Image: Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires
MALBA will host the 24th edition of its ‘Fiesta de la Lectura’ on July 21, turning the Buenos Aires museum into a daylong setting for reading, making, conversation and performance. The winter edition, titled ‘Fiesta de la lectura — Edición Invierno’, runs from 3:00 pm to 9:00 pm and is advertised as free admission until room capacity is reached. According to the museum’s announcement, the event will unfold across the hall, library and auditorium.
This year’s programme begins from ‘Luz, color y espacio’, Dan Flavin’s exhibition at MALBA. The museum describes the edition as taking up the idea of ‘limited light’ — a notion drawn from Flavin’s fluorescent light works and, in the museum’s wording, newly inflected by the gradual disappearance of the fluorescent tubes the artist used for decades. That framework is used to reflect on cultural forms whose survival depends on the communities that sustain them, especially small-scale, fragile or independent publishing projects.
MALBA’s literature team presents the ‘Fiesta de la Lectura’ as a temporary transformation of the museum into a “gran biblioteca para habitar,” a space for reading, writing, talking, posting letters, discovering books and independent publications, and sharing time with other readers. The museum says the event has been building a community of readers inside and outside the institution for more than a decade, and that this winter edition is in dialogue with other living libraries in the region. Participating guests are listed as artists, librarians, writers, editors and researchers from Argentina, Chile, Mexico and Spain.
The day opens with ‘Te leo conmigo. Narración cromática’, a workshop led by Tatá Timbo in the auditorium from 3:00 pm to 5:00 pm. The museum says the activity is designed for families and children aged five and up, and asks participants to take part in a collective narrative process that links word and image. Other children’s activities include a free library for young readers in the museum library from 3:00 pm to 7:00 pm, and an editorial experimentation space for children on Level 1 during the same hours, where participants can fold, write and assemble graphic pieces from varied materials.
Several parallel stations extend the reading-focused format across the museum. A lending library curated for the occasion will occupy the hall from 3:00 pm to 8:00 pm, supported by Penguin Random House, while Level -1 will host an exhibition of publications and fanzines from Argentina, Chile and Mexico. The museum also highlights a postal action in the hall, where an Andreani post office will allow visitors to send postcards and letters free of charge throughout the afternoon. The ‘Dan Flavin. Luz, color y espacio’ exhibition will remain open to visitors attending the event until closing.
The evening programme moves into talks and performances. From 6:30 pm to 7:15 pm, Javier Pérez Iglesias presents ‘Naturaleza bibliotecaria: Derek Jarman y la bibliomancia’ on Level 2, in a reading performance supported by the Centro Cultural de España en Buenos Aires. At 7:00 pm, editors Maximiliano Masuelli, Martín Bollatti and Lorena Fernández join a conversation on independent publishing and fanzines in the lower level. At 7:30 pm, Gabriela Halac performs ‘Instrucciones para ennegrecer un libro’ in the auditorium, followed by ‘Barra de poesía’ in the hall from 8:00 pm to 8:30 pm and a musical closing by Leo García at 8:30 pm.
