Ex Abrupto 2026: Moià once again shakes up contemporary creation

On July 3rd and 4th, Moià will once again become one of the nerve centers of experimental creation in the country with the celebration of the eleventh edition of Ex Abrupto, a festival that has consolidated itself as a reference space for the most undisciplined, hybrid and disruptive contemporary artistic practices. With more than fifty participating artists and collectives, the event reaffirms its commitment to a culture rooted in the territory but open to risk, dissidence and critical reflection on memory, landscape and forms of representation.

This edition presents one of the most ambitious programming of the festival, led by two important names: Santiago Sierra and Mónica Rikić. The Madrid artist brings Los Encargados , one of his most forceful pieces, while Rikić —National Culture Award of Catalonia— will deploy the immersive installation Psychoflage in Moià. Around it, Ex Abrupto 2026 articulates a program that combines visual arts, music, audiovisuals, installations, residencies and critical thinking, turning various spaces in the municipality into scenarios of friction between art and community.

• Santiago Sierra.

Before the official start of the festival, Ex Abrupto 2026 will experience a significant preview on Thursday, July 2 with the inauguration of La Mànega, a new center dedicated to contemporary visual arts and work with the territory. The opening of the space will coincide with the premiere presentation of the self-produced exhibition Caure del cavall , a collective creation that reflects on moments of rupture, displacement and transition. The show brings together works by Maria Alcaide, Paula Artés, Natalia Domínguez and Irene Molina, and is part of a line of research that understands the exhibition not only as a container, but as a device for shared thinking. Its exhibition in La Mànega, recently restored and converted into a new visual arts space in Moià, reinforces the festival's desire to generate stable cultural infrastructures beyond the strict temporality of the event.

Starting on Friday, July 3, the festival will display the bulk of its visual programming. One of the main highlights will be the screening of Los Encargados , by Santiago Sierra, presented on a cinema screen. The work recovers the action that the artist carried out in 2013 on the Gran Vía in Madrid: a funeral procession of Mercedes vehicles transporting, upside down, monumental portraits of the emeritus king and the presidents of the Spanish government since the beginning of democracy. The piece, of undeniable iconic force, articulates a fierce critique of the devices of power, the collusion between politics and capital and the forms of structural violence that permeate contemporary life.

In a very different but equally ambitious formal register, Mónica Rikić will present Psychoflage , a large-format multisensory installation conceived as an immersive and contemplative experience. The piece, made up of twenty inflatable sculptures in motion, will transform Cal Comadran —a former industrial complex recently rehabilitated— into an organic, mutable and almost respiratory environment. The public will be able to lie down on the floor and pace their bodies with the rhythm of the installation, in a proposal that appeals to perception, time and the physical relationship with space.

• Canek Zapata.

The visual arts program will be completed with Bosc Sintètic , by Eyesberg, an immersive installation that imagines a dystopian landscape where nature has been replaced by technology. The work will occupy Les Faixes, the municipality's former textile factory, and will be accompanied by a sound device that will amplify its sensory dimension. The intervention will also include a collective route through the ruined interior of the building, which will soon be restored to become a cultural facility.

Sound arts will once again occupy a central place within the identity of Ex Abrupto, with a program distributed in three distinct spaces that propose different ways of listening, inhabiting and stressing sound. On the one hand, the Surgencia space, located in the Self-Publishing Market of the Parc Municipal Francesc Viñas, will become the stage for the proposals most linked to the emerging scene. From 1:30 p.m., Gal, Gerd, Nicolas d'Angel and Mark Allen Soul will perform there, in a journey through electronics, hybrid music and forms of live that go beyond conventional genres.

In the afternoon, the festival will move part of its programming to the church of the Escola Pia de Moià, converted for the occasion into a space for profane and highly experimental sound practices. Isabel Archs, Miriam Martín i Corprès, as well as Arco Glanz will perform there, in a series of performances that will dialogue with the acoustics, the symbolic charge and the architectural singularity of the space.

In the evening, the Torrent del Mal will take over and transform into one of the most unique stages of the festival: a platform literally located on the water that will host an electronic program starring exclusively women. From 8 p.m., Fernanda Alemán and Kendra will perform live; and, from 11 p.m., it will be the turn of Lux Lisbon, Gatasanta and Imox. The result is a kind of dissident, free and feminine “Sónar” that turns the Torrent del Mal into a space of nocturnal celebration but also of aesthetic and political positioning.

• Eudald Font.

Beyond the large installations and sound programming, Ex Abrupto 2026 reinforces the lines of research that have defined its profile in recent years. One of them is the critical review of the democratic memory of the municipality, which this year takes shape in the exhibition O TOTS O NINGÚ , by the collective Dictadura and Elvira Permanyer i Sert. The proposal questions the official narratives and points out the absences that continue to be inscribed in the public space, turning memory into a field of political and symbolic dispute.

The audiovisual program curated by Cloe Masotta also continues to grow, celebrating its second consecutive edition with Abismar-se en l'amor, abismar-se en l'oblit . The selection, made up of works by Valentina Alvarado Matos, Jodie Mack and Samira Badran, proposes a journey through pieces that explore memory, desire, landscape and forms of resistance to oblivion. With this new installment, the Sant Josep Auditorium consolidates itself as the festival's point dedicated to experimental audiovisual and cinematographic practices.

• Paula Artes.

In parallel, the NON TERRAE PLUS ULTRA program, promoted by cobert, reaches its third edition consolidating the relationship between residency, production and exhibition. This year it presents Escarnir , by María Rosa Aránega, an investigation into shame as a device of social control that connects the historical repression exercised against women with contemporary forms of public mockery. Through drawing, video and installation, the piece expands the reflective scope of the festival and can be visited both during the days of Ex Abrupto and throughout the summer at the Museu de Moià.