Activity

In April and May the curators of the Ester Partegàs and Dorothy Iannone exhibitions, Bea Espejo and Tania Pardo, will take you on a tour of the shows, pointing out the hallmarks of the artistic practices of these two creators.

MINOR ARCHITECTURE BY ESTER PARTEGÀS, curated by BEA ESPEJO

The world in our pocket

Having the world in our pocket is like inhabiting a minor architecture. It alludes to something small that leads to many things, highlights the value of what is within our reach, and celebrates the sensation of confidence we feel when we achieve a lot with very little. It also operates as metaphor for the condensation of the world: something immense, complex and infinite that can be concentrated in the palm of our hand. This thrill of understanding the world and seeing the inexhaustible in the everyday provide the premise for reflecting on Ester Partegàs’s work. 

• Tuesday 14 April, 6.30 pm
• Saturday 23 May, 12 pm

OVER AND OVER AGAIN BY DOROTHY IANNONE, curated by TANIA PARDO

Let’s talk about Dorothy...

The sixties, the Tarot, Dieter Roth, Sarah Pucci, Fluxus friends, Berlin, Düsseldorf and hundreds of recipes. Autobiography, love and the domestic realm were tools of exploration in Dorothy Iannone’s art. The intimacy and power of her works can also be interpreted as a space of women’s liberation, where the personal becomes political. In this tour, books, paintings, sculptures and sound boxes, saturated with text and colour, provide a gateway into Iannone’s universe and the central themes of her work: eroticism, sexuality and friendship.

• Saturday 18 April, 12 pm
• Saturday 23 May, 1 pm
• Saturday 13 June, 12 noon

Activity free of charge. Please register in advance by calling 91 276 02 21 or writing to ca2m@madrid.org 

Have you ever stopped to think about how the bonds between people are manifested? Friendship, family and romantic relationships, needs and plans, desire... The emotional fabric is packed with feelings and concepts that become invisible lines leading and connecting us, constantly tightening and slackening, sometimes without us even noticing.

On this occasion we propose to enrich the research project Un juego de cuerdas y sus 12 leyes [A String Game and Its 12 Laws] with a collective game dynamic in which we’ll explore these and other bonds in a palpable, sensory way through knots and links.

We invite you to get tangled up with us and let go of the rope with the artist and researcher Inés Sorlat, who will use her practice to move the strings. Thus begins Intermittences, with the focus on what is there but might not always be there, on what is tightened but might also slacken.

Inés Sorlat (Madrid, 1993) is a multidisciplinary artist and Audiovisual Communication graduate of the Carlos III University in Madrid. Her work combines audiovisual narrative, installation and sewing, investigating the bonds between people and the invisible laws that uphold them. This exploration led to Un Juego de Cuerdas y sus 12 leyes, a series of twelve conceptual installations that reflect on relationships as a single interconnected system.

In 2025 she presented the first two pieces, Ley 8 and Ley 11, and she is currently developing the following works in the series, visually representing the system and its strings, and, one by one, reinterpreting their laws.

Donde Continúan las Cosas is a group formed by past participants of our programmes for young people, united by their interest in culture, art and community work. The project aims to redefine relationships with the museum, fostering the self-management of the group members and involving them in the definition of programmes for young people.

FUGA is a space where we continue to promote autonomy, exploration and collective undertaking. We don't impose anything here and there are no closed hierarchies: the group members design the programme together.

After a first year of sharing, experimenting and learning—a year of discovering how difficult but how rewarding it is to create a genuinely collective space—the group embarks on this new phase with a clear aim: to create their own podcast.

The podcast will be a tool for engaging with the museum’s programmes and exhibitions, but also for looking beyond them. It will enable us to map the contemporary art scene, interview artists and curators, visit spaces, chat with cultural agents and make our own voice heard in what is happening right now.

We want FUGA to be a place where we can continue adding to a collective archive, where we can explore current initiatives together, formulate theories, ask questions and continue to engage with the museum from the perspective of our own interests and languages.

We’ll meet twice a week during the year in a friendly, horizontal and experimental setting to design the podcast, record episodes, explore topics, invite people and create a project that is truly ours.

Inspired by Dorothy Iannone’s A Cookbook, made in 1969, the writer María Arranz proposes a workshop aimed at the creation of a collective recipe book. Based on a survey of the literary and artistic works of different creators who have made cooking a focal point of their lives, Arranz invites us to take part in a space designed to identify connections between the world of food and other fields like creation and writing that combine art, food and life.

In A Cookbook, Dorothy Iannone shows us that a collection of recipes can reflect not only daily life but the author’s existential musings. While a recipe book can be intimate and introspective, it also speaks to us of domestic and popular culture, of the time and place in which it was compiled. On loose sheets of paper, in notebooks or in published works; with or without drawings; with notes in the margins; with stains and splashes or pristine; inserted with tips honed from years of trial and error, or with precise instructions that leave no room for improvisation. A recipe book reveals many things and therefore demands attentive reading, much more attentive than has historically been granted to these texts. In this workshop we’ll talk, reflect on, discuss and, above all, read recipes, relating these readings to Dorothy’s work and those of other artists and authors who have also found a unique form of expression and thought in cooking.

María Arranz is a writer and a journalist specialising in cultural, feminist and gastronomic topics. A regular contributor on gastronomy to media like El País, she is the author of El delantal y la maza (Col&Col ediciones), an essay about the role of women in the kitchen from a feminist perspective. Among many other interests, in 2013 she founded FUET Magazine, which examines the relationships between food and culture, and she was a member of Cocinar Madrid, a multidisciplinary collective that uses cooking as a tool of anthropological research.

The shelter, retreating to the shelter 
the cave, the cave
the sound box between the shelter walls
the acoustics of the drawings
there where it sounds
we’ve been here for eight years and never sung a full song 

Beyond the end we have never sung
of those lost to the river
from the river to sea
cocorococo

Beyond the urgency-attention
uncertain-subtle-unfinished-unspeakable-invisible
attention intention
being in the phase, in the 3rd phase, not of autonomy but of self-management 
corococo coco cocorococuuuuuuuu

Beyond a new gentleness
that must be invented 
becoming a body of affectations
a beast of a thousand heads with a thousand tongues
reemerges in the shelter of the cave

An amateur choir is a creative project in which any kind of voice is welcome to participate. Every other Thursday, we do our own research sessions as well as sessions with artists who work with voice and listening.

Session dates of An Amateur Choir 2026

15 January / 29 January / 12 February / 26 February / 12 March / 26 March / 9 April / 23 April / 7 May / 21 May / 4 June / 18 June / 1 October / 15 October / 29 October / 5 November / 19 November / 3 December / 17 December.

Those who have come in the past:

An Amateur Choir has featured Sonia Megías, Itziar Okariz, Jaume Ferrete, María Salgado and Fran MM Cabeza de Vaca, Rocío Márquez, Alma Söderberg, Ainara Lagardon, Jhana Beat, Juan G. Araque (Juan Dresán) and Lolita Versache, Luz Prado, Los Torreznos, Makiko Kitago, Julián Mayorga, Agnès Pe, Paloma Carrasco, Anto Rodríguez, Elisa C. Martín, Elena Murcia Pinto with Marina Peralta Murcia, Inma Marín with Jon Cañal and Tania Arias Winogradow with Milo-Andrey Ulises, Rolando San Martín, Amalia Fernández, Elena Córdoba, Raquel G. Ibáñez, Alex Reynolds, Black Tulip, tacoderaya, Mónica Valenciano, Ruth Abellán and Arturo Moya, Ojo Último, Monserrat Palacios and Fátima Miranda, Sole Parody, Enrico Dau Yang Wey, Coco Moya, Veza Fernández, Patricia Leguina, Jesús Burrola, Noela Covelo, Stina Force, Los Cramps (Nilo+Francisco), Ángela Segovia, Eddi Circa + raxet1, E1000, El Gato with Jotas, Nilo Gallego, Tavi Gallart, Hijas de Yocasta, Amaia Bono and Damián Montesdeoca, Piccola, Bea Narcoleptica and Elan d’Orphium.

MATINEES: EXPANDED CINEMA FOR FAMILIES 2026

Matinees is an open, flexible space in which cinema expands: the cinematographic experience spills out of the screen and invites your active participation, regardless of your age.

The white cinema screen—that flat, opaque surface—is also a place to plunge into, to dive down to unsuspected depths. It can spill out of the sides, splashing and soaking everything around it, rising up to the ceiling and raining down from above. The images can adopt unimagined forms: unspeakable, immeasurable. We can watch them from a seat, or alternatively lying down, arm in arm, scattered across the room. Even with our eyes closed. We can touch the light, feel its colours, listen to it like a whisper, like a song. And we can do all of this together, in a room with no seats, no tickets and no popcorn. We believe there are many ways to watch cinema that have yet to be discovered. To explore them, we’ve invited various artists and filmmakers to imagine what those ways are and what other type of cinema has yet to be experienced. The Matinees take place on Saturday mornings and each session will be different: a proposal, an experiment, a challenging experience. We invite you to come with your best friends, your siblings, sons, daughters, dads, mums or grandparents and discover cinema like you have never imagined it. You’ll find all the details and session times here very soon, but for now here are the sessions dates and guests.

PROGRAMME 

28 FEBRUARY | MAIDER FERNÁNDEZ IRIARTE

7 MARCH | MARTA AZPARREN IN COLLABORATION WITH TANIA ARIAS WINOGRADOW

14 MARCH | GÉNESIS VALENZUELA AND MANUEL MUÑOZ 

21 MARCH | ANGIE DE LA LAMA

TIMES: 11.30 am** Time subject to change

Everyone is welcome at the Matinees. We want this programme to be a place for sharing, regardless of age. Babies, boys and girls, young people, adults and seniors: come and join us. You’re free to enter and exit the room during the sessions.

These tours of the Ester Partegàs, Dorothy Iannone and Antonio Ballester Moreno exhibitions don’t seek categorical answers but open up a space where the experiences of visitors, and of groups that now form part of the museum, are put into play and create networks. We want to reflect together on it what means to tour an exhibition using conversation, listening and the difference of gazes.

How does what we see change when we focus on the fragment, the framing or the time we dedicate to a work?
What do we really use when we look at a work?

“What the eye doesn't reveal” proposes a tour where framing, fragment and time are mobilised to provide a deeper insight into Sky and Earth by Antonio Ballester Moreno, Minor Architecture by Ester Partegàs, and Over and Over Again by Dorothy Iannone. Three proposals which, each from a very different place, invite us to think about what falls outside the spotlight, about what is repeated and transformed, and about the intimate, the body and the everyday as territories of meaning.

A space to pause at the details and accept the partial gaze, allowing the works (and other people as well) to interrogate us, disturb us or connect us from unexpected places. A tour where the fragment is not something incomplete but a possibility; where the framing is not a limit but a revelation; and where time is measured not as duration but as intensity of the experience.

The tours will be accompanied by Francisca Soto Martínez (Santiago de Chile, 1989), artist, restorer and educator based in Spain. A member of the El Hueco collective, her work is situated at the intersection between collective memory, community building and cultural mediation, exploring the frictions between art, restoration and education.

Activity for the general public every Sunday at 12.30 pm

• Maximum capacity: 12 people
• Advance registration: 91 276 02 21 or ca2m@madrid.org
• You can also sign up directly at the Museum reception.

Group tours on Wednesday mornings

If you belong to a collective, association, educational establishment or informal group, contact us to arrange a tour by calling 91 276 02 27 or writing to educacion.ca2m@madrid.org