Museu Tàpies

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!

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.

Opening of the exhibition Noor Abed. A Night We Held Between
2025-04-09 18:00 - 19:00 (Europe/Madrid) | Museu Tàpies
On the occasion of the opening screening of the audiovisual work A Night We Held Between (2024) at the Museu Tàpies, Noor Abed and the project curators, LaOtra (María Amador and Patricia Sorroche), discuss the artist’s personal and creative universe on the basis of the book Stars at Midday, presented for the first time in Barcelona and which will be available in the Museu Tàpies bookshop.
Stars at Midday –نجوم الضُهر is a personal diary where the artist sets down poetic and audiovisual notes on the production phase of the film A Night We Held Between, shot in Palestine in 2023 with her family and friends. The film centres on Song for the Fighters, found in the sound archive of the Popular Art Center Palestine. Through the layers of the song, in a maze of sounds and places, the film evokes history as a permanent present tense, a collective act of imagination.
Like the film, but more intimately and profoundly, the book weaves together narrative fragments, songs and daily observations to create a fusion of sequences of natural, prepared movements, of documentary and fictional elements.
Through a choreography of bodies, places, stories and time frames, Abed’s work encourages thought about the forms of social action and resistance in everyday life.

Noor Abed (Jerusalem, 1988) is an interdisciplinary artist and film-maker who works in the intersection between performance, media and film. Through a process of visual creation of images, her work creates situations in which social possibilities are rehearsed and performed.
Abed attended the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York (2015–2016) and the Home Workspace Program (HWP) of Ashkal Alwan in Beirut (2016–2017). She received her BA from the International Academy of Arts in Palestine and a MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles.
Abed’s work has been screened and exhibited at Anthology Film Archives, New York; Gabes Cinema Fen Film Festival, Tunisia; Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival (Jihlava); Leonard & Bina Gallery, Montreal; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham; Ujazdowski Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw; The Mosaic Rooms, London; and MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome among others. In 2021–2022 she was assistant curator on the artistic staff of documenta 15 in Kassel, Germany. Abed has been a resident at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam (2022–2024).

Han Nefkens Foundation – Museu Tàpies Video Art Production Grant 2022, in collaboration with NTU CCA, Singapore; WIELS, Brussels; Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD), Manila; and Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wild Tarot: Barcelona Poesia 2025
2025-05-08 17:30 - 20:00 (Europe/Madrid)
Sold Out Tickets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Programme

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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