Carmela Muñoz curated selection – June 2026

Carmela Muñoz is a resident artist at El Graner in 2026 with the project The Inevitable: Between Rhythmics and Mysticism, together with Juan Carlos Lérida, as part of the Creation and Museums programme.

Thanks to Raquel (and to El Graner) for this wonderful invitation. Being part of this catalogue of recommendations—and everything that slips in between—alongside colleagues I deeply admire fills me with excitement and prompts a number of questions: Which books accompany us across time and space, both within and beyond artistic practice? Which books offer shelter, refuge, and understanding? Which books mark a specific moment along one’s path and leave a trace that remains forever within us? I suppose that naming some inevitably means leaving others out. (Do the things that escape us accompany us too?)

Here is my selection of texts and reference figures that dance alongside me like an endless source:

Paz Rojo’s wonderful book Dancing in the Age of No-Future has been a companion to me in times of crisis, particularly around the question of what it means to be a dancer. It is a key reference within a long-term practice-based artistic research project that I approach through two interconnected directions. The first concerns the disruption of artistic time: a crack opens in the traditional linearity of time and allows another understanding of temporality to emerge, one that grants access to different forms of knowledge. The second relates to what Paz calls “that which dances” — that which is dance itself, appearing as something separate from the dancing body. Could it be that dancing has to do with invoking the invisible forces that surround the dancer’s body?

Aimar Pérez Galí is an important reference for me, and his book Lo tocante has accompanied me through significant moments in my research on invocation. Through a series of letters, he proposes a way of writing dance that embraces aspects of research that are especially meaningful to me: experience, longing, affection, desire, and tenderness. The result is a text that is itself a work of art, entering my body and my understanding through an extraordinary sensitivity. It moves me at the level of the skin. Moreover, Aimar writes these letters to dancers who are no longer here: speaking with them, bringing them into the present, invoking them.

Our Grateful Dead by Vinciane Despret was recommended to me by another of my key references, Constanza Brnčić. This book has brought me great faith and inspiration in thinking about death and our relationship with bodies that are no longer present. Through rigorous and profound research, Despret establishes another kind of relationship with time and memory, opening up the possibility of other forms of communication between bodies. This expands and deepens radical listening, transmission, and the ways we think about ourselves, transform ourselves, and transcend together.

Místicas by Begoña Méndez is the latest book to have found its way to me (sometimes I feel that books find me). I have read it and carry it with me almost everywhere because I feel it accompanies me, strengthens me, and makes me feel less alone in the world: women, mysticism, writing, and that other immeasurable dimension that I cannot quite name. For me, it opens up further layers of experience and knowledge—sensitive and profound—that connect me to a way of living oriented towards passion, surrender, excess, immensity, mystery, transcendence, eros, and a certain form of madness.

I hope this selection may inspire some bodies as much as—or even more than—it has inspired me.