Museu Tàpies

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

Montaner y Simón: A Publishing House with History. Guided Tour
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.

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.

Upcoming Performances

. December 11, 2024, at 7 p.m., the action will take place at the Museu Tàpies

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.

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!

Approximations. Museu Tàpies Guided Tour 2025
2025-03-01 12:00 - 2025-06-14 12:00 (Europe/Madrid) | Museu Tàpies
Guided tour of the Museu Tàpies’ current exhibitions, with an introduction to the history of the building.

Current exhibitions:

· Antoni Tàpies. The imagination of the world
· Marta Palau. My Paths are Earthly
· Anna Malagrida. Opacitas: Veiling Transparency
· Noor Abed. A Night We Held Between

The (In)visible Exiles
2025-03-04 - 2025-05-20 | Museu Tàpies
Archivo General de la Nación de México

Exile is a reality that is very difficult to make visible, since it is, above all, an experience of internal uprooting. Nevertheless, women artists, among them the filmmakers who went into exile, tried time and again to stage and represent their woundedness.
Film producer and director Tània Balló and filmmaker, theorist and film promoter Luis E. Parés programme a film series linked to the exhibition Marta Palau: My Paths are Earthly, with the aim of presenting three different approaches to this wound and the way it is incarnated. Thus, through screenings, talks and conferences, we will generate a space for debate and reflection on these films and on other, more contemporary ones, which have allowed us to rediscover these works and their authors in the present day.

Tània Balló Colell is a filmmaker, writer, cultural promoter and researcher. She is the creator and director of the project Las Sinsombrero (2014–present) and Las Anónimas. Obras sin relato en las colecciones de arte moderno de los museos españoles (Leonardo Grant for Researchers and Cultural Creators, Fundación BBVA, 2023). As a filmmaker, her films El Museo Invisible (2023) and the documentary trilogy Las Sinsombrero (2015–2021) stand out. She is the author of the Las Sinsombrero trilogy (2016, 2018, 2022), of Querido Diario: hoy ha empezado la guerra (2017) and of Les Combatents. La història oblidada de les milicianes antifeixistes (2021). She is also curator of the exhibitions Jorge Semprún. El largo viaje (2024–2025), Las Sinsombrero (2022) and No Pasarán. 16 días Madrid 1936 (2018).

Luís E. Parés holds a PhD in Communication from the Pompeu Fabra University and is artistic director of Cineteca Matadero Madrid. He has worked as part of the programming department of the Filmoteca Española, the editorial board of Caimán CDC and the programming committee of the Sevilla Film Festival, and was coordinator of the RTVE programme Historia de nuestro cine. He has published the books Notes sur l’émigration-Espagne 1960. Apunts per a una pel·lícula invisible (2011) and Filmar el exilio desde Francia (2012). He has directed the short films Los conspiradores (2021) and El espectro político (2023), as well as the feature film La primera mirada (2023).

Programme
4.March 25
22 April 25
20 May 25

María Luisa Elío in En el balcón vacío

2nd edition of the Teresa Barba Critical Writing Competition
2025-03-11
Antoni Tàpies. Cartes per a la Teresa, 1974. Lithography. © Comissió Tàpies / VEGAP. Photography: © Lluís Bover, 2024.

The Museu Tàpies is announcing the second edition of the art criticism text competition aimed at students from upper primary school to university degrees and higher education courses.
The aim is to enhance the students’ critical thinking through a dialogue with the work of Antoni Tàpies that will inspire them to analyse today’s society and the world around us; to encourage students to express themselves through writing; and to connect a young public with the work, thought and concerns of Antoni Tàpies, which are unquestionably a bridge to thinking about our own times and a vindication of a less anthropocentric worldview.
The competition starts from the idea of written art criticism based on a personal interpretation of the work of art counterposed with the present day. It is about making the selected work dialogue with elements from the outside world. Art criticism is, therefore, an attitude or position towards life that interrogates and questions everything that happens around us.
The evaluation of the texts will take into account: linguistic, expressive and analytical maturity; a free interpretation of the work of Antoni Tàpies; and the connections made between that work and the social, cultural and political context of the moment.
BASES
PARTICIPANTS

Students who, during the 2023–24 academic year, are attending the last year of primary school, up to secondary school and Baccalaureate level, and intermediate vocational training.
Participation may be individual or collective, bearing in mind only one prize will be awarded per category.

WORK

Each student or group may submit a single original and unpublished text, written in Catalan, Spanish or English and which has not received a prize in any other competition.
The text must be between 200 and 1,000 words in length.
It is essential that the text has a title and specifies to which work or group of works by Antoni Tàpies it refers.

PREPARATION
The call for the competition will be accompanied by meetings with teaching staff interested in participating, leading to visits to the Museum with their students. In order to further facilitate a closer knowledge of the work of Antoni Tàpies, the Museu Tàpies will be organising discussions at the Museum, sending information, etc., thus providing full support to enable the school to make the competition a core of its curriculum. The Museu Tàpies will also be providing three training modules spread throughout the year aimed at teaching staff. These modules are designed to help teachers articulate the competition in the classroom, while deepening an understanding of the work of the artist and the need to contextualise it the present. In addition, people over the age of sixteen who want to visit the museum or library to prepare for the competition can request free access by sending an email to: concurs@museutapies.org

REGISTRATION AND DOCUMENTATION
Students’ texts should be sent by email to: concurs@museutapies.org
Indicate in the subject box: 1st art criticism competition for students at the Museu Tàpies.
The following documentation must be attached:
-File with the details of the student or group of students, including: name, age, academic year, name of the school and name and contact of the reference teacher.
-Both the texts and the file must be sent in PDF format.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE
May 11, 2025.

AWARDS
A total of three prizes of vouchers of 300 € in books for each of the following three categories:

Prize of 300 € for the winner of the upper primary level, and publication of the text.
Prize of 300 € for the winner of the secondary school level (ESO), and publication of the text.
Prize of 300 € for the winner of Baccalaureate and vocational training level, and publication of the text.
Prize of €300 for the winner of university degrees and higher education training courses and publication of the text.

At the end of the competition there will be a public presentation of the winning and finalist texts that will take place at the Museu Tàpies, with a reading of the winning texts, and the jury’s comments. This will be followed by the presentation of the awards and of a publication including the selected writings.

EVALUATION CRITERIA
The jury of the evaluation committee will take into account the following aspects:

Literary quality of the text: up to 25 points
Interest and originality of the critique or reflection proposed in the text: up to 25 points
The extent to which the reflections connect with the work of Antoni Tàpies: up to 20 points
The degree to which the text connects the work of Antoni Tàpies with current events: up to 30 points

JURY
The jury will be formed by one member of the Associació Catalana de Crítica d’Art (ACCA), as a specialist art critic, as well as four media journalists, both staff and freelance.
· Caterina Almirall, curator and teacher. Member of the ACCA.
· Teresa Sesé, editor of the art section of La Vanguardia.
· Laia Manonelles Moner, PhD in art history from the Universitat de Barcelona, ​​teacher of the Art Criticism subject of the Art History degree at Universitat de Barcelona.
· Albert Mercadé, president of the ACCA, art critic, curator and historian.
· Maria Palau, editor of the culture section of the newspaper El Punt Avui.
· Antoni Ribas Tur, visual arts and culture editor of Diari ARA

SELECTION OF THE WINNING ENTRIES
The jury’s verdict will be made public on June 10, 2025 on the website of the Museu Tàpies: museutapies.org
The award ceremony will take place on December 10, 2025, at the Museu Tàpies. All members of the jury will be invited to attend, together with leading professionals in the sector. The media and all agents involved in the contest will also be invited. The event will consist of the public reading of the winning texts, followed by the jury’s comments.

Opening of the exhibition Anna Malagrida. Opacitas: Veiling Transparency with a conversation between the artist and Marta Gili
2025-03-13 18:00 - 19:00 (Europe/Madrid) | Museu Tàpies
The exhibition Anna Malagrida. Opacitas: veiling transparency opens with a conversation between the artist and Marta Gili, art critic, curator and teacher specializing in photography and contemporary visual arts. A dialogue about the artist’s creative process and the concerns that inspire his work, and to connect Showcases with topics such as the ecological crisis, environmental degradation and the social challenges faced by modern cities. Likewise, the role of art in raising awareness of sustainability and how urban space can be a reflection of our attitudes and behaviors towards the environment will be discussed.
The conversation will be moderated by Patricia Sorroche, curator of the exhibition.

Marta Gili
She is a curator of exhibitions and public programs. Between 1911 and 2006, he was responsible for the visual arts program of the Fundació ”la Caixa”. From 2006 until 2018, he directed the Jeu de Paume National Gallery in Paris. From 2019 until 2023, she was the director of the Ecole Nationale Supèrieure de la Photographie in Arles. Currently, she continues her work as an independent curator of artistic projects.

[Anna Malagrida, Vitrines. Rue Chareton (2009) © Anna Malagrida / VEGAP, 2025]

Following the Sun. Second edition
2025-03-22 | Museu Tàpies
Sound Experiments, Performance Formats and New Situations

Taking as its starting point the contemporary mythology derived from the Antoni Tàpies piece Mitjó [Sock] (2010)—which we understand as a gesture of disobedience and irony, a celebration of the downtrodden and marginalised—the second edition of the series Following the Sun aims to give rise to new performative dialogues with other bodies and identities, creating frictions with societal normativity:

The liberation attained by artists over the last one-hundred years needs not lead us to deny the possibility of accepting other proposals, beliefs, philosophies or cultures, when considered more appropriate for modern mentality. Particularly because it is precisely due to this liberation and independence that we might really learn to respect—I do not like the term tolerate, as will be explained further on—and value all these human manifestations aforementioned, as they rightly deserve, whether coming from our own tradition or from other civilisations. From out of this liberty, we will more readily and unbiasedly be able to convene a grand forum where the voices of all cultures might be heard and where all proposals have their place. Most especially, we will no longer hold to the belief that this tiny bastion we call “Western civilisation” has been something exceptional.
Excerpt from Antoni Tàpies “La imaginació del món” [The Imagination of the World]

The avant-garde always opted for gestures that revealed a certain introspection in relation to the reverberations and possibilities of our actions, words and daily belongings. The work Mitjó, conceived in 1991 and produced and installed in 2010 on the terrace of the Museu Tàpies, is truly a summary of these attitudes of “liberation”—citing Tàpies—that come about through collectivised discomfort and disobedience. What happens when we carry out gestures that are unexpected and unusual, when we impact contexts we “should not”?
From the understanding of Mitjó as an effigy and symbol of marginalisation, this series is conceived as a pagan ritual, inviting nine artists to venerate this object and activate it with new narratives that pertain to creators’ realities. How does the queer body influence society, in visual and positional terms? Why are certain bodies considered disruptive, provocative, polemical or inferior? How might we learn to find greater enjoyment from what is extravagant and ignored?
Following the Sun is an extended solstice, a celebratory menstrual cycle, an offering to the Museu Tàpies as a place of encounter, friction and action. The series seeks to bring together various voices that create by speaking from marginalisation, struggle and resistance, yet also in a celebratory way, with a playful spirit. With a clear idea that avant-garde approaches are as alive as ever, these performance and sound activations are drawn from queer, decolonial, dissident and anti-authoritarian realities, all of which are resonant in the philosophy of Tàpies regarding the flight from the West and the creativity unfolding in the gesture of Mitjó, which continues to unsettle and shake the normativity.
The programme of the second edition of Following the Sun has been curated by Gabriel Virgilio Luciani. The graphic design of the programme and solar navigation calendar were created by designers Ignasi Ayats and Ana Habash. The illustrations are by Eduard Sales.

Gabriel Virgilio Luciani is a curator and professor of Art History based in Barcelona. Their research revolves around the intersection of queer theory, magic, decoloniality, poetry and objectual affectivity. From 2017 to 2019, alongside their studies in Fine Arts at Escola Massana, they were the curator of the self-run space, CERA 13; a radical experimental laboratory in Barcelona’s Raval neighbourhood. In 2020, they obtained their Masters Degree in Digital Art Curatorship at the Universitat Ramon Llull – ESDi, in Barcelona, during which they collaborated with the gallery Dilalica. From 2021 to 2024, they were editor-in-chief of exibart.es, a contemporary culture magazine covering art exhibitions, biennials, fairs and festivals that also features interviews with artists, curators and institutional directors. Currently, they are Head of Programs and Academia of Metàfora Studio Arts, an international contemporary art education platform located in Barcelona.
Over the last nine years their curated exhibitions have been presented in programmes such as Art Nou and Loop Barcelona videoart festival. They have also curated and co-curated projects at THEFLOOR, CERA 13, TKM Room, Escola Massana, àngels barcelona – espai 2, Tangent Projects, L&B gallery, Galeria H2O, Reial Cercle Artístic (as a guest curator for the 1+1+1 Loop curated edition), Espai Souvenir and Mèdol – Centre d’Arts Contemporànies de Tarragona, amongst others.

Programmed Sessions
Saturday 22 March, at 1 pm: Amaru “Personaje Personaje” Peña
Saturday 12 April, at 1 pm: Agnes Essonti Luque
Saturday 17 May, at 1 pm: feyfeyfey
Saturday 14 June, at 7 pm: Adrasha
Saturday 20 September, at 6 pm: laSADCUM Guillem Jiménez
Saturday 20 September, at 7 pm: Sejal Parekh
Saturday 18 October, at 1 pm: Venus Jasper
Saturday 15 November, at 1 pm: Bella Báguena
Saturday 13 December, at 1 pm: Silvia Albert Sopale

Link to the first edition

Following the Sun. Amaru “Personaje Personaje” Peña
2025-03-22 13:00 - 14:30 (Europe/Madrid) | Museu Tàpies
I Swear

We welcome the springtime with the start of this new edition of the series Following the Sun, curated by Gabriel Virgilio Luciani. On this occasion, Gabriel presents a programme that questions societal normativity, inviting queer, decolonial, dissident and antiauthoritarian voices to the terrace of the Museu Tàpies, presided by the artist’s Mitjó [Sock], an iconic image of marginalisation.
The series opens with Amaru “Personaje Personaje” Peña, with many questions along the way: What conditions are imposed when someone does not consent to “belong”? Losing their home? Being forced to live on the margins? Renouncing everything that is theirs to access a different culture? Trans bodies, migrant bodies and so many others are threatened because they do not fit into the standards that not even Antoni Tàpies’ Mitjó can respond to.
The proposal invites us to draw and erase borders, tracing the experience of confronting Spanish and European migratory institutions. This involves a negotiation based on contradiction, in a context that refuses to resonate with a plurality of bodies that express themselves as dissident, as disobedient—intentionally or not—and which, in their own way, respond to the expectations of normative society.

Amaru “Personaje Personaje” Peña (she) is a culebra travesti born in Quito, Ecuador, in 1991, and a migrant with Spanish nationality, after having resided in the Kingdom of Spain for a few years. She was trained as a psychotherapist and studied a postgraduate course in Mediation and Artistic Research. Since 2015 she has combined her work in psychotherapy, dedicate to trans and sexually diverse people, as well as migrants, racialised individuals and children, with an artistic practice as a performer, where she also engages her own experience as a member of some of these collectives.

Photograph: Florian Hetz

The Background of Things
2025-03-25 18:00 - 18:40 (Europe/Madrid)
Arranged on a table, objects are raised and the table gets raised by the objects. A performer (Marc Caellas) reads a selection of poetic texts accompanied by the movement of a dancer (Corinne Spitalier). Each thing is a message, a pulse that reveals itself, a hatch in the void.
We activate these power objects with words and movement. Drawings, stickers, cards, masks, things that flame up to the edge of their limits and inwards, towards their hopeful core. They seduce us.
This is the first activation of the serie A Hatch in the Void proposed by Marc Caellas as part of the exhibition Antoni Tàpies: The Imagination of the World.

A Horizontal Spin
2025-03-27 19:00 - 19:30 (Europe/Madrid) | Museu Tàpies
‘Strategically place the palm of your hand on the chair, lean it at a 30° angle and spin it at a constant speed. Energetic turns, physically identical in time and pace, a motorised mantra which ever since I was young led me to a state of instantaneous calm, like a secret domestic exercise. Reviving this idea of the spinning chair as a gesture that expands and visualises the loop; repetition and concentration as the structural features of all melodies.’
Fito Conesa opens the second edition of the series The Chairs of Tàpies by returning to childhood, proposing a musical exercise of spinning based on the voice, with repetitive structures that are effectively the sonorous foundation for the unpredictable. Repetition as a background, where the temporal features that inhabit it arise naturally. Voice, spinning, song and movement. A gesture to musical practice which, from concrete music or sound performance, also celebrates space, the architectures that inhabit it and the sounds these spaces postulate.
This action features vocal collaborations from: Claudia Scheider, Erika Michie and Enrikson.

Fito Conesa has a degree in Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona. His work is found in museum collections, such as MACBA, and in institutional collections like Col·lecció Banc Sabadell and the University of Granada. Conesa’s work has been exhibited in various museums, art centres and festivals, including La Casa Encendida in Madrid, Matadero Madrid, CaixaForum and MACBA, amongst others.
In 2022 Conesa received the Alfonso X Prize (Región de Murcia) in the category of new media, and was awarded the Video Creation Prize, organised by the Visual Arts Spaces of Catalonia, the Santa Mònica art centre, the Catalan Ministry of Culture and Loop Festival.

The Chairs of Tàpies. Second Edition
2025-03-27 19:00 - 20:00 (Europe/Madrid)
The second edition of the action art series The Chairs of Tàpies, subtitled Tattooed Memories, embraces two lines of inquiry: memory and the body, drawing from the idea of the trace that leaves its mark, and the legacy on the skin, as if it were a scar. These two features, whose character draws from Tàpies, act as a narrative, making it possible to connect universes of the past with worlds of the present, thus creating a living archive of experiences, memories and identities.
Within this framework, the body is understood beyond its physicality; it is granted a symbolic sense which, as with skin, is a reflection of stories and experiences. In this way, each of these actions in the series makes it possible to explore how the body recollects, stores and transforms individual and collective experiences in physical and emotional memory, and how these memories emerge and communicate through performance and movement. By including the gesture, the series emphasises the fleeting presence of the body in time and space, and celebrates how recollections are upheld and updated through it, in continual reinterpretation of the present.
The set of nine sessions features a polyphony of expressive languages, where the voice and movement take on a new dimension, out of the express need to question corporeality. Bodies charged with stories and absences, weighted down; bodies imprisoned in what they have to be, what they want to be, in what they were; bodies that are not bodies, bodies that are only bodies, bodies calling out for bodies. The biography of the body.

The programme of the second edition of the action art series The Chairs of Tàpies, subtitled Tattooed Memories, has been curated by Judith Barnés.

Projected programme:
27/3/25: Fito Conesa
24/4/25: Laia Estruch
29/5/25: Matria Libre – Arte sin fronteras
26/6/25: Esther Ferrer
17/7/25: Benvenuto Chavajay
25/9/25: Joan Morey
30/10/25: Leonor Castro
27/11/25: Mireia Calafell
18/12/25: Mónica Valenciano

Previous edition 2024

Sala de Reflexió (detail), by Antoni Tàpies, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. © Museu Tàpies. Photo: Eva Carasol, 2023

Art as a Facilitator of the Worlds to Come
2025-04-08 18:00 - 19:00 (Europe/Madrid) | Museu Tàpies
How can art help us to think about, criticise and dialogue with established economic and social structures? Starting out from the idea that the capitalist world we live in was built on colonial violence and displacement, we realise that for many populations the world has already ended. At the same time, resistance has kept alive the imagination of what could have been and could still be. Through art, we can contemplate possibilities that escape the limits of social and scientific thought, as the artist is not restricted by method, but only by imagination, the limits of which are porous and extendible.
From this point of view, art not only denounces consumerist culture, the superficiality of an object-based economy or the dehumanisation of the system, but also enables us to draw other futures, to map out cracks in the dominant structure and make up new forms of existence. If the colonial/capitalist project has not completed its task, this means it has not completely won either; therefore, its defeat is still possible, and with it the construction of other possible worlds.
In the context of the exhibition Anna Malagrida. Opacitas. Veiling Transparency, we invite researcher Morena Hanbury Lemos to connect the exhibition with the global economic system and with public policies to promote economic sovereignty, in order to construct new ways of inhabiting the city and the world in which it is our lot to live.

Morena Hanbury Lemos is a doctoral candidate in Ecological Economics at the Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals (ICTA-UAB). She holds a master’s degree in Political Ecology, Degrowth, and Environmental Justice from UAB, a master’s in Decolonial Thought and Humanities, and a bachelor’s degree in Environmental Management from the University of São Paulo, Brazil. Her research focuses on how colonial patterns are perpetuated in the global economy, paying special attention to the analysis of unequal exchange between historically colonised and colonising countries. She studies public policies to foster economic sovereignty, decolonisation and the reorganisation of resources and labour to sustainably meet the needs of the populations in the Global South.
