguity, plurality and openness. Far from seeking conclusive forms or a univocal language, Joan Morey has developed his work from unstable and, at times, contradictory positions. It is precisely in this oscillation where his power resides: in his ability to accommodate other voices, embody other bodies and channel demands—both his own and collectively—that critically question the present.
The performance DOUBLE EVENT (in progress since 2004) fits into this context, developed not as a finite work, but rather as a machine or an open production mechanism. Its title refers to the double event theatrical technique, which describes the simultaneous coexistence of two perceptive levels on stage: on the one hand, the fictional event, and on the other, the conscious recognition of the stage device. The performance therefore works as a system of transference and displacement, a kind of musical chairs, with witnesses and mirrors that challenge the notion of authorship and unitary presence and where body, time and gaze come into constant friction.

With the special collaboration of: Sílvia Arenas, Sònia Gómez and Ester Guntín.

Joan Morey (Mallorca, 1972) holds a degree in Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona. Since the late 1990s, his artistic practice has included performances, videos and installations, as well as sound and graphic works, exploring the intersection between theatre, cinema, philosophy, sexuality and subjectivity. His work is characterised by a profound reflection on authority, power and the dynamics of domination, exploitation and inequality present throughout the history of humanity.
He has presented performances, works and site-specific interventions in many museums, art centres and galleries. His retrospective solo exhibitions include COLLAPSE. Desiring Machine, Working Machine, curated by Latitudes at the Contemporary Art Centre of Barcelona – Fabra i Coats (Barcelona, 2018); COLAPSO. Máquina de representación [COLLAPSE. Representation Machine], curated by Alex Brahin, at the Claustro de San Agustín – Museo de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia (Bogotá, 2019–2020) and COLLAPSE. Bachelor Machine, curated by Latitudes, at Casal Solleric (Palma de Mallorca, 2020).

Activity within the framework of the second edition of The Tàpies Chairs series, coordinated by Judith Barnés.

Conference I, You, World: Symbol and Universe
2025-09-30 18:00 - 20:30 | Museu Tàpies
Following on from the success of the first edition of the I, You, World: Symbol and Universe study days, held last year as part of the programme marking the centenary of the artist’s birth, the Museu Tàpies now presents the second and final edition of these study days. The aim is to delve into one of the most complex and essential aspects of Antoni Tàpies’ work: his ability to create a symbolic language that transcends material form and enters a realm that is both deeply personal and universally resonant.
By bringing together art theorists, poets and image specialists, those sessions spurred the development of fresh insights and multivoiced readings of Tàpies’ Sèrie Teresa [Teresa’s Series] (1966) and Cartes per a la Teresa [Letters to Teresa] (1974), two key works for understanding the dialogue between art, writing and existence in his career.
Tàpies’ oeuvre can be seen as a living essay that shapes a symbolic universe in which poetic vision and material form are in constant interplay. The focus on his Cartes per a la Teresa portfolio and Sèrie Teresa series brought to light the dialectic between sign and gesture, word and space, and the intersection of private life with the public construction of an artwork. This body of images and texts embodies an idea of art not merely limited to representation, but as an open process of exploration and symbolic creation, where each work becomes both meditation and communication extending beyond the artist himself.
The exhibition Antoni Tàpies: The Imagination of the World, currently on view at the Museu Tàpies, presents a selection of twelve works from Cartes per a la Teresa. Building on research shared in these study days, the show offers visitors a rare opportunity to explore the intersection of love letters, collage and lithography, expressed through a language that fuses cosmic gestures with the intimacy of the everyday. This ensemble reflects Tàpies’ gift for decoding and reconstructing shared life experiences, transforming them into spaces rich in meaning and open to multiple interpretations.
In this spirit, the I, You, World: Symbol and Universe study days reaffirm the Museu Tàpies’ commitment to placing the artist’s work within an interdisciplinary framework that allows it to be understood as a meeting point of personal history, symbolic vision, politics and aesthetic reflection. This broader perspective reveals how Tàpies’ art transcends its historical and cultural origins to become a universal expression in which the relationship between sign and world expands into the creation of a new universe.

PROGRAMME

SESSION 1
Date: 30 September 2025
6 pm. Welcome and introduction by Imma Prieto
6.10 pm. Talk: “An Education by Stone”, by Pedro G. Romero
6.50 pm. Talk: “Visual Letters: Overflowing Language, Matter, Affection and Gesture”, by Andrea Soto Calderón
7.30 pm. Poetry reading: “Uneasy Peace”, by Blanca Llum Vidal
8 pm. Open floor for questions
8.30 pm. Closing remarks

SESSION 2
Date: 1 October 2025
6 pm. Introduction by Judith Barnés
6.10 pm. Talk: “Essays on Love Without History”, by Raül Garrigasait
6.50 pm. Poetry reading: “Rag Days: Sequentiality, Epistolarity, Abstraction, Tàpies and Millares”, by Eloy Fernández Porta
7.30 pm. Debate
8 pm. Closing remarks

[Image: Antoni Tàpies. Original model (1971) for the series of lithographs, lithograph-collages and collages Letters to Teresa, 1974. © Comissió Tàpies / VEGAP, 2025]

Link to the first edition of the conference.

Museu Habitat: II International Meeting Countering Abysses. Poetics of Scale 2025
2025-10-01 - 2025-10-04
With two years of experience, the Museu Habitat program has opened several spaces for reflection, exchange, production and experimentation around the history and current affairs of the museum institution. The Museu Habitat has been built as a protean organism that seeks to bring together different types of communities and generate non-consensual spaces. The task of mobilizing meetings and actions has been carried out by a diverse team of artists, curators, activists and managers, which includes the research and mediation collectives Entrar Afuera, IDRA and Transductores.
The set of initiatives deployed has been complemented by two meetings and an exhibition. The first meeting, “Which museum?”, held in May 2024, started from a question that represents the germ of the program: which museum is possible and desirable today? And in 50 years? The second, “Turning spells”, stated that today it is no longer possible to reflect on the institution exclusively from its own foundations, be they physical or conceptual. Thinking and acting only from what happens within this normative building leads to inevitable sensory and epistemological frustration. For its part, through more than 120 works, the exhibition “Fabular paisatges” reflected on how exhibition devices are constructed, which stories are privileged and which stories are silenced. In line with these two meetings and taking into account the polarization that Fabular paisatges aroused, the Habitat Museum opens a new moment of synthesis and possible reformulations based on the seminar “Contrariar abisms. Poetics of scale”.
In December 2024, an assembly was held at the CAP Gornal, organized by the Entrar Afuera collective and mediated by Ràdio Nikosia, in which social and institutional agents converged. In this assembly, the notion of vertigo was taken as a clinical space, of personal experience and institutional challenge, from which to rethink roles and provoke experiences. In this sense, the general impotence that we all feel in the face of war, inequality, racism, gender violence and the devastation of nature, seems to lead us irremediably into the abyss, but at the same time it calls us, definitively, to resistance. This is posed as an urgent need.
In this context, the Habitat Museum proposes a dynamic of work on multiple scales, ranging from micro to macro and vice versa, and which delves into the interstices, into undefined options, that is, into what is located between gesture and action, between the personal and the social, between discourse and affections.
“Contrariar abismes. Poetics of scale” unfolds from three conceptual axes: exhibiting, narrating, fable-making. Exhibiting and narrating are two of the intrinsic tasks of the museum and both work in constant interaction. The decisions about what and how is exhibited construct a story that can and must be questioned permanently. In turn, fable-making is thought of here as a way of imagining other forms of narrating, but also as an exercise in confrontation with what has been fabled.
In this sense, the meeting seeks to resume and open up questions, contradictions and proposals with the aim of generating escape routes that can give rise to the necessary transformative movements and the construction of other spaces and ways of doing things.

Download the programme.

New vinyl of the series Tàpies’ Chairs 2024
2025-10-08 18:00 - 19:00 | Museu Tàpies
The Museu Tàpies presents the vinyl curated from the first edition of the series Tàpies’ Chairs, a collection of sound actions that took place as part of Tàpies Year. The first edition of this multidisciplinary series, brought together proposals by artists who worked with voice, spoken word and oral memory, using the Tàpies universe as a starting point for performative experimentation.
Actions, developed as part of the centenary of the artist’s birth, were created specifically for the museum and displayed diverse languages, ranging from music to text and gesture to sound, from unique perspectives. The first edition of the Tàpies’ Chairs series included the participation of MUOM, Félix Denuit, Biel Mesquida, Itziar Okáriz, Cabosanroque, Joana Gomila, Bartolomé Ferrando, Blanca Llum Vidal and Los Sara Fontán, Hugo Gómez-Chao Porta, Amidea Clotet (Cicle Difraccions), Eduard Escoffet, Mal Pelo and Niño de Elche.
The publication of this record responds to the desire to give continuity and permanence to a project designed to be experienced live. Capturing part of it on a physical medium such as vinyl, allows you to listen from a more intimate place, while prolonging the evocative power of the sound performances. By doing this, the Museu Tàpies reaffirms the value of listening and the sound archive, as active forms of transmitting artistic memory.
As part of the presentation, there will be an audition of the vinyl and the presence of some of the guest artists. In addition, anyone who wants to purchase the vinyl on this occasion will enjoy a special price of 25 euros (the official price is 30 euros).
Within the framework of Càtedra Antoni Tàpies – UPF d’Art i Pensament Contemporanis.

Rhythm and Substances
2025-10-14 18:00 - 19:00
As part of the exhibition Antoni Tàpies: The Imagination of the World, the Museu Tàpies presents the third activation in the cycle A Hatch in the Void, a series of events conceived by writer Marc Caellas to activate the materials presented in the exhibition, highlighting the epochal spirit in which we find ourselves.
This time, Caellas invites guitarist and improviser Juanma Trujillo to share a poetry and music recital that revisits the spirit of the historic evenings of the Club 49, a group of artists and intellectuals who, in the forties and fifties, renewed the cultural scene in Barcelona with talks, recitals and avant-garde actions.
The duet will recall essential voices of 20th-century poetry, such as Carlos Edmundo de Ory, Joan Perucho, J. V. Foix and Juan Eduardo Cirlot, establishing a living dialogue between word and sound. Reading and music will make up a shared space for discovery and experimentation, true to the transgressive spirit that characterised the Club 49 and to the way Antoni Tàpies saw art: as a constant questioning and as a window on the world.
This event offers the audience an intimate, immersive experience, one that invites listening in a different way, letting oneself be surprised and inhabiting a space where poetry and music not only meet, but enrich one another.

Opening of the exhibition: Germaine Dulac. Je n’ai plus rien
2025-10-16 19:00 - 21:00
Opening of the exhibition Germaine Dulac. Je n’ai plus rien, curated by Imma Prieto, director of the Museu Tàpies, and Imma Merino, film critic and university professor. The event will take place on Thursday, October 16, 2025, at 7:00 p.m., at the Museu Tàpies (Carrer de Aragó, 255, Barcelona).
Germaine Dulac. Je n’ai plus rien is the first monographic exhibition dedicated to Germaine Dulac (Amiens, 1882 – Paris, 1942) in the catalan and spanish context. The exhibition is based on a selection of films, texts, and archival materials—some previously unpublished—that allow us to explore the complexity of the cinematographic work of this prominent filmmaker and theorist of the avant-garde art. It also introduces the viewer to French cinematic impressionism, close to a certain narrative cinema, and facilitates the analysis of the critical tensions toward the heteropatriarchal hierarchies of her time, as well as experimental and documentary cinema from the end of her career.
The exhibition revisits more than thirty years of her career and offers a rigorous reflection on cinema, image, and the vindication of the female figure. It also reminds us of the eternal return of history and constitutes a denunciation of the rise of nationalism and the far right.
The retrospective expands with a film programme at the Filmoteca de Catalunya (from October 1 to November 23) and with the publication of the book Germaine Dulac. ¿Qué es el cine? (Wunderkammer / Museu Tàpies, 2025), which brings together, for the first time in Spanish, the filmmaker’s writings and lectures.
Admission to the general opening is free and requires no prior reservation.

Venus Jasper: Weeping Swamp
2025-10-18 13:00 - 15:00
Multidisciplinary artist, Venus Jasper, weaves together a new live performance stemming from their ongoing research Wetlands Worship; an exploration of swamp sentiments, climate grief, queerness and sacred ecologies. Born from speculative fiction modalities of storytelling and narrative deconstruction, the sonic aspect of the performance includes many samples of water, insects and metal, paired with a noise machine and haunting vocals. This future-facing folklore speaks of a rotting, turbulent sea and a journey to a mythic swamp-island where decay is sacred and rage has its rituals.
The artist based in Amsterdam, NL has received travel support from the Mondriaan Fund and will develop the piece during a week-long residency at Graner; an experimental movement and dance center in Barcelona where they will also spend time to investigating and queering the legacy of the Aloja and the Encantades—water spirits in Catalan folklore.
Venus Jasper (they/he) is a queer visual artist, singer-performer, educator, writer and curator – currently based in Amsterdam. In their counter-cultural and ritualistic work they envision spirited and sensuous post-capitalisms that spell the decolonization of the Anthropocene, rekindle more-than-human kinship, and forward (neuro)-queer and trans-historic perspectives on ecology, folklore, contemporary culture, spirituality and the self.
A session within the framework of the 2nd edition of the “Following the Sun 2025” cycle, curated by Gabriel Virgilio Luciani.
