22 February 2026: Lunch with Laia Estruch to celebrate the first anniversary of our joint adventure, HELLO EVERYONE, her solo show at the Museo Reina Sofía. At the beginning of the month, she presented “AÜC” at the Festival Llum and was soon travelling back to Madrid to install “Carrau”, a solo exhibition at her gallery, Ehrhardt Florez, opening during ARCOmadrid week.

26 February 2026: Welcome meeting of this year’s Committee of the Acquisitions Commission of the Col·lecció Nacional d'Art Contemporani of the Generalitat de Catalunya. This is the third and final year Mariana will be serving as Advisor. The open call runs until March 19th, and Committee Members typically hold 10-12 in-person sessions between mid-April and late Summer to evaluate the proposals and future deposits across the regional museums.

4–6 March 2026: Trip to Madrid to visit the art fair ARCOmadrid, a lot of talking and a lot more walking. We began visiting the new museum collection display 1975–now at the Museo Reina Sofia, as well as solo shows dedicated to Juan Uslé, Oliver Laxé, and Alberto Greco. Then we saw Mónica Mays’s solo exhibition at Matadero and Generación 2026 at La Casa Encendida. On Thursday, we visited a few galleries during their morning breakfast – Diego Delas at Carlier Gebauer, Erick Beltrán at PratsNoguerasBlanchard, Ana Laura Aláez at the new space of The Ryder, the new bookstore and art project by Alejandro Cesarco named Lawrence to honour Lawrence Weiner, and finally, the opening of Laia Estruch at Ehrhardt Flórez before going to the art fair. On Friday morning, we visited a great trilogy of shows at Museo CA2M (Ester Partegàs, Dororthy Ianonne, and Lucía C. Pino), Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk at TBA21. Ended the trip visiting galleries around Doctor Fourquet (Carlos Irijalba at Juan Silió, Antonio Caro and Claudio Perna at 1MiraMadrid and Ana Santos at The Goma).

Laia Estruch's exhibition “CARRAU” at Ehrhardt Flórez in Madrid filled the three doors that give access to the three spaces of the gallery (exhibition space, offices and storage).

Photo by Bea Alonso.

12–13 March 2026: Participation in PEEP, a new Hangar initiative that combines study visits, feedback sessions, and a public programme featuring talks, screenings, readings, and performances. The programme was conceived as “a space for encounter, dialogue and experimentation between Hangar's resident artists, invited professionals from the local, national and international spheres, and the general public” with the aim of “exploring and delving deeper into the artists' creative processes, sharing methodologies and generating new professional connections.”

25 March 2026: Lunch in Gràcia with Stockholm-based curators Herkules Jansson, Silvia Thomackenstein, and Vestige Projects (Carina Sabrina Hundsdahl and Michaela Yarmol-Matusiak), who are visiting artists and art spaces in the region, as part of the new Situated Residencies programme organised by the Associació Catalana de Crítics d'Art (ACCA). Their visit is organised alongside the Xarxa de centres territorials d’Arts Visuals de Catalunya, in collaboration with Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Kulturrådet and M|A|C Mataró Art Contemporani, and supported by the ICEC Departament de Cultura de la Generalitat de Catalunya and the Institut Ramon Llull.

26 March 2026: Mariana receives 567 applications for this year’s open call Col·lecció Nacional d'Art Contemporani of the Generalitat de Catalunya. This is the third and final year she serves as Advisor on the Acquisitions Committee. 

In 2025, the committee approved the acquisition of 46 works by 40 artists – 20 men, 18 women, and 2 collectives. More than half of the acquisitions were made through galleries (23), with the remainder acquired directly from the artists or their rightful owners (17). The acquisitions have been deposited in 12 museums across Catalunya, enabling the purchase of works by mid-career artists such as Pep Agut, Tom Carr, Pep Duran, Begoña Montalbán, and Oriol Vilapuig. With a budget increase, it has been possible to acquire works by established artists such as Antoni Muntadas, Sílvia Gubern, Nazario, Dorothée Selz, Marga Ximénez, Magda Bolumar, and Joan Fontcuberta, among others. Artists from younger generations who work with new materials include Paula Artés, Eva Fàbregas, and Agnès Essonti.

27 March 2026: Jorge Satorre and Gabriel Pericàs (artist and book designer+artist, respectively) present the publication “Río” at ANTI Liburudenda in Bilbao. The monograph was published on the occasion of his 2025 exhibition “Río, Ría” curated by Latitudes at the Museo CA2M in Móstoles (Madrid). ARTIUM Curator, Catalina Lozano, joined the conversation. We were unable to attend the event, but we have this pic by Caniche, co-publishers alongside Museo CA2M.

23 April 2026: Besides the unwanted protagonist of the day – torrential streams of pollen – it was a beautiful Sant Jordi. Morning meeting with Pérez y Requena and the TEA team about the exhibition production, which is going full steam, and confirmation that the exhibition title is set as “Un loro, tres bares y dientes de oro” [A Parrot, Three Bars, and Gold Teeth], quite emoji-friendly 🦜,🍷🍸🍹,🥇🦷. The project is now published on Latitudes’ website.

Latitudes’ website with info on the forthcoming exhibition.

7 May 2026: We received an email confirming that our applications to renew our Active Membership with the Gallery Climate Coalition have been successful. This is the fourth year we have submitted our annual carbon calculation, an updated Sustainability Statement, and either examples of the specific actions we have taken or a Review and Reflect statement. Active Members were announced on 21 May. This year, GCC introduced a slight change to the date stamp: going forward, all Active Member badges will be date-stamped for the current and previous year, which makes more sense!

20–24 May 2026: Trip to visit the Biennale Arte 2026 in Venice. Since the pandemic, we have skipped the opening days because the visiting experience was simply too overwhelming (no more 3-hour queues in the rain to watch a video installation!). We enjoy visiting during quieter times, when we can actually see the art. Of course, we miss seeing friends and colleagues from around the world. Still, we like to prioritise the art experience, especially as durational works have been gaining prominence in recent editions (hence longer queues too), and we rarely have the chance to see so much art in one go.

Gulls in Venice are like dragons; they chase after pizza and anything else they can grab. 

 Near Fondamenta Zattere, noticed this beautiful chaise longue outside a design store and "Google Lensed" it to identify it. It's the cantilever Lido Lounge Chair created by Battista and Gino Giudici of Fratelli Giudici in the 1930s for the Lido club in Locarno, Switzerland. It is now well over 3,000 Euros.

Happy to leave the city having seen a bit of the Vogalonga rowing event along the Gran Canale and enjoyed some stunning sunsets from Lido where we were staying.

21 May 2026: Gallery Climate Coalition announces the 2025–26 Active Members on their socials. We're very pleased to renew our Active status for the fourth consecutive year, demonstrating our commitment to implementing environmentally responsible best practices in line with GCC guidance. 

Active Membership is neither a certification of sustainability nor a claim of perfection. It celebrates the people and organisations that continue to assess, report and reduce their impact while working with their communities to build a more equitable, just and sustainable art world.

26 May 2026: The Col·lecció Nacional de la Generalitat de Catalunya has received the Collecting Award at the Nit del Galerisme Premis GAC 2026, organised by the Galeries d'Art de Catalunya — recognising a “transparent and strategic” acquisitions policy committed to strengthening access to culture across the whole territory of Catalonia. Xavier Fina, Director General of Cultural Rights, Creation and Libraries, explains the programme’s criteria and approach here (in Catalan), alongside images of the 2025 acquisitions. Mariana Cánepa Luna of Latitudes has been part of the Commission for the Heritage and Acquisition of Contemporary Art (alongside another 12-14 members) for the last three editions – the 2026 edition is still underway. See the 2024 and 2025 acquisitions.

29 May 2026: “Unfortunately, we regret to inform you...” After seven months of anticipation, Art Explora – Cité internationale des arts finally informed us that our application for a three-month fall research residency in Paris had not been selected. We are told 5,387 projects were submitted and 12 laureates selected. Our project made the shortlist, which slots it into the already packed archive of neither successes nor failures. It’s a small ego boost and a reminder that someone somewhere thought the project deserved a closer look – a tiny achievement worth acknowledging. As every seasoned applicant knows, rejection is temporary; application portals are forever!

1 June 2026: Artforum's Summer issue includes a review by Max Andrews on Mónica May’s show at Matadero Madrid, titled “Pulgar”.

9 June 2026: Newsletter out with the announcement of the exhibition “A Parrot, Three Bars, and Gold Teeth” opening at TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, on July 3rd. Graphic design by Nicolás Barreto.

11 June 2026: ARCOmadrid 2027 opened the application period for participation in its General Programme, the core section of the fair. The announcement states that the fair will feature several curated programmes, including the special section ARCO2046, which will return as a space for exploring possible futures and reflecting on new ways of understanding the world and art. In the 2027 edition, ARCO2046 will have two spaces within the fair, curated by two long-term duos, João Mourão and Luis Silva (co-directors of Kunsthalle Lissabon in Lisbon) and Max Andrews and Mariana Cánepa Luna (Latitudes, based in Barcelona). More on this soon!

14 June 2026: Visiting Spiritvessel in the beautiful village of Espinavessa, Girona, which recently opened the show “TARTAN TARTANA” by New York-based artist Leah Dixon, “an exhibition that condenses the interwoven process of the original history behind the invention of the wheel. In it, Dixon connects different points across space and time: traces of her omnipresent fictional character — a prehistoric girl who conceives the device that will eventually become global transportation— and the basic geometric gesture that enabled the beginning of this movement — the grid — coexist with an apparently technologically advanced reality, represented by skyscrapers, which simultaneously reflect the infinite potential of human ambition and its fragility.” (excerpt from the announcement email).

Max will be reviewing this show for Frieze magazine (review online in August, printed in their October issue). More photos here.

The day after arriving, we presented our work to the Laboratorio de Investigación y Curaduría (LIC), the first edition of TEA's curatorial training programme organised by TEA for Canary Island-based professionals. 

It's always exciting when the exhibition graphic design is installed; it feels more real.

 

Tropicalising the printed matter.

Guided tour of the artists Pérez y Requena. Photo: Juanjo Velázquez.

6–8 July 2026: From Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Max travels to Santander to be part of the jury for the 2026 Becas Botín de Arte in Santander, a gargantuan two-day task of choosing six proposals from over 1,000 submissions originally received from 87 countries. 

The 2026-27 awardees are: Valentina Alvarado Matos (Maracaibo, Venezuela, 1986); Efrén Álvarez Rodríguez (Barcelona, 1980); Shadi Habib Allah (Palestina, 1977); Miquel Mont Gárate (Barcelona, 1963); Natalia Montoya Lecaros (Iquique, Chile, 1994); Chaveli Sifre Riestra (Würzburg, Alemania, 1987). Congrats everyone!

Meanwhile in Barcelona, Mariana publishes the Summer cover story featuring Pérez y Requena’s “Topacio (or 36 Linear Metres of Pink Neon)” (2026), updates Latitudes' website with installation photos of the show, the “archive” button to gather a selection of reviews, and links to the cute trailer of the show, edited by Sara Begoña Pérez Márquez, responsible for social networks at TEA, incorporating Nicolás Barreto’s graphic design. 

Yet, most crucially, over the coming weeks, Mariana wraps up the final conversations as Advisor to the 2026 Acquisitions Committee of the Col·lecció Nacional d'Art Contemporani of the Generalitat de Catalunya. This is the third and final year as part of the Commission. 

A few days later, by chance, we came across a beautifully observed reflection by Bruno Gutiérrez, who suggests that the exhibition helps visitors reconnect with the city's history, symbols, and emotional landscape.

And a few days later, another nice reflection by Ágata Gómez. 

These two posts are sweet evidence of something we have been talking about for years: the astonishingly outdated communications strategies of many museums and art centres. Too often, press officers are funcionarios (state employees) with little grasp of the art world's intricacies. The workflow is familiar: take the curator's press release or notes for the press conference, sprinkle in a couple of quotes from the curatorial essay (if you're lucky), export as a PDF, or hit “send” and upload it to Facebook. Mission accomplished. Few follow-up calls. Few conversations with local or international journalists to find an angle that suits their media (let alone speaking another language! 🤌🏻). Little sense of cultivating relationships.

Even more baffling is how rarely communications teams involve curators or artists early enough to think strategically about an exhibition's public life, yet months beforehand, when there's still time to shape a narrative and identify the audiences who might genuinely care.

Instead, what often happens is a last-minute scramble. Suddenly, we independent curators are expected to provide a ready-made network of editors, writers and publications to contact. Bloggers were once dismissed (despite some producing exceptional criticism and photo documentation); now the obsession is with influencers. Meanwhile, many of those departments still imagine that cultural impact happens primarily in print (newspapers, specifically), despite the shrinking space available for arts coverage. Thoughtful online writing and IG posts often provide more sustained engagement and more genuine writing.

The irony is that many institutions have communications departments yet still end up hiring specialist contemporary art PR agencies — Sutton, Pickles, Fitz & Co, Mahala, Acerca, Comunicación, among others — to devise and execute their cultural strategy that their own teams should have been developing all along. In other words, institutions end up paying twice: once for an in-house press officer, and again to externalise the services to a professional agent or agency that actually knows how to build conversations around contemporary art. 

(Rant over!)

13 July 2026: We are presenting the closing conference “Promises, paradoxes, and questions” at the day-long symposium “An eco-friendly approach to exhibition spaces” at the beautiful thirteenth-century Sala de Graus de la Facultat de Lletres i Turisme de la Universitat de Girona. The event is organised by the Association of Museum Professionals of Catalonia (AMC), the Catalan Institute for Research in Cultural Heritage (ICRPC-CERCA), the UNESCO Chair in Cultural Policies and Cooperation, and the Natural and Cultural Heritage Campus of the University of Girona (UdG).  

15 July 2026: Artforum published Max Andrews’s review of Asier Mendizabal's show “Comparateme” at ProjecteSD in Barcelona. Sadly, the show closed the day before ... the review will be printed in the September issue.

23 July 2024: One application period closes, and another begins: the submission window for the 2026 Visual Arts Mentoring Programme, organised by the National Institute of Visual Arts (INAV) under Uruguay’s Ministry of Education and Culture, has ended. This call invites Uruguayan artists with over seven years of experience, encouraging critical dialogue and professional growth through discussions on working methods, ongoing research, and artistic projects in progress. Mariana Cánepa Luna of Latitudes is one of six curators invited to participate in the Curator-x-Artist module. From September to October 2026, she will mentor four selected artists from the applicant pool, conducting four one-hour individual virtual sessions.

After an intensive month across both personal and professional spheres, we're slowly winding down until September. This summer, we will work on Pérez y Requena’s publication to have it ready before the TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes show closes on 18 October. ¡Felices vacaciones!

→ RELATED CONTENT:

• Laia Estruch’s “Ocells Perduts” (2021) in the exhibition “Panorama 21: Apunts per a un incendi dels ulls” and four open rehearsals, Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), October 2021–February 2022.
• Laia Estruch performs “Mix” (2021–ongoing” at PUBLICS, Helsinki, March 2022.
• Cover Story, April 2022: Mix & Match: Laia Estruch at PUBLICS, 1 Apr 2022
• Panorama in Madrid and Córdoba, 14 June 2022
• Laia Estruch performs “Ocells Perduts V67” (2022) on the river banks of the Guadalquivir River in the city of Córdoba, as part of “Pasaje del agua | The Journeying Stream”, a programme jointly convened by TBA21 and TBA21–Academy.
• Cuerpos de voz conversation between Laia Estruch and TBA21 Chief Curator Soledad Gutiérrez.
• Podcast, “‘Minor’ Ornithologies” conducted by Max Andrews of Latitudes for TBA21 on st_age, 27 September 2022