Málaga’s Transdisciplina turns ten against artist Martin Messier’s thousand-year drop

A decade is a short span for a cultural institution, and Transdisciplina, the Málaga platform for audiovisual experimentation, has chosen to mark its tenth birthday with a work whose title counts in millennia. Canadian artist Martin Messier’s 1 drop 1000 years is the centrepiece of an anniversary that, rather than looking back, sets the platform’s whole argument on one stage: that sound, image and the live body belong in the same room.

What Messier puts in that room is water. Fifteen suspended devices, closer to kinetic sculptures than to stage machinery, release falling threads of water that he choreographs in real time, lit from below so each strike on the floor becomes a point of light. The piece, developed with MUTEK, is built around thermohaline circulation, the slow ocean current that carries heat around the planet and that a warming climate is weakening. It is a performance about duration, and it is staged as one: no spoken word, only the drop and the sound it is made to produce.

The same night belongs to the composer, singer and pianist Amanda Mur, whose music sets roots tradition against synthetic textures, in dialogue with the material, analogue work of visual artist Irene Sáenz. It closes with the first performance of a joint project by Niños Futuro and Mítico Dorado.

The second night turns the question from time to power. The French duo Franck Vigroux and Antoine Schmitt bring ATOTAL, an audiovisual concert in which Vigroux plays live while Schmitt generates the images, and which pushes the old dream of the total work of art until it borrows the visual and psychological methods of propaganda. The release frames it as a deconstruction of imposition and absolute synchrony, a show about what happens to an audience when image and sound refuse to leave it any room.

Two performers silhouetted at a table of electronics before a vast screen of white pixel patterns, ATOTAL by Franck Vigroux and Antoine Schmitt — ATOTAL by Franck Vigroux and Antoine Schmitt. Photo: Quentin Chevrier, courtesy of Transdisciplina

Around it, Los Sara Fontan, the duo of violinist and keyboardist Sara Fontan and drummer Edi Pou, play against the analogue fractals and liquid light shows of Chromatic (Jorge Luque) and THG (Thorno García). Composer Susana Hernández, who records as Ylia, premieres a new live set with visual artist Alba G. Corral, whose digital imagery, like Ylia’s music, has travelled well beyond Spain.

A mirrored digital landscape of blue ribbons and pale organic forms, a visual by Alba G. Corral — Digital artwork by Alba G. Corral. Image courtesy of Transdisciplina

The context explains the ambition. Transdisciplina counts more than 30 events and 24 editions of its T# encounters, plus the installation Emblemas at the Museo Carmen Thyssen Málaga and the FOOLK festival. Its organisers place it on the same map as Sónar, L.E.V., MIRA, Keroxen, Semibreve and Unsound, and the anniversary is backed by Málaga City Council’s culture department, Málaga Procultura, Fundación SGAE, MUTEK and the Québec and Canadian arts councils.

The first night, T#25, takes place at the Teatro Echegaray in Málaga on Saturday 24 October 2026 at 20:00, with doors at 19:30. The second, T#26, follows at the same theatre on Saturday 28 November at 20:00. Tickets are sold through the Teatro Echegaray’s official website. Two free sessions complete the programme: Geeks & Chips Vol.04 on 15 October, organised with Fundación SGAE and ELCAMM (registration required), and a day on videoscenography on 22 October with the lighting and video designers’ association AAIV at the Teatro Cánovas.

Ten years, measured against a thousand: for a platform built on risk, it is an honest scale.

Tags: digital art, Alba G. Corral, Antoine Schmitt, audiovisual performances, Franck Vigroux, Málaga

Málaga’s Transdisciplina turns ten against artist Martin Messier’s thousand-year drop

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