PHotoEspaña turns 20, and this edition offers an extensive proposal where the multiple facets of photography are explored: from author books to contests and, of course, exhibitions. Among such offer is easy to get lost, so we bring you our particular selection, although we invite you to take the opportunity to enjoy this discipline in depth.

The elegant Senegal of the first half of the 20th century. Anonymous of Saint-Louis and Mama Casset

We begin with an exhibition that goes beyond the traditional guidelines of European photography: the Senegalese images of the early 20th century when Senegal was still French Sudan. Far from the typical compositions of colonial air in which the environment is portrayed from a Westernised perspective, these photographs, mostly anonymous, show an alternative reality, more natural and free. Many of these images were taken by the local workers of the photography studios opened by the French displaced to the colonies, improvised artists who knew how to express a beautiful joy of living.

Where: Círculo de Bellas Artes - Sala Goya

Elliott Erwitt, Self-portrait, France Saint-Tropez, 1979

Players. Magnum photographers enter the game

This exhibition gathers the funniest facet of Magnum’s Agency photographers. Although many of them have specialised in photojournalism, there is no lack of those images that, by chance, take the most joyful side of situations. Coincidence and quick shooting, are the maxims of this collection that brings together 150 works by 20 authors with which it is intended to show a vision of the professional photographer where flexibility and humour still have room.

Where: Fundación Telefónica Space

Tomás de Acillona. The pictorialist experimentation

This author is one of the maximum representatives of photographic pictorialism in our country. His career began in the 20s, with a very experimental work from he built up his particular style. In the decade of the 30s, he already counted on a massive production that went from the still life to the portrait, from the landscape to the day-to-day scenes. A way to recover this important figure of national photography and know more in detail this style of work, typical of the beginnings of the discipline.

Where: National Museum of Romanticism

Primitive data 5-38 (2016) Photograph © Montserrat Soto. VEGAP Madrid

Montserrat Soto. Imprimatur

Video and photography serve this artist to generate a narrative around our cultural heritage. This proposal wants to go further in the understanding of the symbolic and message patterns that mark the history of art, today devoid of that previous knowledge to see in the works something more than technical and aesthetic quality. It is a critical and daring project, where contemporary discourse is opposed to traditional narrative and traditional religious painting.

Where: Community of Madrid - Sala Alcalá 31

Sebastián Bejarano. PHE Talent Award

This photographer was selected as a prominent talent among the students of the PHotoEspaña master's degree. His project "El caso 433" is a photographic-literary proposal that creates a photo-story on how to steal the Colombian treasure Quimbaya, a fundamental exponent of this cultural heritage that embraces a broad community within the American country.

Where: FNAC Callao - Preciados Street !

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.