Open Call: Nocturnal Walkthroughs and Workshops

For the exhibition CAUTÍN. Seba Calfuqueo

October 6, 2026–January 17, 2027, at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

APPLICATION PERIOD: MAY 4–31, 2026

The Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza and TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary announce the open call for Recorridos nocturnos (Nocturnal Walkthroughs), a public program accompanying CAUTÍN, by Seba Calfuqueo.

Now in its third edition, the Nocturnal Walkthroughs reflect TBA21's sustained commitment to activating its exhibitions within the museum. Through performative tours, workshops, talks, readings, and sound interventions, the program transforms the exhibition space into a site of encounter, experience, and collective reflection. We invite artists, poets, performers, researchers, scientists, activists, thinkers, and cultural practitioners based in Spain to submit original proposals that bring their own practices into dialogue with the questions raised by the exhibition, offering audiences experiences that expand and deepen their engagement with the work.

CAUTÍN. Seba Calfuqueo

An exhibition curated by Marina Avia Estrada

A river that springs from the sea. A river that is earth, tiny endangered frogs, rocks, narrowleaf plantain, guardian spirits. A river that is a gathering place. A river whose mouth is in the heavens.

This exhibition presents the river not as a watercourse but as an intelligent territory made up of rocks, guardian spirits, sand, animals, plants, and human beings. The artist Seba Calfuqueo acts as a translator of these life forces, arbitrating between their different modes of expression.

Few rivers shape a territory as profoundly as the Cautín shapes the Araucanía. A region within Wallmapu—the native lands of the Mapuche people—, which wave after wave of colonizing ambitions have attempted to reduce to a mere extractive resource, ignoring and attacking its inhabitants’ beliefs and ways of life. This economic and epistemic violence has manifested in evangelizing missions, in the fragmentation and usurpation of the land, and in the privatization of water. In response, Mapuche communities and territories have devised forms of resistance supported by a network of situated knowledge and reciprocal relationships, where all forces are living, sovereign, and interdependent and where separating water from land is inconceivable. This state of belonging and uprootedness is summarized in a verse by Daniela Catrileo: “we are exile in the homeland of the river.”

In CAUTÍN, the river’s languages manifest through a series of artworks that unfold across different media and moments:

1. Video animations that revisit Mapuche origin stories and understand the river as a space of transition and continuity between worlds.
2. Ceramic installations composed of zoomorphic vessels that combine traditional forms with organic and polluting materials, reflecting the river’s hybrid condition.
3. Embroidered paintings that reinterpret historical archives and mapping systems, proposing alternative ways of reading and representing the territory.
4. A large-scale mural painting addressing the dimension of political resistance and territorial defense in Cautín.
5. Video performance, in which the artist’s body engages directly with the river as a site of tension, memory, and transformation.

CAUTÍN does not subscribe to the idyllic, moralizing perception—constructed by religious tradition and Romantic imagery—of water as a space of purification; instead, it presents the river as a hybrid and choral locus, a murky sacred space whose power lies in the celebration of impurity, at once moving current and stagnant swamp. That tension, the flow of heterogeneous and often contradictory forces, is the source of both resistance and balance, bringing forth creativity and life. The same tension permeates and structures this exhibition: a cyclical, upstream journey where the river is more than just water and does not spring from the mountains, the territory is dislocated but not fragmented, and the different languages feed off each other without losing their voices.

Through this open call, we invite a range of voices to interpret and mediate the exhibition, expanding its readings and opening it up to new perspectives. To this end, we propose two formats: performative tours that activate the exhibition space as a site of encounter, experience, and reflection; and, for the first time, workshops that explore the themes of the exhibition in greater depth, with the possibility of taking place in an adjoining room within the museum.

Sebastiana (Seba) Calfuqueo (Santiago de Chile, 1991) is a Mapuche trans artist whose practice questions the mainstream narrative created by colonial processes and their impact on contemporary Indigenous and Western societies. Her work shines a spotlight on the environmental and identity-related consequences of colonization, with a special emphasis on the Chilean government’s privatization of water resources. From a perspective inspired by queer studies, she analyzes and problematizes the imposition of a binary, hierarchical system rooted in colonial thought on the Mapuche worldview, in which gender categories are porous and there is no separation between humans and nature. The artist works with a wide range of media and materials, from performance and installation to painting, pottery, and video animation. She uses these languages in a hybrid, disruptive way to explore the areas where Indigenous and Western philosophies intersect, defying stereotypes associated with the notion of purity in contemporary societies.

Calfuqueo is a curator at Espacio218, member of the Mapuche collective Rangiñtulewfü, and Yene magazine contributor. Her work has won international acclaim and received numerous distinctions, including the Cuervo Prize at Zona Maco (2024), awards from Fundación Ama Amoedo (2024) and Fundación FAVA (2018), and an Eyebeam Fractal Fellowship (2020). She has been a guest artist at the Venice Biennale (2024), the Whitney Biennial (2024), the São Paulo Biennial (2021), the Mercosul Biennial (2020), and the Paiz Art Biennial (2025, 2020). 

Her work can be found in the Tate Modern (United Kingdom), Centre Pompidou (France), Denver Art Museum (United States), Museo MALBA (Argentina), TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, KADIST Collection (France), Museu de Arte Contemporânea do Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil), Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Chile), and MAC (Chile), among other major international collections.

Artist’s website

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

This open call welcomes artists, performers, writers, researchers, activists, scientists, creators, and cultural practitioners based in Spain, from any discipline and background, who wish to propose activities in conversation with the themes of the exhibition.

FORMAT

• Applicants may choose between two formats:
  • A performative walkthrough (including living arts, sound interventions, lectures, or readings).
  • A workshop-based format.

For the performative walkthrough

• A total of 3 proposals will be selected.
• Selected participants will present their activity a total of four times, with two sessions per evening (at 9pm and 10pm).
• Activities will take place on the following Saturdays: October 24, November 7, November 21, December 5, December 19, 2026, and January 16, 2027. Applicants should indicate their availability for these dates when submitting their proposal.
• Duration: approximately 45 minutes per session.
• Capacity: up to 30-40 people per session.
• Free and open to the public.
• Language: Spanish or English.

Workshop-based format

• 1 proposal will be selected.
• The workshop will be presented twice on two different days.
• The workshop will take place outside the exhibition space, in Sala Mirador at the Thyssen Museum.
• The date will be scheduled in coordination with the selected participant between October 20 and December 20, 2026.
• Duration: approximately 1 hour.
• Capacity: up to 25 people.
• Free and open to the public.
• Language: Spanish.

Important considerations for the performative walkthrough: 

• Audio from the artworks will remain active during the sessions.
• Screens will continue displaying the videos throughout the activity.
• Any additional speakers or projectors must be adapted to the requirements and limitations of the gallery space.

PRACTICAL INFORMATION

HOW TO APPLY

Interested applicants should submit their proposal through the registration form. Proposals may be submitted in Spanish or English. Residency in Spain is mandatory.

Requested Documentation:

• Description of the activity
• Relation to the exhibition
• Technical and material requirements
• Short portfolio or CV
• Availability on the proposed dates

Participation Requirements:

• The Nocturnal Walkthroughs can be conducted in Spanish or English.
• Workshop proposals must be delivered in Spanish.
• Applicants must be based in Spain.
• Workshops should specify the target age group they are designed for.
• Open to participants from all disciplines and backgrounds.
• Complete applications must be submitted within the deadline.
• Proposals must be conceived as site-specific interventions designed specifically for this exhibition.
• The organizers may request additional documentation or clarification of the proposal.

Technical Conditions:

Any additional speakers or projectors must be adapted to the limitations of the gallery space. Proposals with simple technical requirements will be especially valued.

Remuneration:

For the performative walkthrough

1,500 € (VAT included)*

For the workshop format

1,000 € (VAT included)*

* Including honoraria, travel, accommodation, and any necessary materials or equipment.

Selection process:

Proposals will be evaluated in two phases. In the first phase, the TBA21 team will review all submissions. In the second phase, a panel comprising the exhibition curator, Marina Avia Estrada, along with invited external professionals, will assess the shortlisted proposals.

Criteria: creativity; technical feasibility (valuing simplicity); potential for audience engagement; alignment with the themes of CAUTÍN; and attention to accessibility, including proposals designed to engage different abilities, incorporate diverse sensory approaches, and foster the inclusion of a wide range of publics.

Applicants of the selected proposals will be informed by email.

TIMELINE

• Release of Open Call: May 4, 2026
• Application period: May 4 – 31, 2026
• Deadline: May 31, 2026 (midnight)
• Notification of results via email: June 19, 2026
• Announcement on TBA21’s Instagram profile: July 6, 2026

CONTACT

For inquiries, please contact: public.programs@tba21.org. Only questions received by email will be answered.

EXAMPLES OF PAST ACTIVITIES:

For the exhibition At-Tāriq. A Journey into the Rural Musical Traditions of North Africa and the Arab World by Tarek Atoui

In Praise of the Broken with Marina Hervás: Marina Hervás’ night tour offered a listening experience exploring the fragmentary and incomplete in shaping our connection to tradition and rurality, engaging in dialogue with Tarek Atoui’s sound work and notions of imagined traditions and utopian geographies.

For the exhibition Listening All Night to the Rain by John Akomfrah

Listening All Night to the Marassa with Inés Sybille and Malvin Montero: Listening All Night to the Marassa is a dance activation. Dancers Malvin Montero and Inés Sybille move through the iconography of the Marassa twins from Haitian-Dominican Vodou, exploring philosophical, aesthetic, sonic, and choreographic echoes from Akomfrah’s aquatic body-archives.

For the exhibition Pedagogies of War by Roman Khimei & Yarema Malashchuk

Perfect Explosion Or I Stop When It Gets Too Loud by Daria Zhuravel in collaboration with Ihor Babaiev: a listening performance based on a sound archive of missiles, artillery, and drone strikes in Ukrainian cities collected by Ihor Babaiev since 2022. Daria Zhuravel takes on the role of a fictional archivist who guides the audience through a collective listening session, where personal reflections fill the intervals between the sounds of war. 

PRIVACY AND DATA PROTECTION:

The processing of personal data is carried out in accordance with the provisions of Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April (General Data Protection Regulation, GDPR), on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and with Organic Law 3/2018 of 5 December on Personal Data Protection and Guarantee of Digital Rights (LOPDGDD).

Participants are informed that by applying to the program, they consent to the processing of the personal data provided. In compliance with Article 13 of the aforementioned Regulation, the following information is provided:

DATA CONTROLLER:

Fundación TBA21

privacy@tba21.org

PURPOSE OF PROCESSING:

To process applications for participation in this open call for night tours and workshops.

LEGAL BASIS FOR PROCESSING:

Processing is necessary for the candidate selection process. Personal data will be retained for as long as necessary to fulfill the purpose for which it was collected and to determine any potential liabilities arising from that purpose and from the processing of the data.

DATA TRANSFERS:

Where applicable, TBA21 will transfer only the information strictly necessary to collaborating entities involved in the exhibition. Any additional data transfer will require the consent of the selected participants.

RIGHTS OF DATA SUBJECTS:

With regard to the personal data collected, you may exercise your rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction of processing, objection, and data portability by submitting a written request to the data controller at the address provided above, under the terms established by applicable regulations. If you consider that your data protection rights have been infringed, you may lodge a complaint with the Spanish Data Protection Agency (https://www.aepd.es/).