This week in the city: a call for projects, a materials show,...
Three things are on this week in Barcelona and Madrid. One closes in three weeks and still accepts applications. Two are exhibitions you can still walk into.
The Commons — a call for projects in Matadero
Intermediae Distribuido is back for a second edition and it stays open until 14 September, 15:00. Matadero Madrid wants three participatory cultural projects tied to the Arganzuela and Usera districts. Artists, creators, collectives, social groups. The work happens inside Matadero and in the neighbourhoods around it through 2026 and 2027.
The brief leans on gender, ecology, care, antiracism, community building. Local proposals with an intersectional angle and a reason to live in those two districts. You hand in the project you want to run, not the finished thing.
The Foundry — material histories at Miró
Kapwani Kiwanga won the Joan Miró Prize in 2025. The prize show, Changing States, runs at Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona until 13 September. It is her first solo exhibition in Spain, though she was trained as an anthropologist before she was an artist.
Her work reads material as evidence. The show moves through geological time, colonial exchange, the stuff things are made of and who moved it. Three new commissions were built for the Miró building itself. Installations that behave like archival documents you can walk into.
The Observatory — the moon over Madrid
The Planetario de Madrid has turned its upper hall over to the moon. Artemisia: la magia de la Luna mixes paintings, sculpture, drawings and audiovisual montages from the main lunar missions, and it runs until 27 December. Entry is free.
The show reads the moon as myth and as target. Scientists and artists sit in the same rooms, and the science is the old kind: how a culture looks up and attaches meaning to a rock in the sky.
■ Filed from The Commons: the civic wing of the city.