Laia Estruch (Barcelona, 1981) is one of the most unique artists in the current Catalan scene. As could be seen in the monumental Trena (Inflatable Braid) she presented in the Oval Hall of the MNAC in 2023, Estruch's work is characterized by how she uses spaces created with a strong sculptural character and vivid colors. And this Wednesday she won by unanimous decision the fourth edition of the Bosch Aymerich award, endowed with 30,000 euros, with another of these structures: Carrau, a work created this year that transformed the entrances to the gallery that represents her, the Madrid-based Ehrhardt Flórez, into an artistic experience. The Bosch Aymerich award, which is biennial, aims to promote artistic creation and especially recognize works that establish a dialogue with architecture.

"It is normal that people can say what they think". This is what is read on the mural seen behind his photo, on his WhatsApp profile. But just because it is normal does not mean it is common. Member of the group Esquirols, a priest who stopped being one for love, author of more than 350 'auques' and scholar of Verdaguer, Joan Vilamala lives up to the motto and Enderrock Llibres publishes a volume where he narrates his life, with an accent on his musical facet.

Can it happen that a character "possesses" its creator? This is what happens to Benedict Newman, a millionaire and bestselling writer, who faints while looking at photographs of a murder and wakes up turned into the detective of his own novels: Colt Stark. Nash Elizondo, the character created by Dolores Redondo (San Sebastián, 1969), is the one who will have to find out if Newman is innocent or could be involved in a series of crimes. The Basque writer, author of books such as those of the Baztan trilogy, returns to bookstores with Totes les nits, totes les ciutats (Columna/Destino; translated into Catalan by Núria Parés Sellarès), a novel in which she immerses herself in identity disorders but also plays with many more literary resources to hook the reader.

At the Pazo de Meirás, before it became public property, there were many paintings of Franco in uniform and in a pose of launching himself into conquest; of his wife, Carmen Polo, all bejeweled and serious, as if she were about to scold someone, and colorful still lifes of flowers painted by the dictator. The images of the dictator with his unleashed ego – there were portraits of him in practically every room – coexisted with the gazes of dead animals he had hunted that hung on the walls.

Around the time of the premiere of Bach, in 2004 at the Espai Lliure, the dancer and choreographer of Mal Pelo María Muñoz (Valencia, 1963) became pregnant with her son Sam. "I can practically say that I grew up with this piece," the boy explains. Two decades later, the Ramis-Muñoz family –formed by Pep Ramis and Maria Muñoz and their children Martí, Paula, and Sam– has united to transform that Bach into a joint creation that emphasizes the idea of transmission in dance. The new version of the show, titled Bach en família, premiered in Paris in February and now arrives at the Canal de Salt for two performances, which will take place this Thursday and are part of the Temporada Alta festival. It is no coincidence that this creation by Mal Pelo reaches Catalonia through the Girona festival. Throughout the 35-year history of Temporada Alta, the company has performed there 24 times. "They are the group that has stepped onto the festival's stages the most times," highlights the event's director, Narcís Puig.

Shaun the Sheep and his ovine companions return to the big screen in a year when other cinematic sheep (the protagonists of the hilarious The Sheep Detective) threatened to overshadow them. Luckily, there is room for everyone on the farm. The third feature from the popular stop-motion franchise created by Aardman studio, to whom we owe classics such as Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit and Chicken Run, once again presents a story filled with brilliant visual gags and a carefully crafted, artisanal aesthetic proposal that reaches its maximum expression in the scenes in the tower-laboratory where Shaun, turned into a woolly version of Dr. Frankenstein, creates a potion that will transform the bald Farmer into a terrifying furry monster.

A new chapter in the long and tortuous history of the Iranian regime's repression of filmmaker Jafar Panahi. The 26th branch of the Tehran Revolutionary Court has sentenced the director of A Simple Accident to five years and one month in prison and has ordered the seizure of his assets, according to Variety, which cites the Iranian news agency Emtedad. It is unclear what charges the filmmaker is accused of. The court has also banned Panahi from using social media for two years. This is the first final sentence for Panahi since he won the Cannes Palme d'Or in 2025 for A Simple Accident, which was also nominated for two Oscars.

The monster has monstrous ideas. The Big Boss is not a madman. Who feeds his boastful ego? Who breathes airs of greatness and superiority into him? Where does he get the ideological fuel that guides his immense power? Who are, in short, his intellectual gurus? In the essay The Dark Enlightenment(Edicions 62, translated by Mireia Alegre), the French political scientist Arnaud Miranda has dived into the bowels of the neo-reactionary thought that feeds the insatiable beast. Donald Trump's ultra-presidentialist policy is a frenetic combination of techno-futurism, national-populism and ultra-reaction. Those who write his script have first and last names, and are supported by billionaires of the tech. Let's get to know this barbaric galaxy.

I wanted to write a chronicle of the presentation of Laetitia Colombani's new novel, Laetitia Colombani, A Day Without Women (La Magrana / Salamandra, 2026), without using the verb to braid. I try a few times and give up. It’s not that I’m in a hurry to pull the ace of The Braid out of my sleeve to hook you into the article, but I have to use the simile of weaving and braiding because the author returns to that structure with which she found success. Let me explain the success: Colombani published her first novel, The Braid, nearly ten years ago, which was an immediate global phenomenon and which, with 8 million copies sold in forty languages, changed her life.

Radio Sarajevo, by Tijan Sila (Sarajevo, 1981), achieves what the literature of memory often pursues and rarely attains: turning a particular experience into a human truth of universal reach. Based on the memories of his childhood during the siege of Sarajevo in the 90s, Sila constructs a narrative that does not seek to explain the war, but rather to make the reader feel its daily degradation and the invisible scars it leaves on those who go through it.

We must begin by debunking the protagonist. "It will be a night of nostalgia and guests," said Jaume Pla, Mazoni, before starting the 20th anniversary concert of the album Esgarrapada (2026). There were indeed guests, but not a shred of nostalgia. Furthermore, there are things that do not need the validation of nostalgia. Therefore, there was no self-indulgence in a vibrant performance that served as a confirmation of the virtues of the repertoire of Mazoni's first album in Catalan. These are ten songs (plus the version of Cançó 7a en colors, by Pau Riba) that go beyond generational impact because they are made with material that does not fade with the passage of time. They keep their gaze on the present, also due to how Mazoni interprets them with the band from the tour of the album Banderes per daltònics (2025) and above all for the guests he chose, some of the most relevant in current Catalan music, everyone connected with those electric and poetic scratches.

The Italian art historian Barbara Jatta has been directing the Vatican Museums for ten years. With 43,000 square meters of exhibition space and seven kilometers in length, it is the sixth largest museum facility in the world, behind giants such as the Louvre, the British Museum, and the Hermitage. Jatta was in Barcelona this Monday for a monographic exhibition at the Diocesan Museum of their collection of 20th-century Italian sacred art. "The Vatican Museums are not just the Sistine Chapel," explains Jatta. "I have been fighting this battle for many years: the Sistine Chapel is an attraction, but the Vatican Museums are made up of about twenty museums that are just as attractive and incredible. We have collections of Greco-Roman antiquities in centers such as the Gregorian Profane Museum, the Pio-Clementine Museum, the Chiaramonti Gallery, or the Braccio Nuovo. But we don't just have antiquities, there are also the Raphael Rooms and the works of the Vatican Pinacoteca, all of them have truly fascinating works!".

"Now Barcelona is my home. Thanks to this museum, I will continue to live eternally. Speak my name, Iny; only then will I be able to continue living eternally. Bring me bread, beer, even geese, if you find any". The one who speaks like this is no fictional character, but Iny, an Egyptian of humble origin who climbed to the core of power during the reigns of Pepi I, Merenre I, and Pepi II. Now, four millennia later, it is he who takes the visitor by the hand to guide them to the Egypt of the 6th Dynasty in the first immersive venture of the Egyptian Museum of Barcelona: Iny, the pharaoh's explorer.

I think his profile picture must be a contemporary sculpture. Then I zoom in: it is the mountain wall of Siurana, in Priorat, which he climbed years ago, and which looks like a human face in profile. It makes me laugh because Marc Domènech likes artists who work with organic forms, and at the gallery he directs (the Marc Domènech) it is not hard at all to imagine a painting of those that dissolve the line between humanity and nature. An art historian and second generation of gallery owners, Domènech has specialized in 20th-century art and works to recover artists who have been left on the margins of the great narratives.

The jury of the National Prize for Spanish Letters recognized this Tuesday the career of the prolific and influential writer Enrique Vila-Matas (Barcelona, 1948) "because he masterfully embodies the core principles of postmodern fiction through a particular style where the borders between reality and fabulation blur and intermingle with absolute fluidity, with the ability to build a literary universe that dialogues with tradition while reinventing it.".

For every award received Sala Augusta followed by Mother Tongue, the latest book by Sebastià Alzamora (Llucmajor, 1972), the Majorcan author has not stopped wondering about the reasons that had made it possible. "I think about it constantly, but I cannot quite explain it to myself," he admits with a smile, surrounded by the jury of the Lletra d'Or prize, one of the most veteran in the Catalan literary sector. It is the fifth recognition for a published work that Sala Augusta has received since Edicions Proa released it in May 2025. First came the Critics' Prize from the Spanish Association of Literary Critics. A few months later, it won the Josep Maria Llompart Prize, awarded by the Association of Catalan Language Writers of the Balearic Islands. It was followed by the Crítica Serra d'Or Prize for poetry and, weeks before the Lletra d'Or, was awarded the National Poetry Prize "for his ability to move, with identical brilliance, from the impassioned language of historical denunciation to the delicacy of the domestic space".

The painter and sculptor Robert Llimós died on Monday at the age of 83, as confirmed to ARA by family sources. Son of the painter Camil Llimós, Robert Llimós studied at the Massana School and the Sant Jordi Higher School of Fine Arts in Barcelona. During the sixties, he began in the new figuration movement, along with recognized artists such as Eduard Arranz-Bravo, Rafael Bartolozzi, and Gerard Sala. Later on, between 1969 and 1973, he experimented with conceptual art, abstract forms, and artistic actions. In fact, the Can Framis museum of the Vila Casas Foundation will inaugurate an exhibition on November 10th of this stage of his career, the one most represented in museums, such as the MACBA and the Reina Sofia Museum. "Robert Llimós has been a fundamental artist, who played a decisive role in the seventies in introducing and consolidating conceptual currents from the practice of painting and action. He opened visionary paths that today are a reference for the new generations, who have adopted and reinterpreted practices similar to those he had already explored back then," says the artistic director of the Vila Casas Foundation, Bernat Puigdollers. "Throughout his career, he has always been an indefatigable artist," says Puigdollers, "who wanted to experiment with a multiplicity of techniques and let himself be influenced by the latest artistic trends with the constant purpose of opening new paths." "As Blanca Arias demonstrates in the exhibition we will inaugurate at the Can Framis Museum, this was his main concern: to search for and find a new image," adds Puigdollers.

While actor and director Pau Roca (Barcelona, 1982) was saying goodbye to Every Brilliant Thing –a monologue he has performed intermittently since 2018, in hundreds of shows–, Miki Esparbé (Manresa, 1983) was taking notes frantically from the stalls. “It is beautiful to see how this play can go through the performer, because the message gets across, whether they do it one way or another. But Pau has done it so many times that he has an impressive stage presence,” explains Esparbé. He will debut on November 4th at the Teatre Borràs, taking the lead in this text by Duncan McMillan that bets everything on a single actor and the audience. Without scenery and with the house lights on at all times, Every Brilliant Thing takes one of the great values of theater to the extreme: the fact that it is a shared and changing experience.

With the production of Macbeth, by Verdi, Jaume Plensa was able to fulfill a dream. Plensa premiered the opera in February 2023 at the Liceu, and this Monday he returned to the theater to present an artist's book: Plensa · Macbeth · Verdi, published by Enciclopèdia Catalana, is a privileged testimony of his entire creative process, from the first sketches to the rehearsals. "It is always said that the energy must be provided by the singers to the audience, and there is never any talk of the energy that the audience gives to the singers," states the artist. "In Macbeth I tried to ensure that the audience was integrated into the production".

The owners of Elvis Presley's music rights have filed a lawsuit against the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, founded in 2021 by Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei, Chris Olah, and Jared Kaplan. The plaintiffs accuse the company of having committed copyright infringement by having used more than 274 of the musician's songs without permission to train Anthropic's AI models. According to the complaint, among the songs used are major hits such as Can't help falling in love, A little less conversation, Don't be cruel, All shook up and Return to sender. The complaint maintains that Anthropic has built its business model on the massive violation of intellectual property on an unprecedented scale.