Montaner y Simón: A Publishing House with History. Guided Tour
2024-05-18 11:00 - 13:30, 2024-09-21 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: Candela Capitán
2024-05-18 12:00 - 14:00 (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.
Third 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.

Third session: Candela Capitán
Control tools in freedom, cowbells and algorithms, “slow living” and “screen hypnotism” are the basis of CELDA SONORA, the new solo by Candela Capitán (Seville, 1996) for the cycle “Following the sun”, curated by Carolina Olivares Esturillo, at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, which will be presented on May 18 to celebrate International Museum Day.

CELDA SONORA is a “dance” process that explores the body and movement to demystify the idea of ​​finding a deeper connection with oneself, others and the environment through the New Age phenomenon. This piece fuses two instruments of free control as disparate as the cowbell and the algorithm, and implements what Captain calls “Slow Living movement practice” in dance. The constrained body and a rudimentary soundtrack are the response to technological saturation, the accelerated pace and search for instant gratification that characterize much of contemporary generations.

Candela Capitán is an action artist and choreographer. Her personal work explores the activation and deactivation of social links, putting the body in relation to other bodies, objects and images collective. New communication technologies, relationships cross-border interactions between artistic disciplines or the intergenerational impact and its consequences are some of the subjects that his projects go through.These serve to create dream spaces and parallel realities in the form of choreographies, installations or performances that invite audience to participate directly in their tensions, joys and delusions. Mostly uses the language of performance to study the limits of dance, thanks to an exhaustive knowledge of the body in movement and its presence on stage. Her works are developed in different media (live actions,facilities or the audiovisual field) and vehicles (through platforms virtual or live), with the aim of finding different channels of interconnection with the public or questioning artistic disciplines and their possibilities.

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.

Barcelona Poetry Festival. With Miquel Desclot and Horacio Curti
2024-05-18 21:00 - 22:00 UTC | Museu Tàpies
Within the framework of the Night of the Museums and within the programming of the Barcelona Poetry festival, the poet Miquel Desclot will recite a selection of the poems that are included in the poetic anthology On a pillow of grass which includes an extensive selection of classical Japanese lyrics, from the 4th century to the present, with haikus and tanks chosen and covered by Desclot.
The poetic recital will consist of three parts and between each part there will be a musical interlude performed by the shakuhashi flutist, Horacio Curti.

PARTICIPANTS
Miquel Desclot
He published the first book of poetry, with the Lullian title of Ira it’s sad passion, as winner of the Amadeu Oller prize for unpublished works, in the spring of 1971. During the half century that has passed since then, he has continued publishing his own verses, such as Songs of the moon in the hat (1978), Aucas and scarecrows (1987), As if always (1994), Fantasies, variations and escape (2006), and poetic versions, such as Lambeth prophetic books, de William Blake (1987-89), I have herbs everywhere. From Japanese lyric (1995), Song book by Francesco Petrarca (2016), I have punished life by living it, de Vincenzo Cardarelli (2020) or The beautiful lady without mercy. Poetic interpretations of English (2021), as well as compilations by Jacques Prévert, William Wordsworth, Umberto Saba, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Robert Frost and Wilhelm Müller. In 2020 he won the Carles Riba poetry prize with the book Wake me up when I’m not sleeping.
In the field of theater, he has translated several works by William Shakespeare for different companies, collected in the volume Choice of works (2017), and seven comedies by Molière, collected in Seven comedies and one ballet (2022), and works by Carlo Goldoni and Guillaume Apollinaire.
He has also published poetry for children, collected under the title The word tamer (2012), and books about music, The golden age of music (2003 and 2022).

Horacio Curti
Doctor in Ethnomusicology, he is a professor at the Escuela Superior de Música de Cataluña (ESMUC) and a collaborating researcher of INET at the Universidad de Aveiro from where he researches sound aesthetics of Japanese music and artistic research.
He learned about the shakuhachi flute in the Himalayan region and traveled to Japan to study it under the guidance of Kaoru Kakizakai within the Kokusai Shakuhachi Kenshukan. He has played and taught in Asia, several countries in Europe and North and South America, developing an artistic activity that includes work within traditional Japanese classical music, as well as free improvisation and contemporary Western classical music.
He has performed as a soloist with orchestras such as the National Orchestra of Spain and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra of Liège (Belgium), and regularly collaborates with dance, poetry and theater. Beyond ephemeral creations, he has published two solo albums (It is and Home is now), the book-CD Zen Stories: Little stories to wake up (together with Marta Millà) and edited the book Eolssigu! The Sounds of Korea.

Conferences on art and spirituality in the artwork of Picasso, Tàpies and Miró
2024-05-22 17:00 - 21:00 (Europe/Madrid) | Museu Tàpies
Online Tickets

From 21 to 24 May 2024
Pompeu Fabra University, Antoni Tàpies Foundation, Joan Miró Foundation and Picasso Museum

In 2023, what has been called the triple commemoration “Picasso 2023 / Tàpies 2024 / Miró 2025” begins in Barcelona and Catalonia. In 2023, we celebrate the 50th. anniversary of Picasso’s death and the 60th. of the opening of the Museum that bears his name. The year 2024 is the centenary of the birth of Tàpies, and 2025, the 50th. anniversary of the inauguration of the Joan Miró Foundation.
As an important event within the programming of the Tàpies Year and the triple commemoration, with the support of the Department of Culture of the Generalitat of Catalonia and with the collaboration of the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, the Museu Picasso and the Fundació Joan Miró, the Conferences on art and spirituality in the artwork of Picasso, Tàpies and Miró encourage intellectual and artistic debate between outstanding scholars, artists and thinkers, with the epicenter in the Antoni Tàpies Meditation Room of the UPF.
The second day of conferences, on Wednesday 22 May, will concentrate the events at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, with the participation of the art scholar Martine Heredia, the poet and essayist Alfonso Alegre and the artist Susy Gómez. There will also be a conversation between the artist Antoni Llena and the conference director, Manuel Guerrero, and the special issue of the magazine Engramma dedicated to Antoni Tàpies will be presented, with Imma Prieto, director of the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Monica Centanni, director of Engramma, and Victoria Cirlot and Ada Naval, editors of this issue of the magazine.

Directors of the conference: Victoria Cirlot, professor in the Department of Humanities at Pompeu Fabra University, and Manuel Guerrero, critic and essayist.

Programme

Antoni Tàpies. Mocador i vernís, 1993. © Private Collection, Barcelona / Vegap © Photography: Davide Camesasca, 2024.

Today is Tàpies. Ricard Bru - Nana Shimomura
2024-05-28 18:00 - 19:00 UTC | Museu Tàpies
Tickets

Organised by the Fundació Antoni 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 6. RETURN TRIP: EAST AND WEST
Tàpies always saw in Eastern art a modernity akin to the essence of the avant-garde: a desire for change and rupture and an appreciation of process and imperfection were some of the aspects of Eastern culture that the artist was interested in following. The spirit of Eastern peoples coincided with Tàpies idea of art as something to stoke the viewer’s imagination, free the mind and fight alienation. Ricard Bru and Nana Shimomura will take Tàpies’ ideas as their starting point for reflecting on the validity of the East in the Western world today: from the fetishising gaze to the fans of Korean Pop, as well as the fascination with Japonisme in Catalan history.

PARTICIPANTS
Ricard Bru is a specialist in Japanese history and culture. He holds a PhD in Art History from the Universitat de Barcelona, and specialises in the links between Japanese art and Japonisme in Catalonia, Spain and Europe. He expanded his field of work with long research periods in Japan, especially at the International Research Centre for Japanese Studies, Kyoto. He has curated various exhibitions at the Museo del Prado, Museu Picasso, Monastery of Pedralbes and Caixaforum. He also curated the permanent exhibition of the Museum of World Cultures, Barcelona.
Nana Shimomura is a multidisciplinary artist who deconstructs calligraphy by intertwining her work with contemporary media and associating it with art, music, dance, poetry and architecture. Her calligraphic expression challenges traditional perceptions of art through the primordial, creative impulse of mark-making, or kaku, which in Japanese means ‘writing’, ‘drawing’ and ‘scratching’. Her artistic practice is based on the concept of constellations, which she sees as celestial bodies that bring us close to our ancient ancestors, who also valued them. She is currently resident at Hangar.

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

Intensive workshop for students with Ghanaian artist Serge Clottey
2024-05-31 | Eina
einaidea invites students to join an intensive 3-week workshop with Ghanaian artist Serge Clottey in collaboration with the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona. The aim of the project is the collaborative construction of a large mural piece, a modular object made of recycled plastic whose installation will also be accompanied by a performative action in the public space. Selected students will be part of a team working at Eina Bosc in collaboration with Clottey’s team and members of the Afro-descendant cooperative Periferia Cimarronas.
The project emerges from Serge Clottey’s practice around what the artist has named “Afrogallonism”. The abundance of yellow plastic gallons in the African continent visibilizes its geopolitical history as well as its neocolonial present. The reuse of scraps of this material—cut, perforated, and woven by hand—as well as its iteration and repurposing serves in Clottey’s work as a model of redistribution, as well as a vehicle for reflection on the migratory and economic reality on the African continent.
Following the construction and installation of the work Beyond the Skin on the front of Fundació Antoni Tàpies, a performative action will take place on Tuesday 2 July, conceived by Clottey together with all participants.
The workshop/ambush, co-organized by einaidea and Fundació Antoni Tàpies, will take place from Monday to Friday between 13-28 June, from 3-9 pm at Eina Bosc. Each student will receive a remuneration of 250€ for their participation in the workshop.
If interested, please send a short motivation note to caterina.miralles@ftapies.com before 31 May!

The foldable museum. Activities for families 2024
2024-06-02 11:00 - 12:30 UTC | Museu Tàpies
Tickets

The Fundació Antoni Tàpies invites you to the presentation and activation of a fold-out model that will allow us to explore the architecture of the museum. Through a series of games and reflections, we will discover the peculiarities of a building that was created for a publishing house and years later became a contemporary art museum.
Fold-out model and activity by El globus vermell. Each family will receive a free model.

El globus vermell is a cultural association founded in 2009 with the aim of forming critical and discerning citizens, involved in their urban context and taking an active role in the transformation of their cities into healthier, more sustainable environments.
As a collective they operate on three levels: cultural (guided visits, itineraries, workshops, publications, exhibitions, etc.); social (public participation, events, etc.); and planning (design, new construction and rehabilitation under the parameters of bio-architecture). They are part of the Educational Project of the City of Barcelona and the Pedagogical Innovation Council (CIP), under the Municipal Institute of Education. Its members are signatories of the Civic Commitment to Sustainability. In 2012, they were awarded the COAC Medal in recognition of their work, and in 2017, the CIP’s Quality Seal. The founders of the collective are architects who, besides collaborating with El globus vermell, combine their work as planners with research, university lecturing, cultural administration and information on architecture and the city.

Trauma-Sensitive Yoga
2024-06-11 18:00 - 19:00 (Europe/Madrid) | Museu Tàpies
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Our bodies store and gather our lived experiences. Everything that we have learnt since we were young—how to interpret the world, how relationships work, our self-esteem, how to react in challenging moments—is saved as if on a hard disk, regulating our way of understanding the world and functioning in it. It is through the body, furthermore, that we are able to incorporate new ways of perceiving and acting in the world. Through the body we can recognise how we are, identify our needs, respond to them and adopt new strategies for interacting with ourselves and with others. Our jobs, families, social contexts and the activities we carry out are where we put into practice what we have learnt. How we treat others, how we deal with demanding situations, how we are or are not able to connect with others in both pleasant and hard circumstances—all these questions are all dictated by this integrated learning process.
Trauma-sensitive yoga offers a space for recognising and educating our internal systems as they perceive and function in the world. In this workshop led by María Macaya, organised on the occasion of the exhibition Chiharu Shiota: Everyone, a Universe, a practical session is offered including a chair and mat (you can bring your own, or use one of those provided). This is followed by a debate on various aspects of the methodology and how they can be applied, not only in a yoga session, but also in an array of life contexts, creating safety and connection in relation to work, family, social life and personal space as well.

María Macaya has a BA in Art History and International Relations from Tufts University, a Creative Writing certificate from Stanford University, and an MA in Art Criticism from Columbia University. She founded Rādika in 2016, with the aim of giving voice to mental and emotional health issues, providing knowledge and tools to support wellness. Through the Rādika platform, she offers courses and training sessions, as well as doing professional interviews aimed at reducing emotional and mental distress.
Macaya is specialised in trauma and trauma-sensitive yoga. She is certified by Gabor Maté’s professional programme in Compassionate Inquiry, and has 300 certification hours from the Center for Trauma and Embodiment in Brookline, Massachusetts, as well as training in the TCTSY method and in the advanced programme at the Center for Yoga and Trauma Recovery in San Francisco. She is also certified in addictions and recovery by Stanford University and has studied neuroscience at King’s College London. She is an advanced professor of Jivamukti Yoga, with an 800-hour certification, training other teachers in the school.
Macaya is currently training in contemplative care of dying.

We recommend attending with comfortable clothing for the exercise (it is not necessary to wear sport clothing, as long as you can move easily and comfortably). No previous experience doing yoga is required to sign up for the session. The session will be held in Spanish language (castellano).

The Chairs of Tàpies: Bartolomé Ferrando
2024-06-14 19:00 - 19:30 UTC | Museu Tàpies
Tickets

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 action for this seventh chair of Tàpies is Brief Phonetic Actions, a proposal by Bartolomé Ferrando. The project brings together short pieces based on the decomposition and re-composition of the voice and words, with some dedicated to Antoni Tàpies. A few of the pieces are grounded in phonetic poetry, situated part-way between speech and music, derived from dadaism and related to Concrete Poetry and Lettrism. In most of these actions, Ferrando addresses the improvised emission of language, in the search for the traits of oral primitivism.

Bartolomé Ferrando is Professor of Intermedia Art and Performance at the Polytechnic University of Valencia. As a performer, he has participated in international festivals and encounters held in Europe, the Americas and Asia. He has coordinated various international festivals at IVAM (Valencia) and MNCARS (Madrid). Ferrando has exhibited his visual poetry in various cities in Spain, Italy and France, and is a member of the groups SIC and dosentredos. Furthermore, he has published the journal Texto poético and the books Hacia una poesía del hacer, La mirada móvil, El arte intermedia, El arte de la performance, elementos de creación, and De la poesía visual al arte de acción, amongst others. He has also produced various recordings on cassette tape, vinyl and CD, as well as videos and DVDs of performance work.

[Photography: Bartolomé Ferrando. Decadence Festival. València. 2015-1. Foto Imke Zeinstra. Homenatge. Poema sonor.]

Following the Sun: Belén Barenys
2024-06-15 19:00 - 21:00 (Europe/Madrid) | Museu Tàpies
Tickets

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.
Fourth 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.

Fourth session: Belén Barenys
Once upon a time there was a nerdy teenager who wrote, drew, danced and composed songs. Now she is older and teaches the things she does, but at that time there was only art for art’s sake, poetry for poetry’s sake, without any pretensions. Artistic creation was an intimate act with herself, a continuity of the game of childhood. This performance is the opportunity for that teenage Belén to present her songs, texts and reflections from that time. They’re immature things, cringe-worthy things, but they’re perhaps the most honest and genuine things she’s ever created. It is a tribute to the artistic gesture that is made after the mathematics homework of 2nd year of ESO. Everything that has been buried in notebooks for years will come to light in a performance that closes a circle and celebrates the first times that a teenager dared to be something similar to an artist. Feismo mágico is an autobiographic experimental sound by Belén Barenys curated by Carolina Olivares Esturillo.

Belén Barenys (Barcelona, 1999) expresses himself through writing, interpretation, dance, cinema, art and songs. While she has a career as an actress and backup singer for the singer Rigoberta Bandini, MEMÉ is her musical project in loner which aims to be radically self-conscious, original and unpredictable. With irony as her flag, this artist wants to delve into topics such as the internet, sex or the transition from childhood to adulthood from a personal and honest perspective

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.

Today is Tàpies: Eugènia Balcells - Pilar Bonet
2024-06-25 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 Fundació Antoni 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 Fundació Antoni 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 7: Towards an emancipating spirituality
In his writing, Antoni Tàpies often talked about spirituality. In the face of the idea that modernity might end up freeing us from faith and religious beliefs, Tàpies argued that spiritual progress had to go hand in hand with the scientific, technological and political advances of the day. Tàpies believed that artists had an important role to play in this progress. Taking up an idea of Paul Klee whereby the artist is “an intermediary, a transmitter or nature”, Tàpies argued that the job of artists was to pass on a spirituality suited to modern times. In this conversation, Eugènia Balcells and Pilar Bonet will deal with the pairing of art and spirituality, a relationship that has existed since the beginning of time, leaving examples that show how creativity has been a way of passing on knowledge of the beyond, of the intangible.

PARTICIPANTS
Eugènia Balcells is a pioneering Catalan audiovisual artist. She began her career in the 1970s between New York and Barcelona in the context of conceptual art, and light has become the central theme of her work. Her videos, films, light installations, performances and murals have been exhibited at festivals and museums worldwide.

Pilar Bonet is a university lecturer, art critic and curator. She explores feminism and emancipatory spiritualities, in particular with regard to the contributions of visionary European writers born before 1950, leading her to create a new critical space focusing on graphic, textile and literary creativity by early women in the history of art from a feminist point of view, among them Josefa Tolrà (1880–1959) and the Aragonese Julia Aguilar (1899–1979). She is president of the Associació Josefa Tolrà and director of the Visionary Women Art research group.

Today is Tàpies programme

Podcasts Today is Tàpies, by Catalunya Ràdio.

Serge Attukwei Clottey. Beyond the Skin. Openning Programme
2024-07-02 18:30 - 21:00 (Europe/Madrid)
Inauguration of the project Beyond the Skin, by Serge Attukwei Clottey, curated by Imma Prieto, director of the Museum, within the framework of Tàpies Centenary Year.
On Tuesday, 2 July 2024, at 7 p.m., Step of Silence, Dance, Memories Resonate, a performative itinerary that will cross the centre of Barcelona from the Museum, where the artistic installation will be presented, made in collaboration with einaidea, Fundació Eina’s research and cultural programming platform and members of the Afro-descendant cooperative Periferia Cimarronas, to the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya (TNC). Clottey will make a stop at the former headquarters of the Compañía General de Tabacos de Filipinas at La Rambla.
The ninety-minute itinerary is conceived as a collaborative community action with music and dance, and is an invitation to reflect on the environment, migration and the economy. Open to everyone, the proceedings will end in the TNC gardens with a concert by the Senegalese musician Momi Maiga, as part of Grec Festival programme, and a gastronomic tasting of African products, thanks to the collaboration of local Barcelona cooperatives of women of Afro-descent. The capacity in the TNC gardens is limited.
On Wednesday, 3 July 2024, at 7 p.m., Els homes de carbó, performance by the artist at Sala Periferia Cimarronas, within the framework of Grec Festival de Barcelona.

The Coal Men
2024-07-03 | Cooperativa Periferia Cimarronas, C/ de Cerdanyola, 26, Barcelona
The consequences of a migratory process or displacement for people’s life is the central theme of the performance staged by Serge Attukwei Clottey as part of the Grec festival programme. The Ghanaian artist asks himself how we can reconstruct family experiences when we do not live in our home because we have had to leave, how each individual deals with prejudice, cultural anxiety and the feeling of belonging when they live in a foreign country. What physical and mental barriers a person must overcome in order to get used to living amidst unfamiliar elements and what power relations arise from this situation are some of the question Clottey asks himself as he places his own body in a state of anxiety, the usual state of a subject affected by an identity crisis who seeks elements to allow him to regain the feeling of home, and is forced to struggle against anti-migrant prejudice.

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.

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
