The Museu Tàpies and Graner – Centre de creació de dansa i arts vives have announced a public open call for the “Archival Body” artistic research residency, inviting artists to explore the relationship between the body, memory, and the museum archive.
Based in Barcelona, Spain, this interdisciplinary residency offers time, resources, and curatorial support to develop a research-driven artistic process connected to the Museu Tàpies collection and exhibition program. The selected project will culminate in a public presentation at the Museu Tàpies in June 2026, fostering new ways of activating exhibition spaces through embodied, performative, and critical practices.
This residency offers the selected artist the framework, time and resources to develop a research process with the methodological, technical and curatorial support of the two institutions, which will culminate in a public presentation at the end of the residency.
The «Archival Body» call was born from a fundamental question that the two institutions ask themselves: how can the body activate, inhabit and transform the material memory of a museum? In this context, the body, conceived as a living archive, as a place of memory and at the same time as a tool of interpretation, becomes an active agent in the construction of meaning. Thus, the body reads, questions, remembers and projects, becoming a channel in relation, in this case, to the content and format of the exhibition.
«Archival Body» aims to establish a new relationship between the exhibition space and the body as a space of knowledge, delving into some ideas such as materiality, gesture, memory and the disciplinary border. The project will emphasize the documentation of the creative process, with the aim that this material becomes shared and leaves a mark both in the Museu Tàpies itself and in Graner.
In this first edition, the exhibition on which this artistic research residency will revolve is Antoni Tàpies. The Perpetual Movement of the Wall, which will be open from 12th February to 6th September, 2026. The research process will culminate with a public activation that will take place at the Museu Tàpies (Barcelona, Catalonia) on Wednesday 10th June.
The deadline for submitting candidacies is February 16, 2026. Here you can consult the rules of the Public Open Call.
