Although we know that commitments get crowded these dates and that meals, dinners, visits and events accumulate without giving truce, there is always a chance to make room to disconnect and enjoy contemporary art with family. Here we bring you a list of some of the most interesting and entertaining cultural activities so that everyone enjoys these holidays between ‘turrón’ and grapes.

Workshops ‘¿Soy yo?’ and ‘Viaje espacial’ at the CGAC

One way to get to know contemporary art is to see it and live it in person while working on some of the concepts present in the exhibitions. The proposal of the CGAC (Santiago de Compostela) is to work, on the one hand, the last series of Jesús Madriñán focused on the people he was portraying when travelling the Camino de Santiago and that allows to delve into concepts such as inclusion and gender diversity and, on the other, the showing of the artist Pedro Cabrita Reis, who reworks objects through found elements and helps us to work the notion of reconversion, destruction and reconstruction. The workshops propose activities linked to the visit of these exhibitions to bring contemporary art to the kids of the house.

21st and 22nd December | From 4 to 9 years old

Workshop ‘App Inventor’ at Espacio Fundación Telefónica

To get into the technology and know some of its many applications, this workshop for teenagers proposes some important keys, without forgetting the responsibility in the use of these devices. A recreational and educational activity that will allow you to get the most out of a tablet while introducing us to the programming language.

26th and 27th December 2019 and 2nd and 3rd January 2020 | From 12 years old on

Workshop ‘Navidad en el museo’, at the Lázaro Galdiano Museum

A good way to soak up the Christmas spirit is to participate in the preparation of decorations, ornaments, gifts and greeting cards that are so exciting at this time. Putting themselves in the shoes of a true artist, participants will be able to tour the galleries of the museum and their showrooms while they soak up the works that reign the space and blow up their imagination in the crafts that they then carry out.

26th and 27th December 2019 and 2nd and 3rd January 2020 | From 5 to 12 years old

‘Este año la Navidad es… ¡verde!’, at the Guggenheim Bilbao

To raise awareness about the need to care for the planet and adopt sustainable practices in our day-to-day lives, the Guggenheim Museum proposes dynamic programming to address these issues by solving puzzles and always keeping in mind the art and work of the artists. In addition, one of the workshops, taught by the artists in residence Miren Arenzana, Zaloa Ipiña and Karlos Martínez Bordoy, will make the little ones reflect on the value of gifts and the possibility of emphasising non-materialistic elements.

From the 20th December 2019 to the 3rd January 2020 | From 3 to 11 years old

‘VaCAACiones’ at the CAAC (Andalusian Centre of Contemporary Art)

The whole family is invited to know the works of the CAAC collection through entertaining and dynamic activities that will allow them to visit and investigate something else in the work of Amalia Pica (Neuquén, Argentina, 1978) and Juan Suárez (El Puerto de Santa María, Cádiz, 1946). The workshop wants to encourage the creative contribution of visitors, to feed their imagination and development, while putting in value the contemporary art that can be seen in the centre.

26th and 27th December 2019 and 2nd and 3rd January 2020

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.