Museu Tàpies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Link to the full programme.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PROGRAMME

Session 1 | October 1, 2024

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

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

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

Session 3 | October 3, 2024

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

Session 4 | October 4, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Link to the full programme.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A fold, a wrinkle, a line, a body
2024-11-23 10:00 - 14:00 (Europe/Madrid) | Museu Tàpies
A workshop so draw with the body, by making folds, wrinkling, tearing or walking, and explore matter for building and the infinite notebook. Training course aimed at social work and education professionals registered in the Apropa Cultura programme.
By Teresa Rubio

Tàpies, political commitment
2024-11-23 11:00 - 13:30 (Europe/Madrid)
Combined visit to the Museu Tàpies and the Museu d’Història de Catalunya
On the occasion of the Tàpies Year, the Museu Tàpies and the Museu d’Història de Catalunya are organising a joint guided tour of the exhibitions Antoni Tàpies: The Practice of Art (Museu Tàpies) and Tàpies: Art and Activism (Museu d’Història de Catalunya) to explain the artist’s most social and committed side.

Image: MHC (Pep Herrero)

Today is Tàpies: Gemma Carbó - Jordi Ferreiro
2024-11-26 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 12: The Coordinates of Artistic Practice and Mediation
Tàpies associated visual culture with a critical spirit. This is why he always argued for an aesthetic education inculcated from early childhood and reaching as much of the population as possible. According to the artist, making the public aesthetically aware was a guarantee of progress, especially if it consisted of a “proper” aesthetic education. This means one that covered everything: “Defending natural landscapes, fighting pollution, against dreadful town planning for ‘profit’, against the din of advertising…” In this conversation, Gemma Carbó and Jordi Ferreiro will be talking about visual culture, democracy, pedagogy and the responsibility of artists and cultural institutions to act as mediators in the media-saturated context in which we live.

PARTICIPANTS
Gemma Carbó is director of the Museum of Rural Life, Catalonia. She is a historian, arts administrator and doctor of education, specialising in the field of cultural and educational policy. She has always taken an interest in connections between the world of culture, education and sustainable development, and argues for culture as an axis for public policy to achieve social change. She is president of the Fundació Interarts, which works in international cultural cooperation, and of the Associació ConArte Internacional for arts in education. She also lectures in teacher training and arts administration at the University of Girona and the UOC, the Catalan open university.

Jordi Ferreiro, artist and educator, sees no distinction between the disciplines in which he works. He combines teaching with artistic practice and arts administration on projects aiming to transform the relationship between artists, the public and museums through participatory structures, entertainment and surprise. Examples of this include choreographed tours, passive performances, interactive audioguides and social sculptures. He also explores out of the ordinary pedagogical situations, affect and meaningful learning and experimental systems of assessment. He is currently the coordinator of education and mediation at Manifesta 15.

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

Conference: I, you, world: Symbol and universe
2024-11-27 - 2024-11-28 | Museu Tàpies
This retrospective exhibition spotlights the work of Antoni Tàpies, but also his life, as well as the people around him. Teresa Barba Fàbregas, who he married in 1954, was his travelling companion and the person who experienced at first hand the construction of a language of his own and the forging of one of the most important figures of the second artistic avant-garde, both nationally and internationally.
In this respect, for the first time the Museu Tàpies is organising conference on the series of 56 drawings entitled Sèrie Teresa (1966) and the portfolio of 66 lithographs, lithocollages and collages entitled Cartes per a la Teresa [Letters for Teresa] (1974). The first is a long love letter with explicit allusions to domesticity and shared sexuality, and a compendium of the signs Tàpies generally used. The second refers to the love letters he exchanged with Teresa Barba during his stay in Paris in from 1950 to 1951. It is therefore a set of material that discusses poetry, art and writing form a holistic point of view that transcends language itself. The series reveals a world that is only decipherable by the couple, but at the same time allows free interpretation by the spectator, ranging from everyday experience to the universal. In this respect, the conference meet a need to give a new dimension to the series, establishing new connections and meanings from the metaphor of words and fleshing out the cosmic dimension of gesture.
The conference I, You, World: Symbol and Universe will feature theorists from the fields of art and poetry and pots such as Maria Josep Balsach, Anna Gual, Gabriel Ventura, José Manuel Cuesta Abad, Valentín Roma and Rasha Omran.

PROGRAMME

SESSION 1 | 27 November 2024
6 pm. Presentation of the seminar by Imma Prieto
6.10 pm. Talk “Tàpies and the Sèrie Teresa: The Fragile Hotbed of Bodies, Silences and Rips in a Secret Image” by Maria Josep Balsach
6.50 pm. Talk “The Intimacy of the T: The Poetic Conceptions in the Sèrie Teresa (1966) and Cartes per a la Teresa (1974)” by Anna Gual
7.30 pm. Poetic reading of “† for Time” by Gabriel Ventura
8 pm. Time for questions
8.30 pm. Close

SESSION 2 | 28 November 2024
6 pm. Presentation of the programme by Imma Prieto
6.10 pm. Talk “Tàpies’ Papers” by José Manuel Cuesta Abad
6.50 pm. Talk “Love as an Artistic Epiphany” by Valentín Roma
7.30 pm. Poetic reading of “I Look in the Depths of the Earth for the Language to Love You” by Rasha Omran. With translation into Catalan by actress Susanna Barranco.
8 pm. Time for questions
8.30 pm. Close

The book «Aquella que va habitar la casa abans que jo», by Rasha Omran, published by Èter Edicions, will be presented at the Fundació Joan Brossa on December 4. Coinciding with the celebration of the seminar, it will be on sale for the first time at the Museu Tàpies bookshop.

Image of Teresa Series, by Antoni Tàpies, exhibited at The Practice of Art at Museu Tàpies. Photo: Pep Herrero

Link to the second edition of the seminar.

Playlist of conference videos from the 2024 seminar.

Plant intelligence. A derive
2024-11-30 10:30 - 13:00 (Europe/Madrid)
rhizome {notebook} plant intelligence. A derive
As part of the Espais C programme and the research-action project rhizome {notebook} plant intelligence, by the artist Anita García, the creator proposes a derive in the area of the Museu Tàpies. A derive is a walk, normally in urban space, that has no pre-established destination. Anita García uses this practice as an instrument to research how we perceive plant species and relate to them. With the observations gathered from this derive and other research processes, the artist creates tools for promotion and learning to be integrated into projects dedicated to social design and artistic-community mediation, as related to formal and informal educational programmes that encourage ecological awareness and multi-species coexistence.
This activity is conceived for publics of all ages interested in art and education.

Anita García has a degree in Design, and has worked professionally in eco-design, art, mediation and social design. She has experience in arts management, teaching, educational consulting and sustainability, and has done projects in artistic research and mediation, participation and citizen co-creation.
As an artist, she researches and centres her work on the dialogue between art, science and design. She is inspired in nature, and her explorations seek to understand herself as an emotional-sensorial being in harmony with other living beings. Through her work, she undertakes reflection to establish the critical/creative/conceptual foundations making it possible to collaborate in actions intended to encourage social, environmental and economic equilibrium.
As a social designer and artistic-community mediator, Anita García conceives educational workshops, actions, kits, devices and cases. She facilitates and coordinates projects meant for entities in education, culture, business, the public administration and collectives. Further to this, she addresses a diverse set of issues such as gender perspectives, human rights, the environment, architecture, landscape, public space and co-existence.

Walls, Surfaces or Tàpies
2024-12-01 11:00 - 12:30 (Europe/Madrid) | Museu Tàpies
During his career, Antoni Tàpies explored the new possibilities offered by painting and experimented with extra-pictorial materials such as powdered marble to achieve different textures in his work. As he was doing this, as he himself said, the painting surprised him by turning into a wall surface.
Have you ever noticed the walls around you at home? What do they tell us? How do they do it? During the activity we want to listen to the surfaces of the walls [the Catalan name of the activity, Parets, murs i tàpies is a play on words in Catalan: all of them mean different types of wall, and of course one is also the artist’s name]. All together, we’ll find out about the creative process behind Antoni Tàpies’ wall creations, about his communicative ability and his fascination for walls. At the same time, while walking around, we will look at the marks on the walls around the museum to see what stories they have to tell.
Family activity

Today is Tàpies. Jordi Colomer - Brigitte Vasallo
2024-12-10 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 13: In Common: The System as a Wall
We idealise artists as unquestionable geniuses and enclose their work within four walls. On the other hand, the internet and new technology promise immediate access to anything we want to know. But who actually has access to real art? And what exactly is this art that we consider real? “For me, any living gesture has far more value, even if it is just scrawling something on a wall, when this gesture is justified by a human fact, than all the paintings in galleries that lack any connection with our lives,” wrote Antoni Tàpies. This reflection by the artist leads us to question institutions in today’s world, in a conversation in which Jordi Colomer and Brigitte Vasallo wonder whether they should all just be abolished or whether they can survive, even as part of a system that must be contested.

PARTICIPANTS
Jordi Colomer is an artist with a strong performative sense who puts to the test the conventions of architecture and urban space to subvert them, in an exercise that sets out to encourage people to think about cultural tradition, the status of art and the role in the inhabitant in today’s cities. Colomer works in the field of sculpture, installations, photography and video art, and his creations deal with topics like nomadism, the periphery, the popular imagination, community and utopia. Since 2018, together with producer Carolina Olivares, he has been involved with La Infinita, a creative laboratory and meeting place between visual and performing arts in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat.

Brigitte Vasallo is a writer and activist focused on processes of otherness, affective policy and cognitive capitalism. She is the author of the novel PornoBurka and the essay Pensamiento monógamo, terror poliamoroso (La Oveja Roja, 2018), an exploration of the centrality of monogamy in our amorous constructions and of how this system has prevailed. She lectures on the master’s degree in Gender and Communication at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, on the postgraduate course in the Culture of Peace at the same university and the LAP at Es Baluard museum of contemporary art in Palma, and has been an international consultant on the project INTIMATE – Citizenship, Care and Choice: The Micropolitics of Intimacy in Southern Europe at the Centro de Estudos Sociais (CES) of the University of Coimbra.

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

Antoni Tàpies’ Suitcase
2024-12-11 19:00 - 20:30 UTC
Antoni Tàpies had two studios: one in Barcelona, on Carrer Saragossa, and the other in Campins, in the Montseny. The house-studio in Barcelona was designed by architect J. A. Coderch following the artist’s requirements in terms of materials and the sober and calm environment he needed. The Campins farmhouse was acquired by the family in 1960 and was used, mainly in the summer months, as a retreat to escape the distractions of the city.
When Tàpies moved from one place to another, he carried with him a suitcase full of vinyl records, which were swapped and reviewed depending on personal interests and the musical fashions of the moment. Although Tàpies did not mix his activities, that is, when he painted, he painted, and when he listened to music, he listened to music, from a very early age music had been his passion.
After the artist’s death, Miquel Tàpies, his youngest son, listed the contents of one of the suitcases with the aim of generating an anthology of twentieth-century classics: Webern, Schoenberg, Scelsci, Ligeti, Xenakis, Feldman, Cage, Boulez…
As part of the celebration of the centenary of the birth of Antoni Tàpies (Tàpies’ Year), the Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya (ESMUC) is collaborating with Museu Tàpies to stage a series of live performances in front of Tapies’ works in othen institiutions. The cycle is titled Antoni Tàpies’ Suitcase, and features the work Hyxos by Giacinto Scelsi, performed by ESMUC students.

Programme of Performances

· 13 December 2023, at 14 h, in the Parliament of Catalonia, the first performance of the cycle took place before the work 7 de novembre, by Antoni Tàpies. The event coincided with the start of the Tàpies Centenary Year activities.
· 22 December 2023, in front of the work by Antoni Tàpies titled Complement, exhibited in the Barcelona City Council.
· 12 January 2024, in front of the work by Antoni Tàpies titled Les quatre cròniques, in Palau de la Generalitat.
· 25 February 2024, at the Museu de Sant Boi, in front of the work by Antoni Tàpies titled 11 de setembre.
· 4 March 2024, in Sala de Reflexió, a work by Antoni Tàpies, in Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), Barcelona (Campus de la Ciutadella, Carrer Ramon Trias Fargas, 25-27).
· 31 May 2024, at 7:30 p.m., at Museu de Valls, on the occasion of the “Antoni Tàpies. Intervening Bronzes (1987-1989)” exhibition.
· 21 June 2024, at 1.30 p.m., at the Institut Français in Barcelona.
· September 24, 2024, at 12 m. and 12:30 p.m., the performance will take place at the Recinte modernista de Sant Pau in Barcelona, featuring the participation of the Victoria de los Ángeles Foundation, in front of the work by Antoni Tàpies titled Painted and Scraped Wood.
· September 26, 2024, at 18.30 p.m., the performance will take place at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, in front of Tàpies’ Paisatge blanc i negre I (1985) and Dues creus negres (1973), at the exhibition Col·lecció MACBA: Preludi. Intenció poètica.
· October 17, 2024, at 18.30 p.m., the action was at the Fundació Suñol in Barcelona.
· October 25, 2024, at 8 p.m., at the CCCB in Barcelona. Agnès Varda had connections with and an interest in Catalan art. The CCCB exhibition includes, among other pieces, the Antoni Tàpies painting Ocre-gris sobre marró (Ochre-Grey over Brown, 1962), which dialogues with an excerpt from Varda’s documentary film Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse (2004). In this film, Varda looks at the ceiling of her house, sees a damp patch, and says it reminds her of a work by Tàpies. Concert by ESMUC students Juan Carlos Narvaez (alto flute) and Álvaro Ayuso (percussion) at the exhibition Agnès Varda. Photograph, Film, Recycle.
· November 18, 2024, at 6:30 p.m., performance at the Ateneu Barcelonès. Sala Oriol Bohigas. Conversation between Imma Prieto, director of Museu Tàpies, and Vicenç Altayó, writer and art critic, moderated by Alba Font and Bárbara Astals. The musical pieces will be performed accompanied by the work entitled Roig i Negre 2, by Antoni Tàpies, which is part of the artistic heritage of the Ateneu Barcelonès. Concert with ESMUC students who will perform several musical works by the composer Alban Berg.
· November 25, 2024, at 8 p.m., at the Cercle del Liceu, in collaboration with the Lliga Jove del Cercle del Liceu.
. December 11, 2024, at 7 p.m., the action will take place at the Museu Tàpies

List of records kept in the suitcase as noted by Miquel Tàpies Barba

Contemporary piano music | Hungaroton HCD 12659 | Klara Kormendi.
Giacinto Scelsci | Wergo | Canti di capricornio.
Iannis Xenakis | WDR | Musique de chambre 1955-1990 | Arditti String Quartet and Claude Helffer.
Alban Berg | CBS | Three Orchestral Pieces, Op. 6 – Violin Concerto | Pierre Boulez.
Charles Ives | Wergo | Sonate fur Klavier No. 1
Milton Babbitt | Harmonia Mundi | Piano Works | Robert Taub.
Arnold Schoenberg | Adès | Pierrot Lunaire / Serenade | Helga Pilarczyck.
Stockhausen | Deutsche Grammophon | Suzane Stephens.
Xenakis | Harmonia Mundi | Pléiades | Les Percussionistes de Strasbourg.
Gurdjieff and Thomas de Hartmann | Journey to inaccessible places and other music | Elan Sicroff.
Charles Ives | CBS | Symphony No. 3 and Orchestral Set No. 2 | Michael Tilson Thomas and Concertgebouw Orchestra.
Berio | Deutsche Grammophon | Coro | Kölner Rundfunk-Sinfonie-Orchester.
Antoine Tisné | Caliope | Ragas: Visions des temps immémoriaux.
Roberto Gerhard | Auvidis | Symphony No. 4, New York and Metamorphosis (Symph. No. 2) | The plague / Epithalamion.
Ligeti | Sony | Cello concerto, Piano concerto, Chamber concerto | Ensemble Modern.
Alban Berg | Accord | Portrait | SIMC-IGNM.
Lutoslawski | Naxos | Symphony No. 3
Boulez | Wergo | Première, deuxième et troisième sonate pour piano.
Lutoslawski, Penderecki, Cage | Deutsche Grammophon | Mayuzumi | LaSalle Quartet.
Xenakis/Messiaen | Denon | Yuji Takahashi.
Pierre Boulez | Harmonia Mundi | Domaines | Michel Portal, Diego Masson.

[Photograph: Performance at Barcelona City Council.]

Opening of the exhibition "Antoni Tàpies: The Imagination of the World"
2025-02-13 19:00 - 21:00 (Europe/Madrid)
Next Thursday, February 13, 2025, at 7:00 p.m., the opening of the exhibition Antoni Tàpies: The Imagination of the World will take place, an exhibition curated by Imma Prieto, director of the Tàpies Museum, and Pablo Allepuz, curator of the Tàpies Museum collection.
Free access until capacity is reached.
See you there!
