We’ve made it past midday. It’s time for a siesta, and we wake from it with a little trumpet song. If you squint and look around, the celebration continues, and if you look more closely, it never ends. An afternoon of games, street parades, colourful clothing and mischief.
Photo: Víctor Colmenero
The Little Clown by Víctor Colmenero. The little clown can’t go to school. The door is too narrow.
The clown points to the door from the window, showing the usual entrance from the possible entrance.
Everyone laughs at the clown until the clown laughs.
Víctor graduated from RESAD in Set Design, Lighting and Costume Design. He continued his education on a scholarship at Escuela SUR and the Scuola Conia directed by Claudia Castellucci, where he was trained in cross-disciplinary art studies and performance technique. He has worked as a lighting and set designer and artistic director with artists like Itziar Barrio, María Jerez, Alberto Cortés and Luis López Carrasco. In parallel, he also develops his own performance work and participates in residencies like Matadero Madrid, La Caldera Barcelona, Nau Estruch, La Casa Encendida, Museo CA2M, La Poderosa and others.
Photo: Arantxa Martínez
‘J, A Folkloric Striptease in 4 minutes’ by Arantxa Martínez. With the company of Celia Ramos. ‘J, A Folkloric Striptease in 4 minutes’ was envisioned as a video-performance for the programme Usted es un colectivo [As an individual, you are a collective] at Barcelona’s LEM festival in 2007. In 2017, Pablo Martínez suggested that I dance this jota live in the first edition of Cabaret MACBA, and I agreed despite my qualms. I made it a bit longer so I could take my time, but it remained a succinct gesture, a blink-and-you-miss-it, a visual poem that speaks for itself made of a body representing itself. In 2025, Lara Brown and Anto Rodríguez invited J to the Picnic Sessions and I hesitated: my innocence and humour are hurting in 2025. The world hurts and I’m sad. Miguel Ángel Berna, who updates and dances the jota, also says, ‘Why is it always this jota, which is in a major tone and always joyful? What if I’m sad?’ And I replied, ‘If I’m sad, I dance, I take off my clothing, I get naked’.
‘I know, with the natural understanding that God has given me, that everything beautiful is lovable, but I cannot grasp why, simply because it is loved, the thing loved for its beauty is obliged to love the one who loves it’. (Or on the destruction of pastoral romance by Marcela, a female character in Don Quijote.)
Arantxa Martínez is an artist, dancer and performer living in Berlin since 2003. Her practice revolves around the processes of identification and dependence of the body and its environs, and she questions performativity in relation to these processes. Her many artistic collaborations have led to works, inquiries, aesthetics, methodologies and practices that span the urban space, theatre, museum, cabaret and the mountains. Her performative inquiry has also expanded to the audiovisual medium, publication and radio.
Since 2003, she has regularly collaborated with Paz Rojo, María Jerez, Kate McIntosh, Juan Domínguez, Isabelle Schad, Miriam Jakob, Sabine Zahn, Julia B. Lapèrriere, Lola Rubio, Eszter Salamon, Guillem Mont de Palol, Thiago Granato, Alice Chauchat, Antonia Baehr, Nilo Gallego, Deborah Hay, Cullberg Ballett, Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz.
She teaches classes at different universities and international institutions like DOCH in Stockholm, Madrid Master of Performing Arts, HZT Berlin and Cullbergballet.
Her texts have been published in different books: the brochure BLI BLA BLU in collaboration with María Jerez for the book Fiesta. Seis relatos de hoy, mañana y pasado mañana, Caniche 2024; From Behind All Over, Ladelfín Editora 2023; and Composing a Body of Bodies for the publication Stadterweitern. Tracing a Practice, Sabine Zahn, 2020.
3zero3. Photo: Jorge Calderero
3ZERO3. 3zero3 grabs us on the dance floor and gets us to sweat, dance, jump. You should attend their sessions in light clothing—enough said! At Skin or Bendito Castigo or the Picnic Sessions, they make the floor rumble, lift it up, shake it, and we soak it in. 3zero3 invites us to dance until we drop through all types/genres of music played by their extra-divine grace.
3zero3 launched their project by themselves after being half of the now-mythical duo manolo&benito djs. What best defines their way of seeing music and being a DJ is a passion and absolute curiosity about everything. They spin everything from the purest house to the most fun trance, including countless genres and atmospheres in the middle that will make you throb and have fun. Music has always been what saved their life. There is nothing they like more, and they want this to be felt and expressed in every set. They convey this energy so that we can have a moment of presence and pure connection with music that draws us out of our individual perception and connects us with something more—even if only during the session. A moment to simply be.