The World Book Day is celebrated every year on April 23rd. This date, which commemorates the death of some of the greatest writers such as Cervantes, Garcilaso de la Vega or Shakespeare, is a reminder of the immense value of the written word to enrich our culture and generate knowledge.

We bring you a list of recommended readings for art lovers or those who begin to be it because the world of books is for everyone:

My Museum, by Joanne Liu

It is an educational book for the little ones of a journey that approaches art from the experience of a child visiting an exhibition hall. It is about encouraging observation, attention, knowledge of different styles and themes to feed the imagination and get familiar with the range of possibilities that art offers to express themselves without limitations. Do you want to train a future artist or curator?

A Journey Through Art, by Aaron Rosen

It is a book designed for the pre-teenagers. As its title indicates, the book presents a journey through the history of art from its beginning to the present, with a content that delves into the cultural substratum of the different civilisations and societies that created the great masterpieces. A pleasant reading, full of illustrations and images that exemplifies the wonders that art has left for posterity.

Teoría de la retaguardia, cómo sobrevivir al arte contemporáneo (y a casi todo lo demás), by Ivan de la Nuez

This acidic work condenses a scathing critique of the current cultural system, the power of "institutionalisation" of museums, the "franchise" character of some museum-factories and the weakness of discourse in many contemporary artworks that are based on "social causes" of the moment, with volatile and futile propaganda. The union between art and globalisation is the raison d'etre of many of these phenomena, and De la Nuez masters these issues in his work.

What are you looking at?, by Will Gompertz.

For those who still want to become familiar with the art of our days and know the significant milestones that have shaped the contemporary art scene, our recommendation is one of the classics: "What are you looking at?", a book that has almost become a “must” to answer some of the questions we always ask ourselves about art.

Guernica, la obra maestra desconocida, by José María Juarranz de la Fuente

For those who seek a bit of intrigue and often question the "official version" of things, we recommend this study focused on the most famous work of Pablo Picasso: "The Guernica." According to its author, who has devoted 14 years to researching this issue, behind Guernica there is a different motivation to the traditionally spread out to represent the horrors of war. An excellent book to delve into the research and the essay in modern art.

ABIERTO INFINITO. LO QUE EL CUERPO RECUERDA. CICLO DE PERFORMANCE X ART MADRID'26

Art Madrid, committed to creating a discursive platform for artists working within the field of performance and action art, presents Abierto Infinito: lo que el cuerpo recuerda, a proposal inspired by Erving Goffman’s ideas in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Amorrortu Editores, Buenos Aires, 1997).

The project unfolds within a theoretical framework that directly engages with these premises, conceiving social interaction as a stage of carefully modulated performances designed to influence others’ perceptions. Goffman argues that individuals deploy both verbal and involuntary expressions to guide the interpretation of their behavior, sustaining roles and façades that define the situation for those who observe.

The body — the first territory of all representation — precedes both word and learned gesture. Human experience, conscious and unconscious alike, is inscribed within it. Abierto Infinito: lo que el cuerpo recuerda departs from this premise: representation inhabits existence itself, and life, understood as a succession of representations, transforms the body into a space of constant negotiation over who we are. In this passage, boundaries blur; the individual opens toward the collective, and the ephemeral acquires symbolic dimension. By inhabiting this interstice, performance simultaneously reveals the fragility of identity and the strength that emerges from encounter with others.

PERFORMANCE: TRAYECTORIA. BY AMANDA GATTI

March 6 | 7:00 PM. Galería de Cristal of the Palacio de Cibeles.

Amanda Gatti. Escaparate. 2023. DT-Espacio. Photograph by Pedro Mendes.

The proposal expands Amanda Gatti’s research initiated in La Plasti Ciudad del Cuerpo — an ongoing series of performance and installation presented since 2023 in spaces such as Fundación Antonio Pérez, Galería Nueva, CRUCE, and the Acción Spring(t)/UCM Congress — where she explores the relationship between her body and objects found in urban space. There, body and materials are articulated through a constant negotiation between functionality, weight, and support, generating temporary architectural compositions.

In Trayectoria, this research shifts toward the act of dragging: a gesture that makes visible the friction between body, objects, and space. The corridor ceases to be a neutrality to be crossed and becomes an operative intermediate zone, where form and content — veil and what is veiled, as Walter Benjamin points out — become confused. The space, saturated with objects turned into a mobile chain, clears and remakes itself with each step. Clearing, for Benjamin, is already an experience of space: each advance sustains this unfinished separation, always oriented toward a destination that may never be reached.

La Plasti Ciudad del Cuerpo #3. Amanda Gatti. Performance documentation. CRUCE 2054 exhibition, Galería CRUCE. Photograph by Pedro Mendes.

Displacement is not limited to material friction: it also becomes a symbolic inscription of that which every life trajectory drags along. The objects — remnants of past uses — function as metaphors for what remains attached to the body even when it no longer serves any function. The performance makes visible the condition of moving forward while carrying heterogeneous weights: material, affective, social. Thus, the gesture of walking linked to these objects turns the route into a writing in motion, where each step simultaneously activates a physical transit and a vital transit. Trayectoria proposes that every life is also a dragging: a continuous recomposing from what we insist on carrying with us.

The action operates objects as verbs: to push, to tense, to trip, to pull. From it emerges an operativity that involves the entire body and exceeds the visual. The image ceases to be representation and becomes gesture: a gesture that founds new spatial forms, that overflows, that produces an ephemeral mode of reappropriation of the corridor.

The trajectory thus becomes an affective map inscribed in the body, a way of merging with the environment by putting past and future, durability and wear, utility and obsolescence into friction. The action returns to public space what was taken from it, but now stripped of function: freed from meaning, freed from commodification, freed to be imagined otherwise.

ABOUT AMANDA GATTI

Amanda Gatti (1996, Porto Alegre, Brazil) is an artist and researcher whose practice unfolds across performance, video, photography, and installation. She explores the intersections of body, object, and space, investigating how we occupy — and are occupied by — the spaces around us. Drawing from experiences of displacement and the observation of domestic and urban environments, her work conceives the body as mediator and archive, transforming found objects, spatial arrangements, and everyday gestures into ephemeral architectures and relational situations.

She studied the Master’s in Scenic Practice and Visual Culture at Museo Reina Sofía/UCLM (Spain, 2023) and the Bachelor’s degree in Audiovisual Production at PUCRS (Brazil, 2018), where she received scholarships such as the Santander Universities grant. In Spain, her work has been presented in institutions and contexts such as Museo Reina Sofía, Fundación Antonio Pérez, Galería Nueva, CRUCE, and Teatro Pradillo, as well as in exhibitions and festivals in Brazil, Germany, Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. She currently resides in Madrid, with secondary bases in Brazil and the United Kingdom.